Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin and today I'm excited to be here with you today because we are going to give a little preview of the upcoming webinar that I will be talking about later this week. I'll get to that in just a second, but I wanted to let you know that I am back from traveling last week I was all week in Belize as a team meet up for Automatic. I was with my – let's see, there was 11 of us total, teammates and we were just there getting to know each other better, hanging out, spending time, you know, getting sun burnt and whatnot. And swimming with the sharks, we did some snorkeling, we did a lot of cool things as team bonding experiences and we also did a lot of work to get ready for the next few months.

And how we're gonna progress into some of our new transitions and new goals at Automatic. So that was a lot of fun. I'm done traveling for awhile, it was kind of a whirlwind two and a half weeks, I went to Nubity Expo in Las Vegas and then I was home for two days and then I flew out to Belize and then my wife joined me for a few days and then we had to pick up my daughter from my parent's house. And now we're all back, everything's kind of back and ready to go and it seems like it's time to record another episode already.

So today I wanted to let you know that there are a lot of announcements, there's a lot of things that have been going on since the last episode that I recorded, which was more than a week and a half ago. And so I wanted to let you know and give you a reminder about the webinar that's happening this Friday, that's May 1st, at 10:00 am Eastern, we'll be talking about how to add custom post types to your WordPress website. So today's a little preview, we're going to talk about some of the benefits of custom post types and then if you're really interested, if you're listening to this right as it releases and then you can go and register and sign up for the webinar and if you're like me, a procrastinator or a constant behind in podcast episodes you'll get this message after the fact and then you can go to Yourwebsiteenginner.com, click on the webinar recordings and then watch the webinar replay.

So that is May 1st, at 10:00 am Eastern, you can register over at Yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar. Also, I wanted to let you know that next week, not this week but the next week, it is May 8th and 9th, I will be at WordCamp North Canton, I have a session on how to add a podcast to your website and how to use WordPress as the platform for your podcast. So if you are interested in that and you live in northeast Ohio area or like the Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh area, even probably parts of West Virginia, you can get to WordCamp North Canton very, very quickly. And I highly recommend coming, you'll have a lot of fun, you'll get to meet a lot of really neat people and you'll just be so energized to really improve and spend time working on your website that it is well worth it. I think it is $30.00 is the admission price, but totally worth it for the two days. The food is great, the people are awesome and you're gonna learn a lot. So that's another announcement.

Also in the news, you might have seen that WordPress 4.2 and 4.2.1 have come out since I last recorded. So WordPress 4.2 is nicknamed Powell and it's in honor of jazz pianist Bud Powell. And you can download and run it on your computer if you want or you can use the quick update button right within your WordPress dashboard. Basically, they're making it easier, the code name is an easier way to share you content, you can use the – one of the things that they worked on was the press of this button and it basically is a bookmarklet that you can add to your bookmarks bar and when you're on any website you can do the "Press This" and it kind of composes it as a draft so you can blog about it later. They also extended character support, which means there are new languages and new emojis, which is really, really nice. You can also now switch your themes, do a theme switch, or a theme preview in the customizer which is really cool. That was never done before.

And the customizer you can now like customize your widgets, you can change some colors, you can update your site title, like a lot of the features and the customizations that you can do within WordPress is now being built into customizer. And so it kind of makes it an experience that's all the same, I mean, every time that you go and wanna make customizations to your site you go into the customizer and it's all there. You can do a live preview, it'll automatically render what it'll look like before you actually hit publish, and so that is really, really cool.

Also, they've added more embed supports so you can now embed from Tumbler and Kickstarter, which is really, really nice. The plugins, updating plugins has been completely overhauled and streamlined it is really, really cool. You don't have to watch that "Update Now" screen anymore, you can just click the button, it does a little spinning thing right there and then it automatically updates, which is really, really cool. Lots of stuff underneath the hood, there was 283 contributors on this release. Unfortunately, my name did not get in there because I was too busy in the last couple months to even really look at it. I had it on my to-do list a few times throughout the last few months, I went to the WordPress Core Trac and was looking for things that I could work on and fix and there was just nothing that stood out to me like, "Hey, I could get this fixed and knocked out in a day or so."

