I've had so many amazing opportunities in 2013 so I'm really excited to start thinking about 2014. I definitely want to create some goals, milestones, resolutions, and avenues to explore in 2014 but before I do that I think it's really important to look back and quantify all the things I did in 2013. Both the good and the bad.
All of the goals in the world wont help unless you can clearly see your strengths and weaknesses and come up with some strategies to work with them.
Yesterday I talked a bit about why I love Jetpack. Today I want to talk about a couple things we can do to make it better. People's biggest concerns with Jetpack aren't that it doesn't do enough or that it doesn't do it right, their concerns are that Jetpack is too big. This isn't exactly news in the WordPress community and there's already a Jetpack Lite plugin which only includes two out of 20+ modules.
I like the idea of the lite version but there's just way too many useful modules to use the lite version. How can you give up a free image CDN (Photon), email subscriptions (Subscriptions), and perhaps the easiest to set up social media sharing tool (Publicize)? As I said yesterday I Love Jetpack and wouldn't want to go without all of that functionality. To this effort rather than creating another Jetpack lite plugin I've created a plugin which removes some of the less used modules.
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.
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.
Last week I was lucky enough to be included in panel interview for a new WooCommerce Ninja. The potential ninja did very well and talked about how he got into WordPress, working with clients, and debugging code. But it wasn't these questions that really interested me – I don't care about coding style, programming languages, or the tools that he uses. All of those can be learned on the fly. The quality that I care about more than all of the rest is passion.
I've been around in the WordPress world for a while now and I've created several plugins for both clients and a few more for my own development tool belt.
I've contributed to several plugins and been officially listed as a contributor on the WordPress.org plugin repository:
I've also contributed to the the beautiful Highwind WordPress theme which I'm using on this blog currently.
So you've found the perfect plugin: it has all of the functionality you need, it's within your budget, and there's surprisingly awesome support. Great – but what if you need to change just one little line of text? What if you want to do something simple like change “Add to Cart” to “Add to Basket”? Or change “Related Products” to “See these related products”?
If you're lucky there's a filter for that particular string but sometimes there isn't. Then what do you do?
I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Amsterdam on a rainy Friday two days after our WooTrip 2013 ended and I've decided to take time out of my vacation to write this blog post. Why? Because I think every company needs a WooTrip.