One of my favorite side projects are my Ninja Form plugins. I love challenging myself with new coding techniques. One of the features that I really enjoyed working on is the template system I put into my Ninja Forms PDF Form Submissions plugin. It allows you to copy a template file to your theme and then customize it. This way you can totally customize the PDF without knowing any programming.
I'm just getting back into my groove after a wild time in San Francisco but before jumping back into the inbox I really want to share my thoughts on WooCommerce Conf. We had a wide variety of attendees, impressive speakers, the whole experience had a professional feel, and
The air is warm and the sun is shining as I'm writing this post on my last full day in San Francisco. I've had a wild ride the last sixteen days attending three conferences, meeting customers, and exploring San Francisco. While conferences and new cities are exciting it's not why we have the WooTrip. The best part of the WooTrip and the real value in it is meeting people that we work with everyday and learning to relate with each other. And that's pretty exciting.
One of the cool things about writing a blog is that you get instant feedback. Usually people ask for my help customizing plugins but sometimes the feedback can spin up a new project. That's what happened with a blog post I wrote back in December. I mentioned that it would be possible to open the WooCommerce Terms & Conditions in a popup and I got email after email asking me how to do it.
After a dozen emails I decided to dig into this and came up with the WooCommerce Terms & Conditions Popup extension.
Four months ago I joined the WooCommerce development team and I loved it. Lots of time to program cool extensions like Coupon Campaigns, Give Products, Ninja Forms Product Addons, updating the email functionality in WooCommerce, and auditing all of the extensions that go in the catalog. I loved every second of it. Working with awesome people, learning new things, and creating code that's used by hundreds of thousands of websites. My path however is changing a bit. Instead of a developer I'll be the WooCommerce Product Manager.
One of the most complex parts about writing e-commerce software is creating shipping options that are configurable enough that people can create the shipping costs they want but the functionality isn't too complex that people are confused. That's why with WooCommerce we include Flat Rate Shipping because it's perfect for people just getting started and isn't so complex that you can't launch your store.
If people want even more shipping options after having set up the rest of WooCommerce then it may be time to look at Table Rate Shipping. It is by far one of the most configurable extensions and it allows you create a table of shipping rates in hundreds of different combinations. You can create zones to target your shipping costs for a particular geographic region, you can group products by similar shipping sizes, you can use the product weight to determine costs, and you can create a table of rates where depending on where the order appears in the table determines the rate. Let's jump in.
Choosing the Right E-Commerce Platform for Your Needs. This was presented at WordCamp Dallas Fort Worth.
Before you get cold hard cash in your bank account you need to make a decision about which e-commerce platform you want to use. We’ll go over all of the options to help you determine which e-commerce platform is the right choice for your project.
I love writing code snippets, plugins, and tutorials on my site. But no matter how good you make them there will be someone who wants to change it. Unfortunately it's just not possible to customize a snippet for every single person. So for that reason I've always recommended various WordPress agencies like Codeable. But in the last couple months I've had more and more requests for custom work so I thought I'd reach out to Codeable to really get to know them so I know that I'm recommending the best service.
You've probably heard about startup weekends but have you heard of a startup week? Here in Colorado we have Denver Startup Week where instead of building a startup over a weekend you hear from local established startups about all of the lessons they learned along the way. A startup weekend is the act of creating something and the startup week is the abstract fundamentals about building something. Having gone to a startup weekend I really appreciated all of the fundamental lessons behind creating a startup. I went to a handful of sessions throughout the week and I wanted to share some of the lessons I learned in case you don't have your own startup week to attend.
If you've read this blog for a bit you'll know that I'm a big fan of Ninja Forms. Every couple of months I release a new extension which adds even more functionality to Ninja Forms and makes it even more powerful. What you might not know is that I'm also an affiliate. Every time someone follows one of my links to the Ninja Forms website and purchases something I get a small cut.
The way the affiliate system works is that I have a special link so the WP Ninjas know who referred the customer. Unfortunately, in most cases the links aren't intuitive, they're long, and sometimes they change which is a big pain to update. Instead of using the link as is you can cloak the link making it look like any other page on your site. Doing so makes it easier to read, they're easy to change, and there aren't any negative SEO affects on your site.
Best of all cloaking your links is actually easier than you think and can be done with just one WordPress plugin which you might already be using.