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Welcome to the deep end
Developer. Front End Dev. Designer. User Interface Designer. Javascripterino. We all have a place in the WordPress ecosystem. We contribute to core, the plugin/theme repos, help out on forums and attend WordCamps. There’s a new kid at the pool, and he’s ready to mix it up a bit. The Amalgamator. Making things easy… too easy? WordPress lowers the bar for creating digital work. It began by lowering the bar for content publishing, and has grown to enable users with relatively low technical skill sets to create remarkably powerful websites. This is one of the key reasons it succeeds as a platform. This ability to take mere mortals and make them website creating superfreaks is its most promising attribute. They can buy hosting, and one click install. They can hit up Themeforest and grab one of a million themes. They can … Continue reading
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That burger was delicious!
Peter has been yammering on and on about Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast & Slow. Rather than read the book, I hit up the Ted talk instead. Kahneman’s examination of the delta between experience and memory is rocking my socks off right now. The video was posted in 2010, so you know I’m right on the cutting edge here. Here’s the gist in case you don’t have time to settle in for a complete viewing. There’s essentially two versions of me. The experiencing self – that’s the me that is actually chowing down on a delicious burger. The remembering self – that’s the me that is sitting back reviewing my instagrams memories of that delicious burger that I ate. According to Kahneman, these two versions of you have vastly different perceptions of happiness, and consequently different perceptions of pain. “We don’t … Continue reading
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RFP:
Love em or leave emThe topic of RFPs came up in our local WordPress user group a few weeks ago. They eat up a ton of our time, and more often than not result in absolutely squat. Worse than that, often I get the feeling that we never really had a shot at it in the first place. The evils of the RFP process have been well documented, and I don’t need to beat a dead horse. For context, I just finished a proposal in response to an RFP. Between the four of us, we spent 4 hours on the phone with the client, 15 hours working on a vision and estimate, 6 hours writing the actual proposal and that was swift. It can be a ton of time. In our eyes, if you are going to go for it, then really go to … Continue reading
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Modern Tribe @ WordSesh
Both Rob and Shane spoke at WordSesh today. It was a powerhouse lineup in the WordPress community, globally attended with over 500 viewers. Mad props to the guys who put this event together. Managing Support for a Premium WordPress Plugin with Rob La Gatta Rob’s slides has an odd malfunction, so check out the slides while you listen. This is his first public talk to the WordPress audience and we are super duper proud of him. Running Support For A Premium WordPress Plugin from roblagatta Managing Distributed Teams with Shane Pearlman
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Team Trip 2013: Cabo San Lucas
Often the magic of a trip is in the moments in-between. Its the personal neuroses you share as the barriers break down over the 6th beer. It’s singing wheels on the bus and painting nails with a bunch of 3 year olds. Its screwing up your best card trick while everyone is watching and playing it off with panache. Its the warning before a lightning talk that this slide deck must never leave this room and will self destruct in … 10, 9, 8 … and knowing who’s presenting, you know he’s not kidding. You can get to know people pretty well with IM & skype video. You have regular conversation. You share stories. Thought, despite all the amazing innovations of this digital era, you still need to meet people face-to-face.
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How bbPress search should work?
There was an interesting discussion during the last bbPress dev meeting about the different approaches for implementing a solid search feature for the forums, and how it should play along with the general WordPress search. Here’s the main ticket. I’d like to keep the dialog going and will summarize the core ideas.I’m writing this without reviewing the whole chat and didn’t take notes, so… sorry in advance if I’m missing someone’s opinion or idea. Please do let me know in the comments. bbPress side of things Let’s concentrate first on how the bbPress search should work. Specifically, what should you get when you search for a keyword. There seems to be three main approaches: Search all, return all When you search for a keyword, bbPress looks for its custom post types (Forums, Topics and Replies) and will return all items … Continue reading
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WordPress.org support forums: more ideas for improvement
A few days ago, I wrote a post pointing out the potential value of adding a “support expectations statement” to the WordPress.org support forums. We’re huge fans of the work the dot-org team has done, as we noted in that article, but it didn’t stop us from thinking about other ways the dot-org forums could be improved. As someone who does a pass through The Events Calendar forum each week, and having compared it to the bbPress install we’ve got running to power the forums here on the Modern Tribe website, I came up with a short “wish list” of the features that would help improve the support experience from both an admin and a user perspective: The ability to close threads. When a thread is either stale (no response from the original poster) or resolved (the original poster is … Continue reading
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Setting support expectations at WordPress.org: one possible solution
The WordPress.org plugin repo is an awesome place. Users are friendly and thankful, discussions are easily tracked, and the ever-growing list of administrative features is making it easier to measure our relationship with the community. We want to extend our sincere thanks to Otto, Scott Reilly & the rest of the dot-org contributors for some of the new additions they’ve been adding recently. The standalone “Reviews” section is huge (we also appreciate the ability to respond to reviews), and we’re looking forward to following the discussion at make/meta over the coming months to see what else is in store. But, as we grow and our user base does the same, we’ve struggled with setting support expectations on the WordPress.org forum for users who’ve never asked for help before. After some discussion last week, we came up with one solution that would … Continue reading
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Worry-Free WordPress
An exploration of how WordPress might be able to achieve an opt out automatic upgrade system instead of the existing (and failing) opt in upgrade system. Continue reading
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The Freelance Primer
I gave an hour and twenty minute talk at How Design Live / Creative Freelance Conference in Boston on the art of the start. This talk has some serious meat on its bones. The organizers were kind enough to provide me the audio and I then paired it with the slides to create a video to share. We always give our educational content away for free to our audience and this isn’t going to be any different. I started freelancing full time out of necessity during the dot bomb in 2001. There were no blogs on freelancing, no conferences, but I was deeply blessed to find a mentor who helped me avoid the worst mistakes my first year. While you shouldn’t get paralysis by analysis (just get started), certain key tips often make the difference between navigating a successful freelance … Continue reading
