EP:014 – The Cotton Club Podcast
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This evening I recorded another episode of The Cotton Club Podcast with Keith Crawford, Steven Trotter, and Mitch Canter. It was awesome to have Mitch on the show w/ us this evening because he is an authority on all things wordpress in my opinion. Keith and I first met Mitch at Wordcamp Fayetteville earlier this year and have followed his streams on Twitter and Facebook since then.
The topic for this evenings show was the GPL debate going on between Thesis and Wordpress or Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenwig, however you want to look at it. We covered how the whole controversy got started and what in the world it’s all about. There have been tons of spirited debates recently on this topic so I thought it was appropriate we address it here on the show. Also, we had Mitch give us a run down of his favorite Wordpress Plugins and then we played a speed round of which plugin to use w/ Mitch. Some of the plugins Mitch covered included: Gravity Forms, Kieran’s Calendar, PowerPress, Sexy Bookmarks, and WP-Touch.
Also, as usual we discussed our favorite iPhone apps of the week. Some of the apps discussed in this episode included: DISQUS, Get Glue, iTweetReply, Boxcar, and LED Flashlight Ultimate.
EP:012 – The Cotton Club Podcast
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Well I think we figured out in this episode of The Cotton Club Podcast exactly how important a reliable internet connection is to producing a show like this. My guests Keith Crawford, Brant Collins, Robert Blake, Craig McCoy, Arlton Lowry, and Steven Trotter were all gracious despite the fact we were disconnected 4 times thanks to my connection dropping out. I promise to work on this and get it all squared away in the very near future so please bear with us through this episode, I did my best editing work to splice together all of the audio, hopefully you won’t be able to tell but I bet you do…
Even though we had some tough connection issues we still managed to cover some pretty cool topics in this episode including the release of the new iPhone and the IOS4.0 operating system. We also touched on the rollout of Wordpress 3.0. Another discussion was carried over from my recent blog post on social media taboo where we each weighed in with our thoughts. If you run a business and want to leverage social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Gowalla, or Foursquare in your marketing you should definitely give this episode a listen. Our guests Arlton Lowry and Steven Trotter also discussed the co-working trends that have started up in Jonesboro and Conway and as usual we wrapped up the show discussing our favorite iPhone apps. Again, please forgive our sloppiness in this episode, we are working to get everything resolved with our connection so we are up and running again soon without interruptions.
Excluding Category from Feed (WP)
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I know that there are probably some plugins out there that will accomplish this same exact thing but if you are looking for a way to exclude a category on the fly with a wordpress website, this method will work. Just locate the category ID# and append it to your feed in Feedburner like so…
Why would this be useful? Let’s say you have a newspaper website that runs Obituaries as a category and you have the RSS Feed plugged into another site that wants to share everything but obituaries, this will do the trick.
Premium Wordpress Hosting
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I have been thinking a lot lately about our hosting business at Pleth. We never have really fit into our industry very well because our philosophy is completely different than 90% of the hosting companies in business today. Most web hosting companies offer low-cost hosting plans with very few bells and whistles so they can keep their costs down and undercut their competitors prices. Services like DNS Management, Website & Database Backups, Storage, and bandwidth are often sold separately as add-on items because they have little or no profit margin in their hosting rates.
My partners and I have never wanted to take our hosting business in that direction, primarily because the market is saturated already with companies trying to do exactly that. Another reason we haven’t went that route is because it’s just not our style. We see ourselves as niche hosting providers with a unique perspective in that we are also developers. We cater to a large population of clients that could care less about web hosting, they just know they need it for their website to stay online, and they will pay extra to have someone else worry with all of the technical issues surrounding it.
Our business philosophy when it comes to our hosting business has always been to add value to our infrastructure as opposed to looking for ways to cut corners and reduce overhead. Since we started we have established our NOC (network operating center) in Dallas, as well as an alternate location in Houston. We have also put a lot of thought into things like Bandwidth, Storage, Virtualization, and Automation. We also have system monitoring in place as well as automated backups that will allow us to quickly restore any of our clients data that might have become lost or corrupt. In addition to our robust backup system, we also have the industry’s leading control panel software, Plesk, running on our shared servers for our managed hosting clients. Our server admin, Matt Critcher, has also devoted countless hours configuring our security solution, mod_security, to fight off security threats.
