Get dressed. A lot of people have asked me about how fun it must be to work in your pajamas. I don’t. Getting dressed, means I’m up and ready to work. If I’m working in my pajamas, it’s a Sunday, something has gone wrong and I’m not happy about it.

It’s OK to do laundry. Simple home tasks like this are OK, you can still work while the machine is running and changing loads is a stretch break. What you want to watch out for is getting distracted by all the possible chores – you’re not in home mode, you’re working.

Eat healthy – you’re home, make a nice sandwich, appreciate how much money you’re saving and do take regular breaks.

Most people have a commute to take them from home mode to work mode, now you don’t have this commute. But use the time it takes to get dressed and get your coffee cup on your desk to make that mental transition and then focus. Use the extra time you get from not having to commute, for self care and extra sleep.

It was the day I worked remotely during a snowstorm 12 years ago and saw that I got more work done at home without all the water cooler distractions, that I realized I could make this work for me.

Posts vs. Pages

Pages: for most part, pages are for “static” content like Home, About, etc. Pages generally do not have dates, comments or categories attached to them. They stand alone. When there is a lot of information to present, I personally like to create custom templates that can display category links in a variety of ways.

Posts: originally designed for the “blog”, posts are meant to be grouped. By default this grouping is by date – the most recent shows up first.  They usually have comments and dates and can be assigned Categories, Tags and custom Taxonomies. It’s the grouping of things that can make your site a powerhouse of easy to find information.

Categories

Categories are your table of contents. The main, broad subject matter that your site is about. They should be pre-defined as part of your planning. Categories are a group of terms that can be hierarchical with parent and children terms. They can be added to menus or sidebars. They can be specifically queried on template pages (i.e. “I want to see the latest four posts on this topic”.) Categories do create their own URL’s – site.com/category/term.

Let’s say we’re creating a cooking site; there are lot’s of ways to organize this, but one way could be by meal type:

Tags

Tags are  your index – a group of terms that are NOT hierarchical. They are meant to be more free-form and more specific. Like categories, they can also be used in menus, sidebars or queries.

Custom Taxonomies

The categories and tags built in to WordPress core are taxonomies. Creating a custom taxonomy based on your subject matter is just a way to extend that. Custom taxonomies follow all the same rules as categories and they are usually built for a site in a plugin or for a specific theme in the functions file. Allowing for custom taxonomies is a powerful way to cross-categorize content. DO be aware of using “reserved terms“! You cannot, for example, create a taxonomy called “year”.

Terms

The words you assign to a category, tag or taxonomy are ‘terms’. There are two ways to create a new term:

• In a post, on the fly
• Or, in the Categories menu

Personally I always advocate the second choice. Adding things on the “fly” in a post leads to duplicates/similar terms confusion. (For both you and your readers.) If I have half of my recipes under ‘dinner’ and the other under ‘supper’, they both lose value and your audience may miss part of what they’re looking for. When you force yourself to add things in the list, you see what is already there.

Where we get into trouble

Similar terms: I’m shopping for a new sofa, but your site has things in ‘couch’, ‘sofa’ and ‘davenport’. Some items are in one, other in another – I’ll never see ALL of the couches!

Same term at different levels: This is not illegal and will work. But how confusing is it to see ‘couch’ under ‘living-room’ and then again under ‘bedroom’?

Inconsistent terms: If I’m writing about cars and I categorize under ‘Chevrolet’ and my co-author categorizes under ‘chevy’, now all I have is a confusing mess for my readers. Planning and editing rules ahead of time can save you here.

Too many categories: Remember “broad subject matter”? Keep it simple.

Just typing: Always a good idea to see the existing list first.

Tagging overkill: If posts have tags that no other post is using – think again. If our goal is to group things, then single tags serve little purpose. If the word is in the title or category, there is zero point in tagging with the same term. Basic search will still find it. It is possible to have the same term in Category and Tag, but so confusing!

The whole point of this exercise is to make it easy for your audience to find what they’re looking for. Inconsistent and similar terms dilute the group and are confusing.

Plan Ahead

Define terms as much as possible ahead of time. If there are multiple editors, discuss this with them and train them on how to do things properly. Cleanup later is a lot harder than planning ahead.

Displaying Categories, Tags & Taxonomies

This is the fun part (well for me anyway.) Simple displays include widgets with a category list and categories are usually listed in a single post, but as mentioned earlier, I’m a fan of landing pages that are full of category links. Let’s break this template down: (you can see the real page here.)

