There's snow swirling outside as I sit in my comfy chair at my local coffee shop back in Green Bay. I got back into Green Bay late last night after an amazing WordCamp Phoenix last weekend. If you haven't ever been to a WordCamp you have to go. They're a very affordable conference where you get to meet other people in your industry & hear all sorts of presentations related to WordPress.
Hey everyone!
Things you can do in Phoenix that you can't do in Green Bay
I'm enjoying the nice sunny weather in Arizona (which means I escaped Green Bay huzzah!). It's January 14th and it's a high of 70 degrees. I've done rock climbing, hiking, and explored the downtown. I'm in heaven. I'll also be speaking at WordCamp Phoenix later this week.
One of the things that constantly amazes me at my job is the number of ways that people use WooCommerce. There's over 200 extensions available for WooCommerce on the WooThemes.com site and there's demand for thousands more. So what does WooThemes do? Do we go on a massive hiring spree and build thousands of plugins?
I'm sure we could do that but why? No matter how many extensions we create there's just no way to cover every single use case one of our users come up with. There's also no way we can be experts in every single market. There's thousands of substandard services out there that we don't want to integrate, and there will be problems finding the right extension if we offer thousands. The trick here is to encourage other experts to work with you so that you can create an exceptional product for 90% of your audience and other developers can cover the last 10%. Let your open source project encourage diversity.
Over the last couple of years the WordPress platform has really matured. Now, premium (commercial) plugins aren't just for developers they're used by developers and users a like. It isn't uncommon at all to see lite versions of plugins in the WordPress repository with a pro version available on the developer's site. So if you have an idea for a plugin how do you capitalize on this? How can you build a valuable product and market it to users?
Last year I created some programming resolutions and shortly after writing that post everything started falling into place. I certainly don't believe it was magic or divine intervention but I do believe in positive thought and setting an intention. Since I did pretty well with my resolutions from last year I wanted to come up with some new ones.
It's December 31st, the last day of December, and also the last day of the Blogging for Benjamin contest. This is the final post I'll be making for this contest. I'm really pleased that I participated in this contest because I learned quite a few things, I've communicated a few things that I'd been meaning to share, and I've created a bunch of snippets and tutorials for WordPressers.
One of the most important parts of creating a new habit – whether it be running more, eating healthy, or forming better writing skills – is to reward yourself when you accomplish the task. That's why we often set milestones for our selves like running a race. There's actually a lot of value in creating these meaningful milestones / goals for your self. They help motivate you push yourself just a little harder and once it's accomplished you'll feel proud of your achievement and you can share the experience with others to relive some of that joy which is very rewarding.
One of the questions we hear all of the time doing support for WooCommerce is “what payment gateway do you recommend?” There's a lot of payment gateways out there – currently there's 111 available for WooCommerce – so picking one can be intimidating. I've used several payment gateways both for myself and doing work for clients and have had to jump over a few hurdles. Now that I've had to painfully learn the flaws of other gateways I'm a huge fan of Stripe. At this point I doubt I would use anything else.
I'm a big advocate of lean plugins and I think we've done a stellar job removing unnecessary bloat from WooCommerce 2.1. The brilliance of having multiple plugins to add only the functionality you need reduces the number of bugs, keeps everything separated for easy updates, and perhaps most importantly creates a clean & intuitive admin interface.
There is of course a huge demand for customizing the behavior of WooCommerce (or any plugin). So where do you put that functionality? Do you put them in settings pages, extra plugins, snippets, tutorials, or something else? There's a few options to choose from and while none of them are perfect there are a couple of clear winners.
All of us have met one of those people that complains about everything. They're no fun to be around. Even if I'm chipper and excited about the day I'll be drained after talking with them for just a few minutes. I don't know about you but I have no desire to spend time with people who bring me down. I want to be around people that inspire me and encourage me to more! I get energized by meeting people who are passionate, people who do instead talk, and people who are unapologetically themselves.