Before I go any further, I should probably say that we have done quite well with our hosting business. I would venture to say that we have several hundred hosted domains running at any given time and our business continues to grow leaps and bounds despite the fact that we haven’t ever spent one penny on advertising campaigns, etc. Our entire business has grown via word of mouth. I have often wondered what our business would be like now had we promoted ourselves, but I honestly don’t see how we could bring on many more projects than we are handling currently.
The past few days I started thinking back to this past weekend’s Wordcamp Fayetteville where I met a lot of people who work with wordpress on a daily basis, and that utilize a lot of premium solutions, such as premium themes and plugins. Something I noticed at the conference was that the vast majority of people there were developers and bloggers who have their website(s) hosted by a third party provider. This got me to thinking about premium wordpress hosting. Granted, not everyone would be interested in paying for hosting their blog when they can get it for free or next to it from a handful of providers in the industry, but here’s what I keep coming back to. The days of the Mommy Blogger sharing recipes and baby photos are behind us, I know several women right now who are actually bringing in a substantial income from their blogs, the same goes for men too. My thoughts are that if someone has a blog that is bringing them $10,000 monthly in revenue, then they probably have already given some thought as to what they would do if the server their website is hosted on crashed. I think this is the target market for this premium offering.
In my mind, premium wordpress hosting not only consists of web storage for your database and files, but it also includes disaster recovery / backup solutions built in w/out having to purchase add-ons. Premium Wordpress hosting also includes a secure environment made possible via our ever changing security protocols and configuration. One thing that I also feel is very important is redundancy and failover connectivity, for example, our network has 19+ backbone providers.
Last night I started mocking up a child theme for Genesis / Studiopress that would be a clean, simple, and very user friendly landing page of sorts to promote this premium offering. I decided to use the enterprise child theme as my starting point for the project and somehow in between catching up on client emails and answering the telephone, I have managed to get the vast majority of the design & layout coded. Below you will find a screenshot of the home page.
My initial plan was to just add a page to our existing corporate website, which runs a different CMS than Wordpress so after talking w/ a few people I had discussed this with earlier, I decided to create a small simple landing page site w/ details about this premium solution. As of right now, I have no idea as to when this site will come online, it’s going to be a very basic site w/ only a few pages outlining our service offering but it’s likely going to take me several weeks to put together all of the content together given my current workload so stay tuned to this blog for more info on this project…
If you are interested in Premium Wordpress Hosting, don’t hesitate to drop us a line…
#WCFAY High Points
This past weekend Keith Crawford and I headed to Fayetteville w/ our wives to attend Wordcamp Fayetteville. We were also meeting several friends from Central Arkansas at the conference like Brent Passmore, Daniel Spillers, Aaron Baker, Tonya Smith, Shelley Keith, and a few others (I probably left someone out, sorry).
When we got into town Friday night we went to the informal tweetup and met Christopher Spencer, Tammy Hart, Nash Vegas aka Mitch Canter, and Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner.com. We had an awesome time at the Friday night tweetup and met a lot of cool NW Arkansas people. I finally got to meet Colin Condray of Blue Zoo as well, he and I have communicated back and forth for a long time via social media and it was nice to finally put a face w/ the name.
Saturday morning Keith and I showed up early for the Wordcamp and met up w/ one of my team members, Marcus Creasy, who was in town to checkout the blogger track for wordpress at the conference but we talked him into hanging w/ us and doing the developer track, which was a little more technical than the blogger track. The first session we attended was Mitch Canter, I have posted the video from this session for those that might have missed it, Mitch spoke about how you can take Wordpress and do anything you want with it through the use of plugins. Some of the things he touched on that I found particularly interesting was e-commerce and podcasting. Two things that we get requests for all of the time. Mitch also talked about Flutter, which is an alternative to Podscms that doesn’t involve creating new tables in your database. At the end of the session Mitch also went through his list of tools / plugins that he likes to use on most of his wordpress projects. I mentioned to him after the session that I thought our toolboxes were almost identical, out of however many hundreds of thousands of plugins are out there for wordpress, that’s pretty ironic.
Another session that Keith and I really enjoyed was a small presentation by Tammy Hart on how to sell Wordpress. There was a lot of good feedback in this session from various people in the crowd. Daniel Spillers brought up an interesting question that pertained as to how you can legally sell wordpress based on the terms of use. I found that discussion to be pretty interesting as well as the way that Tammy works with her clients. There was a lot of dialogue in this session as well.
