Let’s start this review with an honest admission.

While in the 90s I collected (and read, mostly) tech books like they were going out of style. These days I barely get my hands around a book, let alone consume it.

Frankly, I don’t have the time. I have three kids (two are twins) and a wife. I have a mortgage. I co-organize WordPress meetups, and head up a WordCamp committee. That’s not including the remaining bits of time i form together to approximate a “life”.

But what’s the point of this admission? To prove to you that I only have time to devote to reading books that meet a certain level of quality and useful content – not to mention only those that age well. And I am confident in saying that Professional WordPress Design And Development is one of those books.

Great for budding developers

It’s difficult to understand why this book wouldn’t be on any WordPress developer’s shelf. If you haven’t installed WordPress before, for instance, the first chapter guides you through it pretty well. There’s not much to the infamous “5 minute install” but the authors do provide great screenshots and cover some of the potential problems that could arise even in that seemingly easy procedure.

Soon after that, the book jumps into file structure and covering important points like the precious wp-config.php. What I appreciated is that they didn’t gloss over this — and if you’ve seen any documentation online (especially from some hosting companies) you know glossing over wp-config.php is commonplace. They actually took the time to review almost every line of code and why you would want turn certain settings on or off.

“It’s difficult to understand why this book wouldn’t be on any WordPress developer’s shelf.”

For beginning developers, it’s nice the book discusses WP_DEBUG. It’s embarrasing how long it took for me to learn about that after I started developing with WordPress.

And being a more seasoned developer, it’s great that they include reminders of WP_POST_REVISONS and SAVEQUERIES. Thanks to this book, I can quickly skim over a few pages when a particular wp-config setting slips my mind. That will be my method, at least until I can find better memory medication.

I love that the book covers local WordPress environments so early on in the book — as early as Chapter 3. Many developers today still use the old fashioned “edit-save-upload via FTP-check the site-repeat” as their core development process. Why anyone would want to do this is insane to me. I like that Professional WordPress addresses the “why” and then talks about how to configure your stack and WordPress for local development.

The quality here is equal to that of some of the best WordCamp talks given on the same subject.

My favorite parts

I’ll admit, I‘ve yet to read the whole book from cover to cover. But the beauty is you don’t have to. Like most well written technical books that cover a wide range of information, you can jump directly into the section that you need to know on the spot.

I do, however, have some favorite parts. One of them is Chapter 7 which deals with custom post types, custom taxonomies, and metadata. There is plenty of information about these topics on the web today, but I liked how the book made understanding the concept and the use of custom post types a breeze.

Professional WordPress even reminds you to flush the rewrite rules in WordPress when registering new custom post types, which some miss. Often the “have you flushed your rewrite rules” question in WordPress development is, I think, equal to the “did you turn it off and then turn it on” from the greater IT support world.

Brad Williams, David Damstra, and Hal Stern collaborated on Professional WordPress Design and Development.

I also liked Chapter 8, which focused on plugin development. Anyone eager to create WordPress plugins would benefit from this section immensely. If we could start all new plugin developers on the right path using nonces, validating and sanitization of content, and so on, then the world would be a better place.

I’m talking rainbows and unicorns. Or something like that.

Finally, I also appreciated that the book covers some popular filter and actions hooks, not to mention a little further in you’re walked through creating an example plugin yourself.

Going above and beyond

Finding a great hotel that’s clean, affordable, and reliable is always a plus for a traveler. But finding the same hotel that leaves a mint on your pillow is golden.

While Professional WordPress gives you the full course of WordPress development, it’s the “mint on the pillow” that shows they put some extra love and attention into it, and didn’t just stop with the more common development topics.

For example, in Chapter 11, there’s some great tips on advertising and monetizing your site. Chapter 12 covers principles of user experience, usability testing, and even how to optimize your site for search engines. Granted these subjects can be books in themselves, but the authors give you just enough practical tips and tricks to get you moving in the right direction. There’s so much misinformation on the web and in printed form, that I’m glad to see these smaller subjects were included.

I also found the sections on caching, scaling, and securing your WordPress site to be equally as informative. Seasoned WordPress developers would also appreciate their coverage, however brief, of the WordPress community.

