This past Friday I did a joint presentation at the local meetup that I organize, the Appleton WordPress Meetup. I put a lot of effort into the meetup doing one or two presentations a year my self as well as motivating other members to present. But despite all the work I put into it every month I always leave the meeting energized and excited to be doing what I'm doing.
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.
About two months ago I added Jetpack to my site and gave users the option to sign up for my posts via email. And since that time there's a whopping 7 users that have signed up. Coincidentally I also started using Jetpack's Publicize functionality to post my blog posts to Facebook and so my grandpa followed one of those Facebook posts and became the first user to signup for my blog via email!
One of the extensions that I love working with at WooThemes is the Subscriptions extension for WooCommerce. It's probably the most complex extension we have which can make troubleshooting issues challenging but that's offset because the developer also has the best documentation bar none.
The number of possibilities with Subscriptions are really endless. One of my favorite examples is HDPiano.com which sells virtual memberships to learn how to play piano. There's also plenty of users who sell tangible products each month. I just ran into a user who creates fancy shipping labels in Photoshop and uses those labels to ship her products.
The only problem in her case was that she creates the shipping label before the new order comes in so she needed a way to be notified of a customer changing their address before the actual order came in. This is where some of those awesome WooCommerce hooks come in.
One of the best things about WooCommerce is the slick one page checkout. It's really fast since you don't need to reload any pages and it's smart enough to know when you don't need shipping information when you're only purchasing virtual/downloadable products. We like to make sure the site manager has all of the data available to them so if you have a free download available on your site WooCommerce still asks the user for all of their billing address fields which works great for most users.
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.
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.