So unfortunately I didn't contribute to this release but I'm still gonna be looking to get at least a contribution to WordPress Core in this year, calendar year of 2015. And just a few days after that, so that was on April 23rd, 4.2 came out on April 27th, 4.2.1 the security release came out and it is a critical security release for all versions. Basically, it was a few hours ago the WordPress team, a few hours ago on the 27th of course, not a few hours from now, but they said that the team was made aware of a cross-site scripting vulnerability which could enable commoners to comprise the site and the vulnerability was discovered by Jouko Pynnonen, and I'm sure I mispronounced that name, but basically what happens is that WordPress sites could be infected with this, but I believe if I read correctly, if you're running Akismet, Akismet has already patched it and so you're not as vulnerable but you still wanna make sure that you're updated to 4.2 as soon as possible. If you haven't updated at all, you wanna go ahead and make a backup of your website, use BackupBuddy, BackWPup, VaultPress, you name it, whatever system that you wanna use. You wanna use that and make sure that you have a good solid copy because things can break sometimes when you do updates, and so we wanna make sure that that hit doesn't happen to you.

Also another thing that happened since I've been out also on April 23rd was Jetpack 3.5, and so this basically gives you now the ability to manage your site's menus right from WordPress.com. So if you remember in the past, I've mentioned going over to WordPress.com/sites and you can go ahead and you can see the different plugins that you're running on all of your sites. It's kind of like an infinite WP or a managed WP, some of those sites that are like a self-hosted managed area where you can see all of the plugins and stuff that you need updated. Well, now all of this stuff is coming into WordPress.com so you can manage your WordPress.com sites, your self-hosted sites all from one area. So now you can go in once you update to Jetpack 3.5, then you can go in and you can actually customize specific menus. So I could go into WordPress.com/sites, click on Yourwebsiteengineer.com and then go into the menus area and I could actually change the navigation from my main site. So I can either do that on the dashboard or I can do it in the WordPress.com dashboard.

So there's a lot of things happening within WordPress.com and making it kind of a smooth transition between hosting your self-hosted site all with the benefits and the power of using Jetpack. So that's something that came out as well. So it doesn't meant that your dashboard is going away by any shape or form, this is just another way that you can manage your website. So maybe you have a couple things that you wanna do on a couple different sites, you can use the WordPress.com dashboard so you don't have to log in to each and every one of your sites. So that's pretty cool.

And then the last thing that I wanna let you know Synch Pro by iThemes. They do have a free version called Synch, but this is called Synch Pro and this is a new feature for Synch Pro and it's the ability to generate and email reports to your WordPress clients, which is really, really cool. It's kind of a neat thing, so iThemes Synch basically allows you to manage all of your WordPress sites within one interface, kind of like how I was talking that you can do that with WordPress.com now. You can also do this with iThemes Synch. You know how this works is you can go in and say you have 10 clients and you have all 10 clients that are paying you regularly for maintenance. And you wanna be able to generate and send them an email every single month to say, "Hey, this is what I've done. Thanks for paying me," whatever that looks like. And so basically there's now a new reports area where you can go into the reports area and they have this white label email message that you can set up. So you can do some customizations, you can give it your company name, you can add a default message, and you can add some text in the footer. And then what happens is, at the end of the month you can create a report and you can say – you can click all the sites that you'd like to send it to and then it basically generates a report and then you can click the email button, and then you can have all your clients and everything loaded right in and so then it'll just automatically send out to all of your clients, which is really cool. It's pretty neat that you do that and then it has a button at the bottom that says, "View April Report," or "View March Report," or whenever, and when the client clicks the button they'll see your website maintenance report, which includes all actions that updated the site with Synch.

So you can see that, oh, on April 14th, 2015 I've updated this plugin to this new version and then you can see that I've updated Core on April 24th, and that I've updated one, two, three, four, five, six, seven plugins and two themes and it shows you exactly what those are. And so even though that you're using the tool to do this and you're not actually doing a lot of work, this is a really, really cool thing. So this is called Reporting and it's in iThemes Synch Pro and I'm trying to get you a price right now so you can see that. So Synch Pro plan for a ten site plan it is $130.00 per year and then it goes from there. It looks like if you have 50 sites that your managing it's $550.00 a year. So there's a little bit of discount by more and more sites that you have. So that's something if you're interested in and you wanna kind of automate that process of sending that email out every month, I highly recommend looking into Synch Pro from iThemes.