Complaints!

“My only complaint is that they didn’t mention BuddyPress enough.”

What? There are complaints? Does this mean I’ll have to hide from Brad Williams at all future WordCamps?

Easy now, brothers and sisters. My only complaint is that, as a BuddyPress developer, they didn’t mention BuddyPress enough. And I know, you can’t fit everything into the book. I get that. But I figured I would throw that bone out there for consideration.

And if you think that’s bad, you haven’t heard the moaning from those dedicated bbPress developers. Oh boy.

In conclusion…

Brad Williams, David Damstra, and Hal Stern are all excellent developers. You can tell they put a lot of blood, sweat, and spilled beer into this book.

If my house was on fire — assuming my family is safe, duh – and I had to save one book, it wouldn’t be this book. It would be the book filled with my life’s memories, photos, and cash. Maybe if I could take two books. Okay, If I could grab three books, then Professional WordPress would definitely make it out of the fire with me.

I highly recommend Professional WordPress for any WordPress developer – new or experienced. It’s worth having on your shelf.

This review was completed using a copy of the book provided by the publisher.

The post Review: Professional WordPress Design and Development, 2nd Edition appeared first on WPCandy.

Reader is a theme by new theme shop WP Minima, a brand which sells entirely on ThemeForest at the moment. They’ve released two themes so far, one free and one paid. This is the paid theme, which costs $35.

Reader, being both new and minimalistic, caught my eye last week. A lot of the time, theme designers will put something together and call it minimal, almost as an excuse to not put much thought into what’s designed. Or to leave things kind of plain. At least that’s the impression I get when looking at some WordPress themes that get released.

In this case, I think it’s clear that WP Minima put time into Reader and made real decisions. I don’t agree with all of them, but there’s a consistent, strong design aesthetic here that doesn’t come across as what I’ll call “lazy minimal”. It’s minimal, in a good way.

Digging further in

Digging further into the theme, there are design decisions I like as well as those I don’t. The first subtle bit I liked was the fuzzy hover effect on the blog’s title. It’s a neat, happy effect that makes the title of the blog a little more interesting. A lot of themes will make their titles and site headings interesting by dropping in a logo – a logo, of course, that won’t make any sense on a user’s site once they get rolling with the theme. This design touch makes any blog title interesting, just be tweaking the text itself a little.

When rolling over the title of the site, it gets all fuzzy. Is it weird that I find things like that really nice?

That said, some of the interactions aren’t as great. There are two sliding effects worked into the theme that bug me. Reader hides things behind a click-trigger, which requires the visitor to click to view (what I consider) important information.

These triggers are in two places: the site description in the header, and every post’s date and comment counts on archive pages. In both cases, as a visitor, I’m not very likely to click to see that information. That information is something I’ll see and will catch my eye as I scroll down the page. Requiring user action in these areas is really the biggest detractor toward using this theme, in my mind.

Plugin included with the theme

The Minima Shortcodes plugin that came along with the theme is half good and half “meh”. Obviously dropping shortcodes into a plugin is a big plus, and that they seem intended to work with any Minima theme when it’s installed is a great idea.

The plugin’s positive offerings include a few nice call-out styles. There’s a message box, an intro, some highlighting, and so on. With these classes matched across their offering of themes it has its usefulness. I would also like to see the plugin with an option to drop in minimal styles (no pun intended) so the shortcodes can maintain their general look and feel even when other themes are active.

The intro and message shortcodes in user within a post. They’re subtle, but noticeable.

Then there’s the less exciting side of the plugin, which is a set of shortcodes clearly included for average users. There’s one that forces line breaks so they aren’t stripped out by the WordPress editor, for instance.

I should say these types of shortcodes aren’t exciting to me, but might be a breath of fresh air to users who have complained about the WordPress WYSIWYG editor before. So I don’t really consider these a negative inclusion, but more of a “meh”.

What Reader really gets right

Some of my favorite things about Reader, honestly, are things that it just gets right. There aren’t any nasty theme settings screen with the WP Minima branding on it, which is a relief quite honestly.

