Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today we are going to be talking about some of the tools and some of the things that you can purchase to really kind of improve your WordPress website, maybe improve your skills for your WordPress website, or improve your WordPress skills, all these different things that I kind of thought of that maybe go with the holiday spirit that’s coming up here in Christmastime in 2015.
But before we do that, I’ve got a couple quick announcements that I want to share with you. The first one is remember a few weeks ago we talked about the Mac app that was available for WordPress that you can now manage your WordPress website using the Calypso framework and you can do everything right in a desktop app which is really, really cool. Well, I want to let you know that now the Windows version and the Linux version are both available. I’ve got links to those in the show notes for episode number 264.
So if you’re running one of those platforms, basically any computer operating system platform now has the ability to have a standalone app running in their dock or in their menu bar, wherever, and you can actually use that for using WordPress. And I’ve actually been using the app quite a bit. Every morning I open it up and I read through the reader and I follow all of my posts. I’m kind of using it as almost like a Feedly, and so instead of having hundreds and hundreds of different blog posts that I see in Feedly, I’m actually using the wordpress.Com reader and I’m just getting a handful of ones that I absolutely do not want to miss. And so I do that reading every morning.
And then I’ve been working on a 31-day challenge of December to post something daily on DustinHartzler.Com, and everything that I post on there usually goes on – some way I publish it from the app itself. The tricky part is about using a mobile app, using the WordPress mobile app is you can’t change your publicizing information, and sometimes I just don’t want - whatever I’m posting may be kind of weird or not really that interesting and I’m just like, fulfilling the streak and I don’t necessarily want that to go on Facebook, so I ended up saving it as a draft in my phone, heading over to my browser, heading over to my computer, opening the WordPress app, and then customizing those preferences and then publishing it. And so if you are interested, definitely if you are on the Windows platform or if you’re on the Linux platform, head on over to the show notes, and then you can get the download link and you can download and install it. You connect it with your wordpress.Com account, and then any site that’s on wordpress.Com or any jetpack-enabled site, those are all accessible under one roof. It’s almost like a main dashboard for all of your websites which is really, really cool.
Another thing that I wanted to share with you real quick is there is a conference coming up, and I talked about this conference last year, earlier in this year, and it’s called WooConf, and it is –there is WooConf 2016. It’s actually happening in April 2015 in Austin, Texas, and it’s basically a conference all about WooCommerce, and WooCommerce is something that I’m starting to learn a lot more about. But this is a conference dedicated, a three-day conference all about WooConf, and there is a contest where you can actually win a golden ticket which means that you get your flight, the accommodations, and conference admission all taken care of. I think the conference admission is around $500.00, and of course the hotel is a few hundred bucks a night, and then the flights. That’s all covered in his Woo ticket. There is information in the show notes for this episode and you can go and find out how to win this contest or how to enter in the contest and see if you can win a free ticket to WooConf 2016.
I also just want to take this opportunity to share that I have actually transitioned teams without my Automatica family, and so now I’m no longer doing wordpress.Com support as I had been for the last two years. I have moved over to the Woo side of things. I have been doing a three-month microrotation or minirotation they call it. Basically within Automatica we have opportunities to rotate to different teams to see if their style of work or if their tickets, whatever the team does, to see if that’s a better fit for you, and I found that the Woo is, the Woo Commerce tickets were just a better fit for me. So I’m learning a lot about Woo Commerce. I’m diving in, figuring out how the code works, how all these plug-ins and extensions work, and it’s just been mind-blowing because there is so much that I don’t know about Woo Commerce. There’s bookings, there’s subscriptions, there’s memberships, there’s all these payment gateways. All of these things is something that I’ll be learning in 2016. The good news for you, for me doing this, is actually I am working on putting together a content schedule for next year and kind of how many months that are being different themed, and then that way those months can maybe be three or four episodes, kind of very similar-type content with some videos to go along with it. That’s all going to be – some of those months will include how to set up an e-Commerce or how to run a membership site. All of those different things we’re going to talk about. So I’m just learning a lot, and I feel like I’m going to have tons of topics to talk about in 2016 on this actual podcast.