Probably the most mind boggling session of the day was Michael Van Winkle’s on PODSCMS. I knew a little about PODSCMS from having installed it and played with it on my sandbox a few times, and a while back Nick Brewer did a presentation at Central Arkansas Refresh on PODS and I have been quite impressed. Michael’s presentation was one of the few that was primarily all developers / coders so he was able to get pretty detailed w/ his info and I have to say, several times Keith and I looked at each other and shook our heads. Deep Info! I left the presentation pretty inspired to spend more time in PODS on my sandbox to test it’s boundaries. Michael’s presentation is on slideshare here…
In closing I would like to mention that at #WCFAY I finally saw a practical application for Google Wave that extended the software further than making lunch plans. Keith had the idea to live blog the sessions so I joined in. Before we knew it, we had about 10 or so other people join in on the conversation w/ us via Wave. I have to admit, it was pretty cool. You can see the embedded wave here…
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention some new friends from Springfield, MO that decided to give me a new nickname this weekend. 
So hello to @sugarcube and @jenny8675309!
#WCFAY Mitch Canter – WP3
Mitch also did a session this weekend on Wordpress 3.0 because there was a lot of buzz about 3 since the release candidate 1 was just pushed out the door the prior week. In this session Mitch touches on some of the high points that are coming w/ version 3.0.
There’s some really good information in this presentation but my recommendation for getting acquainted w/ 3.0 is to just install it on your own sandbox server and test it for yourself. There are some pretty cool additions in this release.
#WCFAY Mitch Canter – Plugins
This is the video of Mitch Canter’s session on making Wordpress do everything. In this session he touched on running e-commerce through Wordpress as well as podcasting. He also mentions some very nice plugins that he uses on just about every project, ironically we have almost identical toolboxes when it comes to staple plugins.
I had the opportunity to visit w/ Mitch a few times during the conference and he is a very sharp guy, I am looking forward to staying in touch w/ him and following his posts. If you ever have an opportunity to attend a Wordcamp that Mitch is speaking at, i highly recommend it, he covers a lot!!!
As a sidenote, I will likely be posting videos from the conference off and on this week when I have free moments.
Your Thoughts on Wordpress?
I pretty much develop all of my clients websites these days using wordpress as the backend content management system unless there are some really far out project requirements that I don’t see wordpress as a good fit for. Honestly I don’t hear many project requirements these days that won’t work inside of wordpress, especially given the number of plugins that are available.
In fact, did you know that you can now deploy a plugin that will more or less turn your wordpress installation into an auction website like eBay? I was just testing a plugin for a friend a few days ago that does exactly that, and it’s pretty robust too!
This past week I have been working on a project involving wordpress 3.0 and the studiopress genesis theme framework and I have been amazed at just how much more control the end user, or client, is going to have once this version is released. Granted, there is a slight learning curve for developers when it comes to learning everything that is new w/ 3.0, not to mention how genesis from studiopress operates, but once we all get it, lookout!
For instance, I was wrestling today with a header issue on a client project and ran across Nathan Rice’s Genesis Simple Hooks Plugin, compliments of Brent Passmore, this plugin alone extends wordpress further than it’s ever been pushed by allowing the end user, or client, to input content – both shortcodes and php code, into one of the many hooks located on a websites theme. All of this from inside the user-friendly dashboard of Wordpress. Incredible. There is also the PODS CMS plugin for handling different content types and extending the wordpress custom fields option. Is there really anything you can’t push wordpress to do these days?
I know that I have a lot of developers that read my blog so I thought I would invite everyone in for a discussion on this topic, here are a few starting points:
- Do you currently use wordpress exclusively for projects?
- What are your thoughts on wordpress vs the other open source solutions?
- What content management solutions do you offer your clients?
- How much of a factor is wordpress’ name recognition becoming?
- What are some of your favorite wordpress plugins / themes?
- What are some of your likes / dislikes about wordpress?
EP:010 – The Cotton Club Podcast
In this episode of The Cotton Club my guests Keith Crawford and Christopher Spencer discuss the upcoming Wordcamp Fayetteville scheduled for May 29th in Northwest Arkansas. Since this is the first Wordcamp to be held in Arkansas it’s kind of a big deal for those of us who use Wordpress daily and build client solutions with it on a daily basis.
