You Don’t Own My Soul

I'm just getting back from WordCamp Minneapolis where I met great people, talked about business models, ate great food, and had a lot of fun. There was one thing, and actually it was just a single sentence, that really bothered me.

Anything you code we own.

This comment was made by a business owner in reference to his developer writing some personal code at home. Ugh. There's something about this attitude that makes me cringe. The concept of owning everything isn't fair to anyone. It robs the employee of their drive to excel and then that robs the business of a hard working employee. Nobody wins.

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Writing a WooCommerce Shipping Method

Highway at Dawn

A few months ago I wrote a plugin that connects Spee-Dee Delivery, a shipping services for the upper midwest, and WooCommerce. The plugin is going through the audit process right now and should be launched shortly. While the whole process has taken a few months in terms of time writing code the project has only taken ~40 hours. About 20 of which have been doing QA testing to make sure it's as intuitive as possible and doesn't need to be done unless you're planning on selling your plugin.

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How to Create an Invoice Using WooCommerce

The one page checkout process in WooCommerce is pretty darn slick. You can beautifully sell all sorts of products. We know because we use it ourselves on WooThemes.com. But there are plenty of special circumstances where you don't want a customer to go through your normal checkout process.

  • Sometimes you may want to give special pricing to a customer
  • Sometimes you may want to send a direct payment link to your customers / clients
  • Sometimes a customer may want to add on something extra to an existing order before you ship it
  • And sometimes you may have products which aren't in your public catalog but you want to give them to some customers

In all of these cases you can easily create an invoice and have the customer pay for it using WooCommerce.

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Team Communication

I've been working with an absolutely stellar team for the past 10 months. One of the best and worst parts about this team is that we're entirely remote. None of us are required to go into an office, work particular hours, or dress in a certain way. The only thing that matters is that we get the job done. While the hours and lifestyle are great the downside of remote working is that you feel so isolated. The closest WooThemes team member is about 400 miles away across 2 states.

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A ThemeForest Theme Case Study

ThemeForest has a pretty bad rap in the WordPress world. It's incredibly popular for anyone who doesn't know anything about HTML & CSS because of the cheap prices and huge selection. There is of course a catch – the cheap prices reflect the quality of some of these themes. While the screenshots look nice the code infrastructure that you pay for is very poorly built. If you have any aspirations to use one of these themes in anyway other than the author intended you'll likely run into a whole bunch of issues. I recently modified a ThemeForest theme (which I'm not going to name) for a friend and here are just some of the issues I ran into.

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Display Currency Code Infront of Symbol in WooCommerce

WooCommerce has a ton of options for multiple currencies right out of the box. WooCommerce comes bundled with dozens of different currencies you can use in your store, there are snippets to add extra currencies, there's also have a really nice Currency Converter Widget to help you display different currencies in your store.

By default WooCommerce will display the currency symbol with the product. You can do all sorts of things like choosing the position of the symbol (some currencies the symbol goes on the right of the number), you can change the decimal separator (some currencies prefer commas to decimal points), and you can change the number of decimal places (some currencies like Yen don't have decimals). We have docs for all of these settings.

This works great for 99% of the stores out there. There are a few exceptions that might require a couple snippets of code to display it exactly the way you want.

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Tips for Starting Your Own Meetup

I got an interesting email today from someone who wanted to start their own meetup looking for some advice. There's actually a lot of things you have to think about when you're trying to build a community.

  • How often do you want to meet? How long do you stay?
  • Do you want to have a soft starting or soft ending time (to give people time to chat)? Or should it be very focused?
  • How many users will we expect? How many developers? Can we have one without the other?
  • What style of presentations do we want? Round table? Lectures? Tutorials? Presentations? Panel?

There's a million questions that you have to figure out if you really want to build a community. Having helped out at the local Web920, running my own Appleton WordPress, and speaking at a couple meetups in California I have definitely learned a few lessons.

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Useful Shipping Functions for WooCommerce

One of the things any good framework should do is provide utility functions. Things that make developing for that framework easier and consistent. For an e-commerce framework that would be things like rounding prices, calculating taxes, and getting shipping quotes. If you've ever wanted to dig into WooCommerce there's a really easy guide to creating your own shipping method and I highly recommend you start there. It also happens to be a lot easier than building your own payment gateway. 🙂

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