So those are the announcements for this week. The plug-in that I want to highlight this week is called Tickera. Tickera. T-i-c-k-e-r-a, and it is an event ticketing system. It will allow you to transform your WordPress into a full-featured event ticketing system. Think about like Event Bright. It is very similar to Event Bright. It does some really cool things, but you don’t have to pay that third-party extra access fee. If you list something or you sell tickets on Event Bright, you have to pay not only just the payment processing, but you also have to pay the fee for listing it on there. So it gives you some really neat abilities. It’s a newer plug-in. It’s got 1,000 installs. But if you’re looking to sell tickets on your website, I think this would be a perfect one to take a look at and see if this is something that would be right for you. So that’s Tickera. I can’t even say it. Tickera event ticketing system. So check that out in the show notes for episode number 264.
So today I was just thinking about – oh, there’s some listener feedback. Before I forget. There is a – I got a message on last week’s show, and it says if you need a hand learning about Matt’s homework, and that’s Matt Mulloway said that we should learn JavaScript deeply, that’s something, that’s one of his homework assignments for all of next year, and there is a website called FreeCodeCamp.Com, and give that a try. This person said that they’ve signed up a couple of weeks ago and they feel much more confident with JavaScript, and they even built a few little apps which I think is really cool. And that’s something that’s definitely on my list for 2016. There’s so many different pieces of WordPress that I know, like high-levels of information, but I really want to dive in and learn a lot of things, especially with the JavaScript stuff. It’s just really, really cool. Like, it’s also neat, and I’m just blown away with the new web technologies that’s coming out. So if you’re interested, head on over to FreeCodeCamp.Com, sign up, and take a look at learning JavaScript that way.
Alright, now we’ll move on to the main section of the show, and today we’ll talk about WordPress tools to buy for Christmas. You know, it’s holiday time, and you’re always thinking about what can you buy for other people, what can you buy for yourself. We’re to this point where, I don’t know, this time of year is all about buying people stuff, but that’s not really what I want to talk about today. I just wanted to say if you need gift ideas for somebody – I know it’s very, very close to Christmas – or if you want to splurge and maybe you get a little Christmas money or something like that, here’s a few things that you could sink a little bit of money into that would help you significantly in 2016. So these are in no real order. There’s really – I just kind of came up with the as I – and wrote them down as I came up with them, so here’s a few things that I thought of.
The first one is iThemes bundle. So iThemes is the maker of Backup Buddy. They have a lot of other really cool plug-ins and so you can get Backup Buddy in a developer bundle. It’s like, $250.00-ish. They’re sometimes running sales and whatnot, but that bundle includes all kinds of extra plug-ins. It gives you a lot of things including the backup buddy and the stash to store your backups, the better WP Security Pro, all those different types of things. So if you’re interested in learning about some of those things, there’s a link in the show notes. There’s a link to the show notes for all of these things, but that is something that you could buy to make sure that all your sites are backed up for the year, make sure that they’re very secure and that nobody’s going to hack them.
Another thing that you could purchase for yourself is a little WordPress swag. There’s a link to the new swag store here in the show notes as well, and that is a new website that was launched just a couple months ago, and it’s launched on WordPress now. It used to be a Shopify site or some other e-Commerce store, but now it’s on Woo Commerce – it’s on WordPress running Woo Commerce, and it’s just really, really slick. They’ve got a lot of shirts and hoodies and stuff like that that you can go and purchase all that kind of stuff and you can have a little bit more WordPress swag, if you don’t have enough. I know there’s people that I know that have more than a few dozen different WordCamp shirts and WordPress shirts that they can wear for weeks and weeks without ever having to do the laundry, which is pretty crazy.
