Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today we’ve got a jammed packed episode with lots of news in the WordPress space. And we’ve got a great episode talking all about four different places where we can actually upload and host our media files or our videos for our WordPress websites.

First, I want to get right into the announcements. I want to tell you about this month’s webinar or actually it’s next month’s webinar. It is going to be on June 4th, which if you look at your calendars right now, you may be saying hey, June 4th is not a Friday. That is true. It is going to be on Thursday, June 4th at 10:00 a.m. eastern.

And I’m doing this on a Thursday mainly because I always do them on Fridays, and I just want to give other people an opportunity to hang in if Thursdays work better. And on Friday I’m actually starting a two-week long travel period, and then by the time I get back, it’s going to be almost July. And then I would have them back to back.

So I thought June 4th, 10:00 a.m. eastern. You can register over at yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar. And we are going to be talking about how we can customize our WordPress dashboard and our WordPress backend. Basically, we’re going to talk about the different ways that we can make it easier for ourselves and for clients if we may be designing websites for clients so then they don’t ever have to look at code.

So they can easily change things on your website. We’re making it very, very simple. I’m going to have for the first time in quite a while or if ever I’m going to have a friend on the show to actually help deliver this webinar. And it was because of a session that I saw at WordCamp North Canton that Mr. Kyle Maurer will be on the show. And I’m excited to have him.

And he’s going to share his presentation. It’s much more of a visual type thing, so it made a lot of sense to have him come on a webinar. So if you’re interested, you can register over at yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar. And if you can’t make it, be sure to register anyways, and you’ll get a video replay later that day with all the information and what not.

So that is the first of four, I guess, news articles this week. The next one is called the “Trojan Emoji.” This is a really neat article that I found over on poststatus.com. There’s a link in the show, and it’s for Episode #223 where you can actually read the whole article. But I just want to go over it really, really quick. It’s actually about a part of a presentation over at Loop Conf.

And this was a conference all about WordPress 4, WordPress developers last week or the week before in Las Vegas. And basically, what the overarching thing is is remember in 4.2 I kept saying oh, we’ve got this big emoji support that’s being added to WordPress 4.2. And a lot of people are like well, who cares. I don’t use emoji too often.

Well, in all reality, this whole thing was a big cover up to actually hide some vulnerability that was discovered in 3.6.1. So this was back in 2014. There was this vulnerability that was found, and it took approximately 1,000 lines of code to or, I guess, WordPress core added 1,000 lines of code disguised as emoji support. And it was really for fixing this vulnerability.

And I think what the really cool part about this whole story is – and again, you can read the whole thing if you want – but the really cool part is how concerned the WordPress developers and the WordPress community is about security and how they kept it on the dl for a year and a half that hey, this is actually a huge deal that we need to fix. And virtually every WordPress website was prone to this vulnerability.

So they didn’t come out and say it. As soon as they found it, they started trying to figure out a way to fix it, which I think is very, very valuable in that they code named it emoji to get emoji support in I think was really, really cool as well. So that’s the first thing I wanted to share, and so I am just extremely excited 1.) Because the vulnerability has been patched but also in the fact that the vulnerability was kept on the secret.

And nobody knew about it except for the people that were working specifically on that area of core. And so it’s not like our sites were vulnerable in any way, shape, or form, but I just really think that that’s kind of a huge benefit from hearing about from the WordPress community. So I really like that. Another piece of news that’s out in the WordPress space is Desktop Server released version 3.8.

And if you’ve listened to the show for a while, you may have heard me talk about Desktop Server, and it’s the best way that I know to run your WordPress website locally on your computer so you can basically download this software. You can use it to clone your website, run it locally on your computer, and you can get things up and running.

And you can have a duplicate version of your set. You can tinker around on your site and all these things locally on your computer and not mess up your live site. Well, some of the really cool things that happened in 3.8, some of my favorite features is now they have the ability to add plugins inside of desktop servers. So they’re kind of like WordPress plugins, but they’re a little bit different.