The first column is “show me the latest 4 posts in Mammals”. The second column is “show me the Featured articles in Mammals”.  The third is show me different “types of content” in this category. The middle section is show me all the child terms of Mammals. The end section is show me all the Clinical Topics for this group. This site is all about helping Veterinarians find info on “exotic” pet animals. If a Dr. has a bunny in her office and needs to anesthetize it, does she look under Rabbit, or Anesthesiology? Doesn’t really matter, either way the article on this will show up and she can then filter those results to get a more specific set of posts. Except for the first 2 columns, there are no single post links here, just links that will take me to a list. This site has over a thousand articles, but that doesn’t matter either, once they are properly categorized, they will show up in these lists. This site was planned for growth.

Tags also have a standard widget, show up in the single post and there are dozens of plugins that let you show tag-clouds or some other creative way to show them. In my recipe example, I used broad categories for meal type and then tagged with ingredients.

Precautions

Stay on top of things as the site grows, always keep simplicity in mind. Using multiple languages? Definitely add terms in the list, not the post; your French term could end up in the English list which makes it useless. Don’t forget to read the Reserved Terms doc in the codex when creating custom taxonomies.

Further References

• https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies
• http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/categories-vs-tags-seo-best-practices-which-one-is-better/
• https://www.wpsitecare.com/wordpress-categories-vs-tags/
• https://make.wordpress.org/training/handbook/user-lessons/categories-vs-tags/
• https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/basics/categories-tags-custom-taxonomies/
• https://yoast.com/seo-website-menu/

Items needed: Restrict Content Pro professional license. This includes the Group add-on and several others. You’ll also need a site with an SSL certificate enabled and a an account with a payment processor – like Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, etc. – that you can use with Restrict Content Pro, if you’re wanting paid subscriptions.

Setting up a group account is all about establishing the Group owner. Only the Group owner will get the renewal emails etc. When their subscription expires, every one in their group will be affected. Once their account is set-up and paid for, then they have the ability to add their own members through a front end form or with a CSV upload. Owners can set additional members as Admins to manage the group membership list. Members can also be added via the Dashboard, but this front end option takes a lot of work off the plate of the site owner!

Install Restrict and the Group add-on.

Restrict>Subscription levels

Set up the membership levels you want, add pricing, term limits etc. Set up the real ones you want and then it’s a good idea to add a test single subscription and test group subscription for a $1, so you can test things first. When setting up levels, you can make it a Group account by checking the Allow Group Account box at the bottom, this will then allow you to set how many seats will be allowed for this subscription.

Set up the registration forms on a page. There is a basic shortcode ([register_form]) that will show all of the levels that you have created, but you can also set up an individual page for each subscription type based on the ID ([register_form id=”1″]). In this use case that was necessary. The client had one ‘unlimited’ option, that he wanted to negotiate pricing on a case by case basis. Payment for this one does not go through the site and I didn’t want a form for that! When a new unlimited group is sold, the membership is setup manually.

If someone purchases a group membership via the site, they become the group owner by default and only their login will allow adding and changing their membership, unless they setup additional admins. Any members that they add show up under Restrict>Groups>Specific Group>Members and also show up in the Users table as free.

Adding subscribers manually:

For my client’s custom groups, or if you’re importing members from another site, adding them manually is needed, but it’s important to do things in the right order!

Single subscriber:

1. Create the User first.
2. Once saved, in the list view of Users, there’s a link to Add Subscription.
3. At the Edit Member screen, change their status to Active, pick the right Subscription Level and add an expiration date if needed. Don’t forget to Update!

Group subscriber:

1. Follow the first 3 steps above. This User will be the Group owner. When choosing their subscription, be sure it’s a level that allows groups.
2. Restrict>Groups, Create a Group, make this user the owner.
3. Now you can add members manually or via CSV upload in the dashboard, or the Group owner can do it themselves on the site. (I created a page called Group Management with 2 shortcodes: ([login_form] [rcp_group_dashboard]). They need to login to gain access to the group management. All members in a group can have the same password if wanted.

Caveats when adding manually:

By default, adding new members creates the standard WordPress user notification and admin notification emails. In this case I was adding close to 900 people and didn’t want or need them to get these notifications. If you want to turn this off, you will need to write a small plugin to disable that function. (www.itsupportguides.com/knowledge-base/wordpress/wordpress-how-to-disable-new-user-notification-emails) and no, this won’t work in your functions file, has to be in a plugin. In addition to the system emails, RCP also has a way to Invite members to your group, which generates more emails. In this use case, I didn’t want that either, so in Restrict>Settings>Emails, I have the Group Invite email disabled.