Another thing that you can purchase for yourself if you wanted to splurge a little bit this holiday season is Desktop Server. This is software package that allows you to run your website locally on your computer, and so I run this, I use it nearly every day just working on my websites. All of my websites run locally on my computer before they run out in the Cloud where other people can see them. I update plug-ins locally; I do all kinds of things locally before I actually make those changes on a live server. I do a lot of testing to make sure that everything is just working absolutely perfectly, and so desktop Server is one of the pieces of the puzzle that makes it happen for me. And I did a webinar on Desktop Server. I’ll link to that in the show notes as well so you can go ahead and really see how this tool works. Essentially it’s like you’re running WordPress on your computer, which is awesome when you want to make changes when you don’t have a real stable internet connection or maybe you have kind of slow internet. But you can do all of those things right on your computer, which is really, really fun.
The other piece of the puzzle that I use for my locally development is something called WP Migrate DP Pro, and that is a premium extension as well as a premium plug-in that allows me to sync my databases between my live site and my development local site. And so how I use this is my local site I normally update all the plug-ins and update all the themes over locally, but I do all of my editing, when I post a new podcast episode, all that stuff goes lives first on YourWebsiteEngineer.Com, and then I eventually have to pull it down to sync it to my dev site. My dev site is normally a couple weeks out of date because I don’t do this regularly, but basically what it does is it pulls all of the information, all of the plug-ins, all of the settings from my life site, all of the comments, all of the posts, all of the pages, anything that I’ve updated, it just pulls it down and makes it a clone on my local environment, which is really, really cool. It saves me tons of time if I know in the past that I’ve done some local development, I have made some changes, I have done a lot of things locally on my computer, and then just pushed them all to the cloud and pushed them the opposite way. So I’ve pushed them from local up to YourWebsiteEngineer.Com, which is another kind of sweet way to do that as well. So WP Migrate DB Pro is a must-have plug-in that’s in my toolbox that I just absolutely love.
Another one that you could purchase, this one you can actually run free for quite a while without actually having to pay, but a good text editor, something like Sublime Text is what I use. I really like Sublime Text 2. There is a new one out there called Atom. That one works really well as well. So there is a few different tools that you can use if you want to get more into the coding or the programming type things. You want to make sure that you have a really robust code editor just so that it makes it easier for you when you’re doing things. I know I really like Sublime Text because if I’m working on a theme, I just open the entire theme inside of Sublime Text, and I’m able to look at all of the files, and I can search for snippets of text or things that I need to change, and I can do a global search over all of the files that I have open instead of having to open one file at a time and do a search and things like that. So that’s something else that I really, really like.
Another plug-in or another – this is kind of a third-party thing that’s not really necessary, but I use it a lot, and I really like it. It’s called Code Kit, and it is a platform that basically it will generate CSS code from writing SASS code. It can do a lot of things. That’s about all that I use it for. So essentially now when I write my CSS, I write it in SASS and then when I click a button, it compiles all of these different stylesheets into one minified stylesheet that has no text and no spacing or no empty space, so it really compacts it and makes it much more quickly to be able to download and to be used on your website. So Code Kit is something that runs about $25.00 approximately, and it’s just something if you need a geeky tool, that’s definitely something to look at.
Another plug-in that I use and absolutely love is called Opt-In Monster, and that’s how the pop-ups are working on YourWebsiteEngineer.Com. That’s how the pop-up boxes, I’ve had them slide up from the bottom, they can come down from the top, they can pop up when somebody’s about to leave a page. There’s a lot of really cool things that you can do with Opt-In Monster, and it integrates with dozens and dozens of email providers, and if your email provider isn’t listed, then you can just copy and paste just the form code, and it will absolutely work with that. So that’s another thing that you could think of about investing on your WordPress site.