One of the cool ones is called airplane mode, and this is a plug in that basically allows your website to virtually go into airplane mode. So that means it’s going to actually not take any time to load external resources. I don’t know if you’ve ever used a local server. It’s really fast. Your website loads really, really quickly until you add that Twitter widget in or that Facebook widget or different embeds or different things that has to go out to the internet to get the information and then bring it back in to serve up your website.

That stuff takes forever, and then it seems like your local site and your local development takes much, much longer because of the fact that it’s trying to get these other resources. And these other resources are online, and it’s got to go out and get them. Well, you can turn on airplane mode, and this basically gives you the ability to wipe out any of those connections. And they just won’t load, which is really cool. There’s another one out there called bypass login, and this one’s really, really neat because it basically works off the WordPress database. And you can bypass a login, so this is really, really helpful if you’re building some sort of membership site and you want to easily be able to log out and log back in as a different user level.

So maybe you have people that are in a premium level or an expert level or beginner level or whatever that level is, and you want to see what the different views are. You can go in, and basically, you log out. And then when you go to your login page, it’s got the usual fields for username and password, but then it also has bypass login. And it’s a dropdown menu, and it has all of the users that are in the WordPress database.

You basically pick the one that you want. You don’t even have to hit submit, and it just automatically logs you in. It is really, really cool. It is so neat that it just works, and it’s really, really cool. I mean, this plugin isn’t made for your self-hosted sites so that people could do this on their own. But when you’re on a local environment right on your computer, you’re not gonna have people trying to hack into it or what not. So I think this is really, really cool.

There is a link to the entire blogpost over at the show notes for Episode #223, but I just wanted to highlight that, some of the really cool things that I use virtually every day when I’m running my virtual server right here on my computer. All right, and finally, the biggest news of the day is that Automatic, the company that I work for, has acquired WooThemes and that includes WooThemes like all of their themes, their plugins, which includes WooCommerce.

There’s a Sensei plugin, which is like a classroom plugin and what not, and it has all been acquired by Automatic. So this is something that’s been going on. Negotiations have been going on for quite some time behind the scenes, and we’ve officially been allowed to announce it and talk about it live everywhere on the web.

But basically, there is a one minute and 50 second video that I’m gonna play. It’s basically Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automatic. He’s talking about some of the reasons behind WooThemes and WooCommerce and what not. So let’s go ahead, and we’ll just listen to it. There’s no real need to see the video, but that will be embedded for the show notes for this episode. So let’s hear what Matt says all about why Automatic chose to pursue WooThemes.
[Start of video]

Matt Mullenweg: Howdy. My name is Matt Mullenweg, and I am the cofounder of WordPress and the founder and CEO of Automatic. We make services like WordPress.com and Jetpack, and today we’re announcing we’re moving into a new area which is ecommerce. I remember a few days ago I was at a work camp, and someone stood up in the Q&A and asked me, “When are you gonna make it as easy to publish stores online as you’ve made it to publish websites?”

There was spontaneous applause from the audience. People love this idea, but I deferred because I knew that selling things online is hard. You deal with payment gateways, taxes, shipping, inventory management. Around this time, a company that previously had been known to make thieves, started to tackle the ecommerce space with their plugin WooCommerce. And they looked a lot like Automatic, actually, with now over 55 people all over the world.

Today we’re announcing that Automatic has acquired WooCommerce, and we’re looking forward to our teams working together to bring Woo to an even wider audience because I do believe that the web need and open, independent, and easy to use commerce platform that you can run yourself on your own website. There’s already over 600,000 store fronts created with WooCommerce, which is incredible.

And we think there will be very many more in the future as they reach more WordPress’s 23 percent of all websites. If you want to check it out, go to WooCommerce.com. That’s woocommerce.com. And if you have any questions from the community or anyone really, I’m going to be doing a Q&A about this on my blog at ma.tt. Come on by. I would love to have you. Thank you all for joining, and I hope I see you around the web. Bye.