It’s a fair amount of work to get all this working and tested, but now my client can now pass off a lot of the work he used to do to maintain his list to the group owners and the group owners have full control of their membership. A win-win!

Further Reference:

docs.restrictcontentpro.com/category/1525-group-accounts

docs.restrictcontentpro.com/article/1765-authorize-net Read this if you’re using Authorize.net!

Oh, and many thanks to John Parris, the support lead for RCP, his help is invaluable.

But what about retail sites where you don’t want to force a login? That gets more difficult. The use case here is a retail site that sells online to the general public, but ONLY in North America. This client is expanding his product through other distributors in Europe and wants retail clients there to read about the products, but not be able to buy directly. The challenge here was to find a way to keep the store fully functional in the US and Canada, but to turn off prices and the buy buttons everywhere else.

By adding a geolocation plugin and a couple of new functions, I was able to make this work very nicely.

1. Install the GeoIP Detection plugin. This plugin does have to be connected to an GeoIP database, I kept mine simple and went with the Maxmind default. I also had caching and a reverse proxy setup, so I checked both of those boxes as well.

 

2. Write the functions. This was the “fun” part. I was inspired by an article by Josh Pollack, that really got me started in the right direction. The rest of the function is basically disabling all the price and button hooks found in the Woocommerce templates and replacing them. This code could be it’s own plugin, but I placed it in my themes’ functions.php file.
   
3. Test, test, test. I highly recommend implementing this on a staging site first, you never want your store to disappear on a live site. The best way to find out if it’s working is to comment out the line with the country code that you’re in and see if the pricing disappears. For final testing, I found a site where I could fake my IP for another country and see what happened. I also did some real user testing and asked friends I had in Canada and France to take a look for me. When my friend in Canada could see the buy now buttons and my friend in France could not, I was confident that I could now implement this on the live site. Once I did, I had my friends user test for me again!

Event Categories

You can also add categories to your menu, this is a great article for that.

Why do we work in WordPress?

• Easier for developers?
  • (sure, there’s a plugin for that)
• Easier for designers?
  • (not really, unless they understand the structure)

I don’t know about you, but I started building sites in WordPress because the end client wants editing control! Sure, a lot of clients say they want control and then don’t ever change anything, but let’s make it as easy for them and ourselves as possible.

Theme development is really about creating 2 sites in WordPress. The front end for the visitor, the dashboard for the owner/editor.

Ever done this?

Yep, I’m guilty too. It’s so easy to just setup a complex layout in HTML inside the editor. Until of course your editor tries to update something in the visual editor and BREAKS it.

ACF Plugin

Advanced Custom Fields – Pro version

ACF is a very powerful plugin for developers and it’s very nice for content editors. With defined fields placed in a template, your editor doesn’t even have to think about how to get the picture to go over there, or where to put the email address, you control the layout with the template. The editor is then free to change and add without fear of breaking anything.

• Add fields just for images or with a wysiwyg editor, plus many more options
• Specify what page, template or post type the field shows up on
• Pro version includes a Repeater, Flexible Content and Gallery options

Create Fields First

Need several fields for just one page or category of post? That’s a group.

Fields

Add the fields you need within a group. Think about how your editor is going to use them. Do they need a full WYSIWYG editor, or will a simple text field do? Do they need to link to another page or create a mailto: link with an email address? Make the content easy to edit while locking down the styles and functionality as much as possible.

Repeater

Repeater fields have sub-fields. Groups of things that can be um, repeated. Like a service section that needs a headline, image and text or a slideshow.

Create the Template 2nd

Once you have a pretty good idea of what fields you need for a certain page, create a new template page in your theme. Then place the divs and fields where you want and style them. ACF has excellent documentation on how to call different kinds of fields.

When the editor wants to change or add, this is what he sees.

Now he can change where something links, update the graphics etc. in a clear and straight forward way. The styling has all been pre-determined so there’s no fear of this layout not looking great. Here’s the real site.

I’m a big proponent of small business site owners knowing how to keep their own sites current. I like to get the theme setup and working with some content and then let the owner take over with adding the rest of the content during development. Yes, this involves time and training, but I find the end confidence and satisfaction of the client to be well worth it. You don’t hand over a car to someone who doesn’t know how to drive. By using custom fields to control the content you can have interesting layouts without sacrificing simplicity of editing for your clients.

