One of my favorite plugins in the entire WordPress blogosphere is JetPack. JetPack is plugin built by Automattic that brings in all the features of WordPress.com to your own WordPress.org site. The thing that I love so much about this plugin is that they offer some incredible free cloud services as well as a few really great simple modules (think of them as mini plugins) built the right way.
A few days ago I took part in WordSesh and was able to talk about one of my favorite topics – Why You Should or Shouldn't Use Premium Plugins. Aside from the general awesomeness of 24 hours of WordPress presentations there was another aspect that I really enjoyed – just talking.
One of the most powerful plugins for WooCommerce is Table Rate Shipping because it's so configurable. You can create your own rules for bulk shipping, weight based shipping, or set up shipping zones and charge different rates for each zone. When someone requests their existing shipping method only support certain zones, or charge extra for specific zones we usually point them to Table Rate Shipping because that extension can do just about anything.
It would be nice if we could take some of the functionality of that plugin out and apply it to other shipping methods (like UPS, FedEx, USPS, etc.) but at WooThemes we're very aware of feature creep and if we added these other feature the existing shipping methods would be bloated to the point of being unusable. So without adding a whole bunch of options that most users don't want the best way to do this is to write a snippet of code to do this.
For something as seemingly simple as setting up a terms & conditions page you would think that we wouldn't get many questions about it but we actually get quite a few questions.
I'm a big fan of premium plugins – they typically have more features, better support, and are better maintained than free plugins. Having said that you can actually do quite a bit with all of the free plugins available on the WordPress.org plugin repository. This site for example uses only free plugins and plugins I've written myself (okay technically I'm using one premium plugin because I'm experimenting with it).
Believe me it's not often you'll hear me say that popularity matters but sometimes in the world of programming it does.
A few days ago I talked about some of the things I'm grateful for working on the web and one of the items on that list is working remotely. To me it's an absolutely amazing experience to work from my home. I get so much out of the time I can spend focusing on my job, time at coffee shops, going to meetups (I actually run one Friday mornings), working during the hours I feel most productive, etc. But that's not the response I hear when I tell others where I work.
How do you get any work done?
Aren't you distracted!?
Don't you watch TV all day?
Most people look at me like I'm cursed! But the answer to staying on task while working from home is actually pretty simple – or at least simple to put into words. You have to enjoy what you do and find it intellectually stimulating.
WooCommerce has a pretty fantastic admin user interface. There's just enough tabs to only show you the data you need to see and have the rest of the data be easily accessible. If you're just editing one product it should be easy to change something as simple as the “download expiration” field. But what happens if you need to bulk edit products? Could you use the WordPress bulk editor?
The default WordPress bulk editor is great for a handful of products. But what if your company has some sort of policy change? Like one that changes how long all of your links are valid. If that's the case you could easily be editing all of the products in your store. That's where it helps to know a little code and just update the database directly.
Yesterday, in my post about why working on the web is so great I mentioned a tool called GitHub. While GitHub is only a tool it is a really awesome tool because it makes it unbelievably easy to version control your code and for another user to submit a patch (aka pull request) or report issues to you. Increased collaboration is important for any project but it's even more important for open source projects.
It should come as no surprise that software isn't free. It takes many programming hours to build new features, many hours to diagnose and fix bugs, hours to plan the roadmap, and many many hours of support helping your users.
There are some great open source projects that have highly efficient monetizations models. Just look at the totally free software WordPress; they have WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, Akismet, VaultPress, etc, that bring in money. But for many open source projects there isn't a good monetization model and without cash flow to support the hours of development the project dies.
Now what happens for projects that don't have a good business model? Well unless they have a dedicated community to keep it going these projects quickly become outdated and become security vulnerabilities. And the last thing that you want is an outdated piece of software that leaves your site ripe for a hack.
Four days ago it was Thanksgiving here in the USA. One of the best traditions (aside from eating copious amounts of food) is to go around the table and say one thing that you're grateful for. There's actually been quite a bit of science about gratitude and how important it is to your overall happiness. One of my favorite researchers in this area is Brene Brown. She has some amazing TED Talks and this great clip about how important it is to be grateful.
She talks about how it isn't joy that makes us grateful but gratitude that brings us joy. So to be as joyful as I can be I'm going to list several things that I'm so grateful for working on the web. These aren't in any particular order just how they come up naturally in my head.