Alright, so it's the time in the show where is there a plugin for that? Of course there is, there's always a plugin for that. And today the plugin I wanna highlight is called BirchPress Scheduler and this is an appointment booking and online scheduling plugin that allows service businesses take online bookings. And this has over 5,000 installs and it basically gives you the ability for spas, yoga studios, contractors, photographers, to take online appointments and bookings. You can embed a booking form in a page or a post on a website, customers can see the availability and book an appointment online directly, that way they don't have to talk to you, you don't have to them and go back and forth via email, whatever it happens to be. So say for example like a spa, they have 10 appointments during the course of the day and you can book specifically with each one of those. It's built responsive so it works with the responsive themes, it's really kind of neat, I, personally, have no use for this, but there are plenty of people out there listening to this show that would be like, "Oh, I could totally use something like this for my website." So go ahead and check that out, BirchPress Scheduler and it'll be in the show notes for episode number 230.

Okay, today I wanted to just kinda highlight real quick some benefits of using custom post types. And we're not gonna get into a lot of detail because I do have this webinar coming up in three days where we'll kind of highlight a lot of things. And, of course, if you are listening to this weeks and weeks and weeks in the future you can go ahead and just head on over to the webinar archives page on my website and you can watch the webinar replay and you can see all of the benefits and how to set it up and how I'm using custom post types. So basically what it is is a custom post type is your own type of custom posts. You know, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever, so let's talk about the different post types that are built into WordPress right now. So you have the post, that's a post type, page, that's a post type, you have menus, you have revisions, and you have attachments. Those are the five post types that are built into WordPress. And some things you may have noticed or you may have used separate plugins to do this, but sometimes you get an extra area on the left hand side in your menu bar for portfolio items, maybe testimonials, maybe blogs, maybe – there's all kinds of different things, menus, if you have some sort of a website that has to do with blogging about cooking or recipes or things like that.

I know on mine I have one called "Webinars," so all of my webinars go in that area. And there's so many different benefits and so many different things that you can do with custom post types. Think of your WordPress site as a site building framework and the custom post types are the different types of content block that make up your website. For example, you could have something like portfolio items or houses for sale or cars for sale or podcasts or journal entries or anything that might warrant on the front end a specific type of formatting. If a site is setup for a client who doesn't have a lot of web experience and they don't want to really play around with it too much, then custom post types can be much easier to understand than kind of trying to teach them the differences between posts and pages and where to put content and things along those lines, so custom post types is a helpful way to kind of tailor your WordPress website.

So the four things that I came up with and, of course, there's more benefits than that but these are kind of four things that I really like about custom post types. And so you should like them about custom post types as well, okay, I kid, I kid, of course. So the first way is you can organize or present your data exactly the way that you want it. You can – this is kind of the big thing, I'm super OCD about certain things, so like I want all of my webinars in a specific area on my website, like I don't wanna have to go into "Posts" and then filter by different categories to find all of my webinar posts. So I created a custom post type for that. I also use that area to generate and have created a custom post type template page. So basically all of my custom post types for webinars are going to look specifically different than a podcast episode page would. And that's because I've built that into a custom template.

Another really cool thing that you can do is if you go to my website right now, yourwebsiteengineer.com, and look on the homepage and you scroll down a little bit you'll see on the left hand side you'll see the most recent podcast episode and you'll see on the right hand side the most recent webinar that I've done. And so that webinar is basically pulling that custom post type, it's pulling the most recent post in that post type to display on the homepage. And so I know that if I put something in there, the newest there, the newest post is going to just automatically pull in and be posted there right there on the top of my site. So custom post types can help your OCDness and make sure that everything is straight, neat, and right into the right place. It can also allow you to create custom themes and custom templates so that you are displaying things exactly the way that you want them on your website.