In addition, the theme acts as you’d expect it to when it comes to basic WordPress features. Sidebars, widgets, menus, even background colors and the theme customizer operated exactly as I would have wanted. It sounds silly, both when discussing that and writing it down here, but it’s truly shocking how many themes out there just fall apart under these basic sanity checks.

Seriously, more theme developers should really dive in and make their themes work with the theme customizer. It makes working with themes so much better.

I also really like the implementation of the featured images. Having them fit across the post block gives it a good feel, and would keep me excited to find – or take, rather – images to fit with each post.

Post formats in Reader seem to each be styled uniquely, which is great to see any theme doing. I’m also partial to theme-specific WYSIWYG editor styles, which Reader pulls off near perfectly.

Final thoughts

Reader is a solid minimal blogging theme, and has gone on my list of themes to recommend to anyone looking to just get a site up and get writing. It’s not a perfect theme, but I think I would still rank it up there with the solid simplicity of the default Twenty Ten through Twelve themes, albeit with its own style.

Given that Reader is only the second theme to come out of WP Minima so far, I’d say it’s a shop to keep an eye on.

Oh, and if you’d like to hear further thoughts on Reader — and other awesome and sometimes-not-so-awesome WordPress themes — listen to the latest episode of the Theme Show podcast.

This review was completed using a copy of Reader provided to WPCandy by WP Minima.

The post Reader theme review: Minimal, but not in a lazy way appeared first on WPCandy.

BizWay is a new WordPress theme released to the dot org theme repository in the last week. There were fifteen themes all pushed live to the directory on the same day, and I think BizWay deserves to be pulled out from the crowd a bit.

BizWay is a free release from a commercial theme shop called InkThemes. Many of the themes on the dot org directory that I like recently have been from commercial theme shops releasing free themes. I had not heard of InkThemes until I ran across this free theme release.

You can check it out along with me if you download BizWay from WordPress.org.

The Look

When evaluating the look of WordPress themes, it’s important to realize the context and experience the reviewer has. All of my experience with building sites has been for small businesses or organizations, so this one caught my eye. This theme is an easy choice for any business or organization to use.

Some may call the site layout overdone, with so many themes out there that have the big featured slider area and three featured areas, but this is what many businesses are looking for. Most businesses I’ve dealt with want the home page to be static content, more like a brochure, and have news release and “blog” content on another part of the site that’s not the home page. This theme has the homepage layout many businesses are looking for. Oh, and I kind of prefer it too!

The Good

Upon activation the theme looks exactly like the theme demo, which is a plus for me. It’s frustrating to install a theme and then spend the next hour figuring out how to mimic what the demo looked like. As a visual person, now I can see what dummy content needs to be swapped out with my content.

BizWay uses a third party option panel, but it only has enough options as it needs to. It’s easy to insert your own logo and favicon, and clearly states the suggest pixel dimensions. In some themes I’ve used, the image sizes weren’t documented anywhere and I had to use Chrome’s element inspector to mimic the demo’s size. There are also options to easily insert your own images, text and links for the slider area and three column featured area. For me the “right” number of options for a theme is just enough that they all need to be filled out, and this theme meets my requirement. The theme options link is also where it should be, hidden under Appearance on the dashboard and not its own top level menu.

[pullquote text="This theme is an easy choice for any business or organization to use." type="roadblock"]

The archive pages are attractively laid out, with support for featured images, a colored “Read More” button, and automatic truncation if the post doesn’t contain the “more” tag. The visual editor has also been styled so that line width is similar to the front end view, something that’s often overlooked by theme authors.

The Bad

The only feature I feel BizWay is lacking is that there isn’t a way to easily change the color scheme throughout the site. There is a pervasive blue color for header colors, links, arrows, etc, and most site owners will want to swap out that blue color for something else that matches what they are about. It wouldn’t be hard add an option to the options screen to make that change to the CSS file. Yeah, I know that if someone really wants to change colors they can go into the style sheet themselves, but everything else on the theme is an easy task for a novice WordPress user. Why should something as changing a menu background color be more difficult.