[End of video]

Dustin Hartzler: All right, that was Matt, and the funny part about that whole video is all talking about WooCommerce. And yes, WooCommerce was part of the deal, but it was actually the entire company WooThemes. And so those are some of the nuances that I saw with some of the articles that are out today just talking about the differences in why the stories from Mashable and TechCrunch and all these people talking about why Automatic acquired WooCommerce and WooThemes and those types of things.
So one of the encouraging parts are that the two companies will stay completely separate. And so in the framework that if you purchase WooThemes, they’re gonna continue to support them. You’ll still work with their happiness engineers. The plugins are all gonna work. We’re gonna kind of operate under two distinct companies if you will for a while before we start merging in.

The cool part is as far as I know, some of the features that are on self-hosted WordPress sites are actually gonna move to WordPress.com, which will make WordPress.com just that much of a more enticing platform for people to try out and use. So there’s a whole article over on ma.tt, and I’ll have a link to that in the show notes as well.

All right, let’s move on to the is there a plugin for that section. And this week the plugin that I want to talk about is called sidekick, and it is a real-time, voice-guided WordPress training and support straight from your dashboard. And so how this works is it’s basically the fastest and easiest way to learn WordPress, and you could actually do a screen flow course or basically screen casting inside your WordPress dashboard.

So you could teach your clients. You could teach people that you want to know and teach about WordPress. You could add this right inside their dashboard, and they’ve got work walkthroughs that you can add straight there how to edit a post and how to edit a page and how you add media from a computer and stuff. It looks really, really cool. It basically just kinda takes over. It kinda runs as a footer inside your WordPress dashboard, which is really nice.

And so I’d recommend if you have any need for this, go ahead and check that out. And of course, like I said, the plugin will be in the WordPress repository, and you can find a link on the show notes for Episode #223. I feel like I’ve said that 16 times already in the first part of this episode. Okay, today we’re going to talk about where I should host videos for my WordPress website.

There’s lots of different options out there. I decided to highlight four of them because I’ve had experience with these four different platforms. And so I would just go through them, and you can take your time and figure out which one is going to be the best for you. But these are the four that I feel that are probably the best, most used for most WordPress websites.

So the first one is VideoPress, and you may not know this but VideoPress is made by Automatic. It’s another product that Automatic offers, and it is $60.00 per year, but it’s really cool because it just integrates right in with the Jetpack plugin. So basically, you just have to pay your subscription, and then it just works within Jetpack.

There’s no additional plugin to install, and yeah, it just works. You use WordPress.com serves to host all your videos, and so to do that, you need a WordPress.com account. But since it’s inside the Jetpack plugin, you’ve already got a WordPress.com account, and so it all just kind of works. You get unlimited traffic and views. It’s ad free, and one of the limitations is you can only upload a one gigabyte file.

So if you’ve got something that’s two hours and it’s more than one gigabyte, you have to somehow compress that down to a smaller size file. VideoPress is really good, and it makes it super simple to do. And you can just manage everything within a WordPress library and everything, but there are some limitations. There’s not a lot of stats to see who’s watching and how long they’re watching and all those different types of things.

It does work on mobile and on desktops, and it’s responsive and what not. But there are some limitations. It’s one that works really well, but it’s probably not one of the best options that are out there. Another one is called YouTube. You may have heard of it, but YouTube is the No. 2 search engine in the world. YouTube videos actually appear most of the time inside Google search results if it is a good fit.

So you see a lot of times if you’re Googling like how to tie my shoe or how to wash my windows or whatever it is, usually there’s one or two results that send you to websites. And then the next couple will send you to videos right within YouTube. If you’re just looking for people to watch your videos and you don’t care if they come straight to your website or if they go to YouTube then YouTube is a good place to put them.