Then he directed my attention to a completely different site that was not his. “I want my site to look just like this one.” Oh. Now we’re not talking about a few minor changes, now we’re talking about a whole re-design. This is basically building a new site. Except for having most of the content already written (and really that probably needs some work as well), everything will have to be done from scratch. I can charge hourly for this, but most small business people like to have a clue on cost before starting such a project.

This was my understanding at the end of the conversation:

– He was going to send me the login information to his current site so I could get to the files and make the simple address changes right away.

– He was also going to look at all the content on the current site and decide what was going to go on what pages for the new site and if changes or new images were needed.

Once I had this information, I would be able to send him an estimated cost and a contract. While I have no problem just billing for a few hours of maintenance, for a complete project, I need to have a signed contract and a spelled out payment plan. It is typical to ask for 1/3 up front, a 1/3 after the design has been approved and the final payment once the working site has been approved, but before it gets launched.

Close to a week went by and I hadn’t heard from him, so I sent him a friendly follow-up email asking him about getting the login information so I could correct the current site. The reply I got back is “is the new template ready yet?”

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

My bad, I should have followed up the conversation with an email spelling out my understanding and the action points that we both needed to take.

The cost of designing and building a site is often one of the first questions I get and probably one of the hardest to answer. This is not an evasion. If you went into a Home Depot and asked how much a new kitchen was would you expect a direct answer? No, you know that you would have to pick out the appliances, cabinets, counter top materials, etc. before a price could be generated. So what do I need to be able to write you a quote? Some of that depends on what you need or want for your site, but some of it is pretty basic.

1. How many pages do you want?
2. Do you have the images you need or do you need stock photography or?
3. Do you have the written content ready or do you need a writer?
4. Do you need a contact form? (What happens when someone fills it out, does it go to you email or a database?)
5. Is there ecommerce needed?

As you might imagine, I’ve just gotten started. The discovery stage is a very important collaborative effort and one of the main reasons I encourage my clients to fill out my questionnaire. It may seem like a lot of work and it is, but without your contribution to the project there isn’t much I can do. This is exactly what I talk about in my SCORE Chicago web design presentation.

The good news is that every new client and project is a fascinating learning process and this faux pas on my part has at least given me good material for an article and a reminder to never assume anything. Now excuse me while I go reply to that email with some detail about what I need to get this project rolling.

Further References:

How much does a site really cost? This is a great article that outlines the step nicely.

See the presentation on WordPress.tv.

On the original site, the membership plugin used was pretty unwieldy, didn’t let excerpts show and we had a huge issue with spam registrations. The goals for the re-design was to still restrict content to logged in users; but allow excerpts to show to everyone, including search engines and make the registration/verification process easier.

I also needed a pretty complicated registration form, so I wanted to use Gravity Forms to build it. These are the steps I took to combine the ease of building a form with Gravity, registering new users for the site and connecting it to Restrict Content Pro membership.

• Site needs about 80% of its content restricted from non-registered users, but we still want the excerpts to show.
• Need users at several distinct levels –
  • Trial – full read access for a limited time
  • Member – full read access, unlimited time
  • Shopper – full read access, unlimited and see “buy now” buttons in Woo shopping cart.
• All users are free, there is no payment – the Gravity form will not work if payment is involved in initial registration
• All users start with a Trial 5 day subscription, but get moved to full member manually by the business office after they have been verified.
• Plugins needed:
  • RCP (developers license)
  • Gravity Forms (developers license)
  • Registration form add-on for Gravity
• For Shopping restrictions:
  • WooCommerce
  • WooCommerce Catalog Visibility Options (this works based on user role)

Setup Restrict Content Pro

• Restrict>Settings
  • General – Add license key
  • Messages – These are what show up when user is not logged in or registered, premium is all that’s needed. This text can be formatted with CSS classes if desired.
  • Sign-up form and Emails – become moot, this is what Gravity is taking over
• Restrict>Subscription Levels
  • Add a Trial subscription with a limited amount of days*
    • *Because we’re using Gravity to add the user, the date limit doesn’t work here. See Gravity User Registration notes.
  • Add a regular subscription, unlimited – both of these are Subscriber level
  • Added a 3^rd level for U.S. shoppers, role of customer (from WooCommerce)

Setup Gravity registration form – add RCP fields in the add-on section.