When I run Pingdom Tools on my test site, the page loads 464k and 38 HTTP requests. That’s not terrible in the grand scheme of things, but I think 38 requests is a lot for such a simple home page. Some things like the bullets under the home page slider are made with an image, and those images aren’t combined into one large sprite for the whole site. This is fine for a few thousand page views a month, but if a site running this theme were to get a lot of traffic, server resources would become a concern. Also, Pingdom Tools reports four broken link to images from the style sheet.

[pullquote type="jump" text="That's not terrible in the grand scheme of things, but I think 38 requests is a lot for such a simple home page."]

BizWay doesn’t make good use of the new theme customizer recently released with WordPress version 3.4, at least in this version of the theme. Only the default three core options are available: site title, navigation, and static front page. Granted WordPress 3.4 was released one day prior to this theme’s release, and the theme review process can take a week or more, but many other themes on the dot org directory already use the customizer for changing out header images, colors, etc…

Otto released How to leverage the Theme Customizer in your own themes a full six weeks prior to the release of WordPress version 3.4 so the customizer feature of WordPress core isn’t a surprise. In time I hope that developers begin to ditch third-party options frameworks in favor this WordPress core feature.

Better use of the theme customizer would also provide a more unified experience to changing the site. This isn’t really a critique of this theme, just all themes in general. Some options are in the theme options link, the footer must be changed in the widgets area, and core site options like site title and menus are in yet another location. I think the core theme customizer would be the best place to condense all options, making it more intuitive for the average user.

One slightly strange thing is that on the dashboard under Appearance, the theme inserted a “InkThemes Themes” link under the “Theme Options” link. This is basically a link to some of the author’s other themes, with both their commercial option and free or “lite” versions on the dot org directory. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Since this theme made it past the theme review team it must be kosher with community standards, but I’ve never seen it before from any other theme author.

Another thing to consider is that the images and code for this page are now hosted on my site. I’m paying to store this content and the bandwidth to serve it up! Granted it’s only a few hundred kb, and I probably won’t click on it more than once, but it is something to consider.

This author has taken the time to contribute to the dot org directory, and I totally understand that he wants to drive some traffic toward his commercial offerings, but this just feels gross to me. I’d be fine with having a credit page with links out to his social media listings (links, not embedded iframes as seen here), and I’d even be fine with a link to purchase the full version of the theme and see his other offerings, but this feels more like a storefront that I didn’t expect to be installed with a theme. When I installed WP App Store, I expected a storefront. When I install a theme, I expect to get a theme – and nothing else.

Lite Version

This is basically a stripped down version of a commercial theme by the same name. From what I can tell, what you would gain by purchasing the full version of the theme is:

• Responsive design
• Support and Documentation
• 10 more color options
• More available slider “slides”

The price is about what you would expect from a commercial theme, in line with most theme marketplaces. If I were building a site for a business I’d strongly suggest that the company purchase the theme for the available color options and more slides for the featured slider. It’s a bit frustrating that those features are limited on the free release.

Personally, I think theme authors should make one of their best pieces of work available on the directory to show off their talent, and not just as a way to get users “on the hook” and basically be forced into a purchase once they begin inserting content and hit a limit three hours into the project. If I were to come across a free theme that did exactly what I wanted for a project, I would certainly look toward the author’s other offerings for future projects. I have learned to find good theme authors and follow their future work, but maybe I’m not the normal theme purchaser.

I suspect that the problem of too many HTTP requests would also be present in the paid version. That is probably just the developer’s style. Also, I’m curious if the “InkThemes Themes” advertisement page would go away in the paid version. My guess is not.

[pullquote type="roadblock" text="I would still use BizWay to get a quick site up for a friend or family member."]

Conclusion

This is a solid theme, with respect to design and functionality. I would still use BizWay to get a quick site up for a friend or family member. It’s very easy to customize with your own content, and generally behaves the way I would expect it to.

If you can live with the blue color, or can change it in the style sheet yourself, I say “Go for it!”

This review was completed using version 1.0 of the BizWay theme.

The post Review: BizWay WordPress Theme by InkThemes appeared first on WPCandy.