If you are interested in attending Wordcamp Fayetteville you can register online via Eventbrite. Better jump on it soon though because there aren’t a lot of open slots available and the prices are going to increase from $40 to $50 in a few days. Also, if you are planning on attending, be sure to leave me a comment here or send me a tweet so we can hookup during the conference.
In this episode we also discuss the beta release of Wordpress 3.0 and the Genesis Framework from Studiopress.
Genesis Framework 101
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I have been working on a project involving the beta release of Wordpress 3.0 and the Studiopress Genesis Theme Framework this week and I have to say the more I use this combination I can see how things are fixing to change in the CMS world. For the better too I might add.
The Wordpress 3 release is still in beta but some of the new things it’s going to bring to the table are phenomenal and well thought out. I don’t recommend running 3.0 beta on any production sites yet but I do recommend putting it on a sandbox and getting familiar with it from a developers perspective.
On the theme / design side of things, Brian Gardner and the Studiopress team always turn out awesome products. Their Genesis framework is no exception. Everyone that knows me well knows that I am a huge fan of their themes and use them for starters on a lot of projects so I have been getting a lot of questions in passing about Genesis so I figured a blog post was in order. There will be additional posts to follow but this one will touch on some of the basics.
There are a couple of things you should know about how Genesis works with child themes and of course the parent theme, Genesis. however before you dive into it. Here are some basics that I pulled from the Studiopress website to get you started…
What is a Child Theme?
A child theme is an extension of a theme framework which is comprised of typical theme elements – with Genesis, it includes a screenshot, theme files, a stylesheet, a functions file and an images folder. These elements are grouped together in what’s known as a child theme folder and can be activated like any other WordPress theme. To help explain the relationship of a child theme and the parent Genesis theme framework, I’ll go into detail with each one.A Screenshot
All WordPress themes have a screenshoot image included – typically this is called “screenshot.png”, is 600 x 450 in dimension and is a visual display of the theme, which can be seen on the Appearance > Themes page inside your WordPress dashboard. Since child themes have their own folders and are activated like any other theme, they require a screenshot like a standard theme.Theme Files
The Genesis theme framework, which in essence is the parent theme, is where all of the theme files are kept. This would include the typical theme files such as 404.php, comments.php, footer.php, header.php, index.php, page.php, single.php and so on. Child themes can also include these files – and the hierarchy works in a way that if any of those files exist in the child theme folder, they will override the parent theme. In other words, if you customize a footer.php file and place it into your child theme folder, that will be used in lieu of the one in the Genesis parent theme. Currently the only theme files that may be found in some of the Genesis child themes are a custom home.php file, which will control the way a site’s homepage will appear. If one is not a part of a child theme, then the theme will use the index.php file, in the Genesis-parent theme, for the homepage.A Stylesheet
Many theme frameworks are built in a way that imports the parent theme stylesheet, then allows for customizations to be made by way of the child theme stylesheet. While there is nothing wrong with the way that works, we’ve chosen to simplify things and just give the child theme it’s own stylesheet. In other words, if a child theme is being used, the style.css file in the child theme folder has complete control over the way the child theme looks. You don’t have to compare and sift through multiple stylesheets to look for and change style elements.A Functions File
Most WordPress themes have a functions.php file – which is typically a file where you can control certain behaviors of how WordPress is run or how the theme outputs various things. For instance, a functions file can register sidebar widgets and how they are styled, as well as a number of other “function” related things. With Genesis, the functions.php is simple – it calls the entire theme framework to run and that is the only code found there. The great thing about the way Genesis is built, is that the child theme’s functions file is where a number of things occur – additional sidebar widgets can be registered, and from a development side, custom functions are defined as well as filtered and hooked. (more on that in upcoming posts.)An Images Folder
This one is pretty self-explanatory – as with any WordPress theme, there is an images folder which is used to hold any images that a theme requires. Use this to hold background images, icons, navbar gradients, and what not.
If you are currently running MU or Wordpress Buddypress, I recommend checking out Studiopress for your themes because they have some great themes and also some links to the child theme for buddypress that are very nice. Stay tuned as I post some more notes about what’s happening w/ Wordpress 3.0 as well as our Genesis project we are helping deploy for a client.