The next benefit of using custom post types is to stop relying on categories. I know that a lot of people have developed themes and they've designed their website so that a specific category will actually display differently on their website, which is perfectly fine. I use it a lot, too, just because like my podcast is not in a custom post type category or not in a custom post type, it's in a category, so I have to tag each episode as a category of podcasts for it to go to my feed and different things. And I know for a fact that probably within the 230 episodes that I've released, probably a half dozen or even a dozen times I forgot to tag it as a category – or I forgot to tag the category as podcast and it just didn't go out. The show didn't go live when I thought it would, it was just like, "Oh, I need to do this." And so if you wanna make it easier for your clients or your customers or just take away some of that brain power that you have to think, "Okay, how do I get to display properly?" You can add it as a custom post type and then program the rest of your theme around that custom post type. And so that way the correct templates always use as long as you're using the custom post type.

The next benefit is improved usability for your clients. And so it is kind of complex to tell a client, especially if they are very first getting started with WordPress, "Okay, to post a podcast you must do A, B, C, and D. You've gotta make sure that you got this and this and this. And you don't have to do this area and in a post area make sure you click on that category as podcast," all of these different things. And then if you say, "Okay, to do a blog post you have to do this, this, this, and this," and they're completely different steps because maybe sometimes the blog post they need to add they put a whole bunch of information in the post, maybe they used a featured image but on the podcast page they don't use a featured image, whatever it is, like it's much more complex to use that same post editor window to do multiple different things. And so with custom post types you have the ability to create a singular process that makes sense to a non-programmer and a non-power user. For example, what you can do is you can create within custom post types once you've enabled custom post types then you can unlock these things called custom meta boxes. And basically in a custom meta box you can say like, let's say for example, like for my webinars one, and I don't have this built in yet but this is something that I've been thinking about in the future that maybe on the end of every webinar page I wanna be able – for people to download the link for the video, the audio, and the presentation, whatever that is, a PDF of the presentation.

So what I could do is I could create these custom post meta boxes underneath the post area. So I can go in, I can embed the video, I can add all the links, I can add the code, I can do everything that I need and then if I wanted to custom tailor what the download buttons look like for download the video, the audio, and the presentation then I could just create special boxes right underneath there that says, "Video MP4 File" and then I could post in the Amazon S3 link. Or maybe I wanted to put the audio and I could paste that right in, and I could do that so it creates these really nice looking boxes or maybe they're laid out in a specific manner. And then you don't have to worry about, "Okay, now I need to wrap these with a special H –" you know, like you don't have to make sure that they're saved as a link and then they have the right class around them to get them to display the right way. And I'll show this in the upcoming webinar because this is something that is really, really powerful and is really, really cool with custom post types.

And then the last benefit and, of course, there's lots more benefits but the last one that I wanna highlight today is you can hide your content for default queries. So you're not really hiding your content per se, but out of the box custom post types are not included in the normal queries and so, for example, like you will never see a webinar of mine show up in the big long list of all my podcast episodes because they're excluded. They're not specifically posts any more; they're not going to show up in that same area. So if you are a blogger and you have a bunch of blog posts and then you have a video custom post types, then those videos will never show up in that specific feed you'll have to create your own page for those to display. Now this is sometimes good and sometimes bad, maybe if you are running a blog but you want your videos intertwined you'd wanna stay along the lines of a category or use a category for video and just keep those all in the posts area. But if you are running a site that you wanna keep things very, very different and very spread out, then you would wanna check into using custom post types.

So the four reasons that I came up with, the four benefits that I came up with; you can organize and present your data exactly the way that you want to, you can stop relying on categories to display the posts like you need, you also will have the improved usability for your clients, you'll make it easier for your clients to add their new posts in whatever that post type is. And you can hide the content from default queries. Now if any of this sounds interesting to you, you can go ahead and register over at yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar for the upcoming webinar, or if it's in the future, if it's in 2016, 2017 when you may be listening to this, you can head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com, look for the webinar replays and you can go ahead and watch the custom webinar replay for May, 2015.

That's going to wrap up this episode and so this was kind of a high level overview of custom post types. Custom post types are probably one of the coolest things about WordPress, but they're also one of the most complex things. And we're going to dig into that, we're going to dive into that on the webinar and just spend some time really learning about how they work and how we can use them for our benefit and the benefit for our clients and people who want to use WordPress as their website platform. That's all I've got for you this week. Take care and we'll talk again next week. Bye-bye.