Clark Wimberly released an e-book called Meta Valuables earlier this month, and as the name might suggest it is an introduction to WordPress meta data. At 45 pages and a $2-or-what-you-wish price point, it really feels a bit like buying a chapter out of a larger book introducing WordPress development methods.

And if a chapter introducing WordPress meta data functions sounds like fun to you, you’re in pretty good hands with Meta Valuables.

Wimberly developed the book for a class on meta data he taught, and as such it reads like you might expect: brief bits of instruction followed by examples and suggestions for how to use the functions. The book expects a bit more of a 201 developer than a 101, which is probably perfect given the number of learning WordPress developers out there that are comfortable editing template files and assembling their own functions.

Wimberly jumps in right away with code examples and practical use cases for meta data. You only have to bear a single Hello world! example before you’re into the good and more practical stuff.

There are three great examples in Wimberly’s book that, if you’re anything like me, will get you excited thinking about other possibilities.

One such example shows how to use user meta to track and display a user’s favorite posts. Wimberly doesn’t go further than giving the basics on updating the favorites and then displaying them, but for the learning developer interested in building a favorite posts plugin that’s just so, it’s a killer start.

I also enjoyed his example of using meta data within a shortcode to track the use of said shortcode and make each post query-able without the need for extra taxonomies. I’d say it’s a clever way to avoid using an additional taxonomy — and that’s coming from someone who loves using custom taxonomies.

Another example shows how to use post meta to track and query posts with more than a certain number of comments, which Wimberly says he prefers to looking up post comment counts every time he wants to display “popular posts”.

As someone who falls somewhere between “familiar” and “a master” on the meta data knowledge scale (of course that’s a thing!) each of these examples were interesting and gave me my own ideas to try out.

Keep in mind, though: Wimberly’s intent in Meta Valuables isn’t to walk you through creating a complete meta data driven app using WordPress. It’s just meant to get you excited and show you where to go and play next.

One thing not really covered in the book is the relative baggage that too many meta data inputs and options can add to the user experience and whether to consider that when adding meta data. User experience is a bit outside the scope of this book, though Wimberly does recommend using the custom meta box library by Jared Atchison, Bill Erickson, and Andrew Norcross, which is probably the best way to go for those with heavy meta data needs.[ref]I can get pretty hung up on UI/UX stuff, for better or worse, so I couldn’t help but think of that stuff when reading through the book.[/ref]

Instead of exhausting all the possibilities you could explore with meta data, this book will whet your appetite for more. When you finish you’ll likely have a couple of very actionable ideas that you can put to work immediately, with a curious mind for more.

And really, what more can you ask from any book?

I completed this review using a copy provided by Mr. Wimberly, though I plan on heading over and sending him $5 for the pleasure of reading it as soon I publish this review. I suggest you do the same.

The post Review: Meta Valuables e-book by Clark Wimberly appeared first on WPCandy.

Polaroids is a new WordPress theme released to the dot org theme repository in the last week. It’s the work of developer Guy Davies and caught my eye, honestly, because it doesn’t look like a lot of the other themes on WordPress.org. It looks more like a photo blog theme than a traditional blog theme.

If you’d like to follow along with my review, you can download Polaroids from WordPress.org.[ref]While I’m thinking about it, I’d like to point out that right now WordPress.org doesn’t do a great job of previewing non-blog themes. Just go check out the theme preview for Polaroids on WordPress.org to see what I mean. The default site content that all theme demos get doesn’t really do the theme justice. Perhaps ThemeForest, which seems to allow theme authors to specify a different site as a demo location, would be a nice compromise in situations like this. In any case, the theme’s author is using Polaroids right now, and is really a more proper demonstration of the theme.[/ref]

The look

I like the Polaroid effect used in this theme, gimmicky as it might be.[ref]Funny thought: how many younger theme users wouldn’t get the Polaroids reference, or why the theme puts the images in those funny boxes.[/ref]

That said, I always struggle with photo blogs. Polaroids follows a number of the style choices I tend to attribute to photo blog themes: one column, minimalistic, and monotone. They fit with what’s likely expected out of a photo blog theme, but they just seem a little off to me. I’m not entirely sure what it is about the look, but it doesn’t suit me personally.