The next thing that you can do is you could invest in Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms is a plug-in, and this is another must-have. I don’t even look at the price that the developer pack costs when it comes time to renewal. I just go ahead and renew it, because I know that it is a plug-in that I don’t want to have to reconfigure on all of my sites, and it just makes it so easy to create a form on a website. So Gravity Forms does that. It has a lot of cool integrations where you can integrate it with your email subscription service, so if you want to have a contact form and then a checkbox at the bottom that says, “Please add me to your mailing list.” That could be done as well, l which is really cool. Gravity Forms is by far one of the favorite plug-ins by a lot of WordPress developers, and it’s a pretty low barrier to entry cost, $35.00 per website for the first website, and then it just goes up from there depending on if you get, how many site licenses you need.
Another thing that you could purchase for yourself is a new theme. I did this last year. I purchased a new theme about September-ish, and it was an HTML theme. I ended up I bought an HTML theme because I wanted to make it into a WordPress theme, because I didn’t want all the extra fluff that come with some WordPress themes. But if you’ve been thinking about, hey, it’s time for me to do a new site, what you could do is you could purchase a new theme, you could purchase Desktop Server, and you could install this new theme on your local site. You could do a lot of configuring, getting it all set up, and then you can move that theme and push it right over to your live site and just have a brand-new site in 2016. So that’s another thing. The price range is there, range from zero - you can find a lot of really nice free themes on the WordPress repository – and then they go up from there. The general is about $50.00 to $100.00 for a new theme, and then you’ll spend a few hours customizing that, configuring it, making it look exactly like you’d like it to.
And the last thing that you could purchase for yourself is a subscription to a code school. There are lots of places out there. There’s places like Treehouse, there’s Codecademy, there’s Linda.Com. There’s one called WPSessions, and that’s all – WPSessions is a lot of WordPress information. That’ snot necessarily code-based, but Treehouse has some really good courses if you want to learn JavaScript, if you want to learn PhP, if you want to try to figure out how this whole GIT thing works, how to use a terminal better. All of these different things. This is a perfect place to go and focus on learning a new skill, learning it well, and then being able to use that as you continue down your WordPress career in whatever that may look like. I know that I always have things I want to learn. I want to be better at the terminal, I want to be better with GIT, and I want to be better with PhP and MySQL and how to get informant in and out of a database and how to use SVN to get my plug-in to the WordPress repository. And there are always so many things to learn. I think what I need to do is just kind of head-down focus. Okay, January is going to be a month that I’m going to learn X, and whatever X is, I just 100 percent focus on that, don’t care about anything else, and just go ahead and focus on that.
And speaking of goals like that, that’s what we’re going to talk about on next week’s episode. We’ll talk about some of the goals that we need to be thinking about for 2016 and what we want to do with our websites, what we want to do to kind of improve our businesses and all of those things that come with that. So we’ll talk about that next week in next week’s show, number 265.
Lastly, I just want to say thank you. Thank you so much for listening, thank you for just the support over the last month, over the last 12 months, the last five years, and I know that there have been a lot of people that have used links over on my resources page. It’s purchase things which give me a small affiliative commission back, and I just really appreciate that. I really appreciate you trusting my judgement in the things that I feel that are valuable, the tools that I feel are really good for people that are in the WordPress space, and just thank you so much. I wish that everyone has a super Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and all of the other holidays that are coming up in the next few days. Just thank you so much for tuning in to this week’s episode. We’re going to get the outro music going, and then we’ll get out of here. So like I said, thank you so much. If you do have a little bit of money, extra money after the holidays, or even in January, think about investing in yourself. Invest in your tools, invest in a plug-in that’s going to make your life easier. Just think about if you bought Gravity Forms, you could save hours every time that you wanted to create a new form. What’s your time worth, and is it worth it to pay a little bit for a premium plug-in?
That’s all I really wanted to share with you. Again, take some time to spend with your families this holiday, and have a Merry Christmas. Take care. Bye-bye.