A fellow WordPresser sent me an email today asking about WordPress Theme Providers and I thought I'd spend a few more minutes on the response and share it here for everyone.
I’ve got a new project and I’m debating about recommending they purchase a responsive theme, or if I should design one myself. I was trying to remember something you said from past meetings. Did you say avoid ThemeForest? If yes, why?
One of the requests we get asked all the time at WooThemes is, “Which theme should I choose?”. I understand why people ask this question but unfortunately it isn't a simple answer. There's a lot of variables and things you have to understand before you pick a theme. The most important of which is what themes shouldn't do…
I just built a plugin for Contact Form 7. Yup you read that right Contact Form 7. After releasing the MailPoet extension for Ninja Forms I bumped into Kim from MailPoet at WordCamp Europe and we struck up a conversation for some more MailPoet plugins.
Guess what I did today? I sent an email to noreply@speakinginbytes.com. Why did I send an email to a noreply@{domain} address? And why to my own domain? Because as I was flying through my email using all of my fancy gmail shortcuts I opened an email, pressed r to reply typed up a response pressed tab and return and let it fly. Only then did realize that I sent it to my own domain. What would've been really handy in this situation would be a way to automatically change the from address in emails that already contain the requestor's email address.
A quick Google search will turn up this great post by the WP Ninjas (the guys who make Ninja Forms) about dynamically changing the email address. This is actually a really great solution because you can specify exactly which fields you want to use for the name & email address as well as which forms you want to apply this to. The only down side is that it isn't plug & play – and I like plug and play. That way if I ever create another form or modify my form by adding or deleting fields it will still work.
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.
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.
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).
If you're like me you probably have certain areas on your site that are more important than others. You might have a contact form, a blog where visitors can comment, and a client portal to submit bugs. Clearly these three areas all have drastically different levels of importance to your business. But do you actually prioritize these notifications or do they all go to the same inbox?
Wouldn't it be great if you could get notices about bugs right away? What if you could get a notification when a user selects “I want to spend ${god-loads-of-money}” on your contact form?
I came up with a solution to solve these issues and I'm happy to announce that I've just released Text Message Notifications – my 3rd add-on for Ninja Forms!
If you've been a part of the WordPress community at all you'll know just how awesome it is: there's developers that spend hundreds or even thousands of hours writing free themes and plugins, there's a free support forum, and awesome Stack Exchange community for customizations, and plenty of advice at affordable WordCamps.
I know that I've been given so many awesome free things in this community that I want to give back. I've built a few plugins, and created a few tutorials, but I really want to give back in a bigger way. I want to give back to every WordPress user. I want to contribute to WordPress core.
A few months ago I made my first contribution and I got my very first credit for WordPress in the recent 3.7 update. I created several videos (all linked below) so you can follow the steps, create your own patch, and become a core contributor yourself. 🙂
Shipping is one of the most complex aspects of e-commerce. You have to worry about shipping provider regulations, large products that have awkward dimensions & box sizes, small products that the shipping calculators incorrectly estimate and you over charge, or you could have a mix match of product sizes and it's hard to come up with a fair flat rate shipping fee.
One of the approaches many store owners take is to mark up their products a little more and then offer free shipping. I think this is brilliant idea, but what happens if you have many small items and one large item that throws off the flat rate fee? If you're using WooCommerce there's a filter you can use to disable free shipping when a specific product is in the cart.