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.
A few days ago I talked about some of the things I'm grateful for working on the web and one of the items on that list is working remotely. To me it's an absolutely amazing experience to work from my home. I get so much out of the time I can spend focusing on my job, time at coffee shops, going to meetups (I actually run one Friday mornings), working during the hours I feel most productive, etc. But that's not the response I hear when I tell others where I work.
How do you get any work done?
Aren't you distracted!?
Don't you watch TV all day?
Most people look at me like I'm cursed! But the answer to staying on task while working from home is actually pretty simple – or at least simple to put into words. You have to enjoy what you do and find it intellectually stimulating.
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.
Four days ago it was Thanksgiving here in the USA. One of the best traditions (aside from eating copious amounts of food) is to go around the table and say one thing that you're grateful for. There's actually been quite a bit of science about gratitude and how important it is to your overall happiness. One of my favorite researchers in this area is Brene Brown. She has some amazing TED Talks and this great clip about how important it is to be grateful.
She talks about how it isn't joy that makes us grateful but gratitude that brings us joy. So to be as joyful as I can be I'm going to list several things that I'm so grateful for working on the web. These aren't in any particular order just how they come up naturally in my head.
One of the best parts about working for WooThemes is that everyone is so excited and passionate about everything they do. We're all constantly throwing new ideas out there and often you just run with them and see what happens. No red tape. JFDI.
My colleague Daniel Espinoza is really passionate about blogging. He likes it so much and finds it so rewarding that he blogs on 4 different sites at the moment. In addition to encouraging us during our weekly meetings, in the company chat, and on twitter (just press the publish button!) he just set up the Blogging for Benjamin competition!
One of the requests I hear all the time is how to remove the WooCommerce “From: $$” price on the variable product page. Some people feel that it adds unnecessary clutter to the page. The good news here is that WooCommerce is incredibly flexible. With a simple filter you can modify that price however you want or remove it entirely.
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!
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.