I know that in the past I’ve actually housed my videos in several different places and just put them on YouTube so that people could discover my content on YouTube, but then maybe I used one of the other servers like Vimeo or something to actually put them on my website. And I’ll talk about that in just a second. Let’s see. What else? With YouTube it’s free, and you can have unlimited lengths, I believe, for the most part. Sometimes you have to use your account a few times and let YouTube know that you’re not a spammer or anything. And then they’ll increase that limit. I know that I can upload like an hour and a half and have no problems whatsoever. You can create channels with similar videos, so if you have a bunch of video that are all very similar, you can tag them all as the same.

And you can have a video playlist, which is really, really nice. And if you have videos that have lots of views, then you have the ability to run advertisements on the bottom and make a little extra cash with that. Sometimes the ads are a little bit annoying that they get in the way. But if they actually cause you to make money when people are visiting your sites and your videos, then that may be a good thing.

Now, I think I heard somewhere you had to have 10s of 1000s or even 100s of 1000s of views before you can actually start making some significant money with YouTube ads. And then another thing that’s out there with YouTube is you can actually do unlisted videos, which basically hides them from YouTube searches but then if you have a direct link, you can give people a direct link to your site or to your video. And they can find it on YouTube.

And they can watch it and what not, but it will not be found if somebody is searching for it on YouTube. They won’t find it in search results either. So YouTube is another option. It’s probably the most popular option, and of the four that we talk that we talk about today, it is the one that’s going to get you the most traffic outside of your website.

The next one that I’ll share is called Vimeo, and it’s another popular video hosting site. And for a while it was Vimeo and YouTube right next and next way early on. And then with Google and their bigness and their power, it just skyrocketed. And now, there’s millions of minutes of video being uploaded every minute. But Vimeo is really kinda nice. I really like it. With free accounts, you ca upload up to 500 megabytes of HD content per week.

So if you have a lot of HD content, then the free version isn’t for you. But maybe the Plus version is. And the Plus version runs the same cost as VideoPress does for $60.00 per year, and it really has some really cool things. Like, the Plus version you can actually customize what the player looks like. You can change the colors to match your website a little bit nicer. You can change the play buttons. You can upload graphics or images to be the beginning image and what not, the still image and what not. The Plus account also has better stats. They have the ability to track things just a little bit nicer, and one of the things that I really like is you can password protect your videos if you want. So you can password protect them so people can’t actually go in and watch your video without the right password.

You can also say to only embed them on a certain page, so for a while when I was running a membership site or I had a class that I was teaching, I said only let the videos be embedded on this page. And it didn’t list them on Vimeo, so people couldn’t find them. It only was allowed to be viewed on my website, the one that I specify. And then from there it was really nice because I could just create a password for that entire site.

And then I knew that all those videos were locked down, and they didn’t actually have to go in and use a password every time they wanted to watch a new video, which I really like which was really cool. And so those are some of the options in Vimeo. They do have a Pro account that’s a little bit more expensive. I think instead of $60.00 a year, it’s maybe $200.00 a year, and it adds a few extra features.

But I think Vimeo Plus does a really good job for the $60.00. I used it for a couple years when I was running those different sites and I wanted to keep stuff hidden, and now, I just don’t have a need for it. So I don’t pay for a subscription of Vimeo. But I really do like them. I just like the way the player looks versus what it looks like from YouTube.

And so a lot of times when I was creating webinars and I wanted to embed them on my website, I would embed them from Vimeo. But I would upload them to YouTube to get that extra traffic and just get extra eyes on my content. So that is Vimeo. And the last one that I want to share with is probably my favorite, but it’s the most expensive one. And it seems like that’s always the case these days.

Always the one that’s most expensive is the one that I like the best. But the one that I really like is called Wistia. The prices have come down quite a bit since they first got started and they first launched, but they’re a really cool service. And they have some amazing stats, some amazing things that you can check out. So you can see exactly how long somebody watches a video. So you can see oh, this user was on there from 0:00 to one minute, and then they got bored. And then the next person was there and saw a 1:05, and then they got bored. And so now, you can start triggering in okay, what was said at the 55 second mark to a minute mark that was causing people to leave? So you can dive right into all of that information. You can see how long people stayed, if they came back. You can also embed opt in forms to the video player themselves.