• Forms>new form
  • Create user registration form with desired fields
  • At the end of the form, add 3 hidden fields
• RCP Status, Default value ‘active’ (status of free works, but does not allow the users to actually see content once logged in!) *See addendum

• RCP subscription, default value ‘1’ (the Trial or first level you created)
• A simple date field. A function needs to be added to functions.php to add the time limit before it expires. http://gravitywiz.com/populate-dates-gravity-form-fields/

• Save form, make sure it’s active (green in list view) and add a Confirmation
• Under Notifications, make sure Admin notification is turned on as well; this is what will send you the form. You can add an additional thank you email here if you want.

• Forms>User Registration
  • Action is Create user, assign the form you just created
  • Assign the User settings
  • Add the User Meta, this is the 3 hidden fields you added.
  • This is where you can force user activation via email as well. This single check box saves the business office from having to weed through thousands of junk registrations. If the account wasn’t activated by a human with a real email address, then it doesn’t exist in the system and the form can be ignored.

Activate users procedure

• A user fills out the registration form and the office gets the form via the Admin notification.
• Until the user activates the account, they do not show up in the Users or Members list, making verifications easier for the business office and spam registrations a non-issue.
• Once the account shows up, the office goes through their verification procedure and either deletes the user account or upgrades them to full membership

Addendum
I originally wrote this article in 2015 and have had this active on my site all these years. Last year, RCP went through a major upgrade, they separated Memberships from Users and created a separate Customers table as well. I’m sure RCP had a good reason for all of this, but in my case the changes broke our trial system. Because RCP_status was deprecated as a function, new users coming in through the registration form were coming in as Trial Pending, not Active. This defeated the purpose, Trial users are not able to read restricted articles until their status in Active, something the ladies in the office have been scrambling to keep up with and change manually.

I did a lot of research on this and tried to come up with a function that would automagically update these new Trial members to Active as soon as they activated their account. I tried the solution presented in this article https://missionlab.dev/memberships/gravityforms-user-registration-restrict-content-pro/, but was unable to get the gform_user_registered function to work. When I get stuck like this, I turn to the folks at AlphaParticle for help. The solution turned out to be to ignore what GF was doing and go straight to the issue, Pending members need to always be changed to Active. This function says, find the membership, get their status, and if it’s Pending, change it to Active. This is written as a simple plugin file.

<?php /** * Plugin Name: RCP status fix 
* Description: Fix member import status, set to active 
* Author: Becky Davis 
* Version 1.0 
* Author URI: http://beckydavisdesign.com 
* fix changes in RCP 3+ - set status to active
*/ 
function bd_add_rcp_membership_status( $membership_id, $data ) { 
        $membership =rcp_get_membership( $membership_id); 
        $status= $membership->get_status();

	if('pending' == $status) {
		$membership->set_status('active');
	}

}
 
add_action( 'rcp_new_membership_added', 'bd_add_rcp_membership_status', 10, 2 );

Content Management

This is what WordPress is famous for and the idea of having a site that you can edit yourself is very appealing. It’s why I started developing in WordPress exclusively; my clients kept asking for this ability. But be honest with yourself – do you really want to write a new article every week/month? Or do you just need a few tweaks to a page or two a couple of times a year? If you’re starting from scratch, you may as well go with WordPress so that even these tweaks are easy, but is it worth re-building the whole site just for this ability? You may not like paying a developer to go in and make a few simple text changes, but if it’s only once or twice a year, it’s probably much cheaper to do that than to re-build.

Maintenance

If you already have a simple HTML site (does your URL end in .html?, then you do), it probably really is “set it and forget it.” Not so with a WordPress site. The price we pay for having such a nice content management system is that it’s software – software that needs updating on a regular basis. Think about how many times your phone apps have updated in the past year. Sometimes it’s for feature enhancement, but most of the time it’s for security. WordPress and all of it’s plugins are no different. To keep your site secure, regular updates are required. They are constantly improving how easy and well this works, but it will be some time before “set it and forget it” works in the WordPress world.

Conversion

If you have a site that works for you, but want it in WordPress, just because – there is no simple answer for this. We can’t move the house. The house has to be built from scratch (especially if you want it to look the same), and then you have to move all the furniture in. The cost for this is the same as if I was building something new, because that’s exactly what I’m doing, building something new.

If you’d like to start adding regular articles or events or if you need to update that home page every month or if you want to incorporate new functionality like shopping, then this kind of move may make very good sense. If you’re just tweaking a few things a couple of times a year, then it probably makes much more sense to stick with the system you have.