So after they get so long, maybe you say five tips, and after the second tip they have to enter their email so that you know they opt into your list. And then you continue providing the value in their lessons. That one’s really, really cool. The prices, actually, for this Wistia do start at zero dollars. You can get started for 25 videos for free, but they allow you to do a lot of the things.

They don’t give you near the in-depth stats and what not, but you also have to have a player that has a little Wistia icon in the bottom right hand corner, which isn’t a deal breaker if you want to go ahead and start trying it out. The next option goes up to, I think, maybe $25.00 a month, and then options go all the way up to $300.00 per month. And basically, the different price points are based on how many videos you have uploaded.

I think the $25.00 a month plan is up to 100 videos, and then maybe the next one is $100.00 a month. And that’s unlimited videos but so much bandwidth. And then the $300.00 a month plan is unlimited, unlimited, unlimited. Another cool feature that they do have is you can turn on and enable social sharing bars under videos if you want. So if you want people to be able to automatically tweet things right from the video or right from underneath the video, you can do that.

They’ve got a whole list of features. I’ve got those listed in the show notes, but, I mean, there’s just dozens and dozens of things. You can edit your videos, and you can edit them right inside Wistia. You can add colors to them to make them more vintage. I mean, you can do a lot of things. And they have what’s called the Wistia labs where you can go in and try out some of their new features which are really cool.

And you can get a feel for doing some video editing without actually having to open up these heavy operating systems, Adobe Premiere or things like that to render them to be different colors and what not. So if you’re in the market for something that is a really nice player that looks really, really great, Wistia is going to be the one for you, especially if you don’t mind investing a little bit of cash up front. So you’ll get those extra stats. It’ll look really great, and, I believe, Wistia has a button too that you can just say give the user the ability to download this video, which is also a really big help if you’re running some sort of membership site or you’ve got an area where people are maybe wanting to take those videos on the go.

It’s probably the worst thing. Those other three services VideoPress, Vimeo, and YouTube those ones you have to find hackey ways to go about downloading them to put them on your device. And as I see it, if you’re giving people value and you’re giving them videos for them to watch, let them consume it when they have the time and the opportunity.

So if they want to load up a bunch of your videos and then watch them on a plane, that’s absolutely up to them, and you want to give them that easy option. And Wistia gives you that by just giving you the button that says download now. So those are the reviews of the four different services that you can use to hose your WordPress website. Technically, you can host them on your own site. You can upload an mp4 file if you want to right to your webhost.

And then if somebody clicks on the link, you won’t actually have a real, real good player inside of your WordPress site. But if somebody would click on a link to watch your video or download your video, then it would play in another browser window. I mean, that’s an okay solution. If you’re using shared hosting and it’s kind of slower, it would take a while for that video to download.

And if you have 100s of 1000s of people watching that video, then it’s just not gonna scale. And your webhost may shut you down. So I prefer having your media content on another server, another service just so that they’re the ones responsible for the videos. I know that YouTube does a great job of helping my site load quickly because it’s not having to load all of those resources right away to play the video until somebody actually hits the play button.

So those are the options out there if you’re interested in adding video to your website, and I know a lot of us are moving more to multimedia. There’s a lot more animation. There’s a lot more stuff going on with our websites, and I know that video is getting more and more popular on our websites. So that is going to wrap up this episode, and that’s what I wanted to share. We’re talking about videos this week, and next week I’m not sure what we’re gonna talk about. Maybe we’ll recap the whole scoop on what happened with WooCommerce and what it’s going to look like in the next weeks. I don’t know. I haven’t really decided yet, but I appreciate you taking the time this week to spend some time with me listening about your different options to create or to add videos to your WordPress website. Don’t forget to go to yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar to sign up for the webinar, and we’ll talk again soon. Take care. Bye-bye.