While setting up and using Polaroids, I wondered whether a theme like this might not work well with some form of guided setup. Perhaps the WordPress pointers could be used to pull something like this off. Let’s say I activate it, and then the pointers pop up to walk me through establishing common photo blog settings: media dimensions, where to set the featured images, and so on. I’ve seen a pointer-assisted tour implemented in Joost de Valk’s SEO plugin, but no other examples come to mind.

Unnecessary theme options

One criticism I would offer of Polaroids has to do with its theme options screen. It’s not the user interface – that’s fine, and mostly fits the WordPress standard design. But I don’t think any of the options that are there belong within a WordPress theme.

Two of them might. There’s an option to turn on human-readable dates, and another to hide the “comments disabled” message on posts when the comments are turned off. But otherwise, the options include things like “Use dynamic meta descriptions” and “Hide Tools menu” checkboxes.

Have a look at the theme options screen (click to see large):

The bulk of the included options involve removing elements from the WordPress dashboard. Normally I’m all for tweaking the WordPress dashboard, but not this way. These changes shouldn’t be made via a WordPress theme – any users who likes these changes will lose them when they swap out their themes.

In addition to the unnecessary theme options, Polaroids changes the standard WordPress Upload/Insert text and icon (see below).

I get the sense that the developer intended to make things clearer for users — perhaps after his own experiences with clients, or based on his own preferences. Whether his change improves the editor or not is debatable, but without question it shouldn’t be something that happens when you use the theme.

It’s not that I think everything in WordPress needs to remain in its default state. In fact a good number of my favorite WordPress plugins tweak WordPress dashboard behavior. But dashboard tweaks belong in plugins, and never in themes.

If those theme options and the tweak to the dashboard were pulled out and moved into a separate plugin, the theme would instantly improve.

Confusing editor behavior

WordPress themes can include editor styles, and I’ve come to look for this when I try themes out. In Polaroid’s case, something was bothering me about the editor styles. I couldn’t pinpoint the issue at first, but every time I started a new post with it, the text would be centered. Then I opened up the theme and didn’t see a specific editor stylesheet for the WYSIWYG editor.

Polaroids loads up the main theme stylesheet (style.css) for the WYSIWYG editor, rather than a specific stylesheet with only relevant typography the way you would expect.

Implementing styles specifically for the Visual Editor is a nice touch, but only when the styles improve the experience.

Conclusion

I don’t think I would use Polaroids. It just doesn’t appeal to me visually, which is of course a personal thing and shouldn’t be seen as a negative for the theme.

That said, I would really like to recommend the theme to photographer friends. But right now  the theme options and odd WYSIWYG editor behavior give me pause. With a couple of tweaks to the theme, though, I think it could be a great free WordPress photoblogging theme.

If you’re interested in additional discussion on Polaroids, see episode number nine of The Weekly Theme Show.

This review was completed using version 1.41 of the Polaroids theme.

The post Review: Polaroids WordPress theme by Guy Davies appeared first on WPCandy.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the first-ever WordCamp in Nashville, Tennessee. Nick Weaver and I took a quick seven hour road trip down to Nashville and, if I can speak for us both, had a great time.[ref]Nick, who you really should know from The Weekly Theme Show by now — shame on you if you don’t.[/ref]

The event was organized by John Housholder and members of his development shop Ah So Designs. They did a great job, pulling off a solid WordCamp in just nine weeks with what sounded like a budget on the lighter side. There were two tracks (one for beginners and intermediate users, another for developers) and eleven sessions. I stuck to the developer track sessions, though I missed out on Mitch Canter’s presentation in the morning (that’s what I get for relying on only one alarm) and was briefly distracted by an epic 34-level game of Jenga outside one of the rooms.

The highlight of the event

The highlight for me (aside from the after party, details of which are never, ever to be published of course) was the Otto and Nacin Show, wherein they went through and demonstrated the various features coming to WordPress in version 3.4. Although it was in the developer track, I’d say a majority of the session would have been interesting to any attendee there — particularly since a lot of it was focused on what’s coming in the near future.

I liveblogged a number of my choice favorite quotes from that session, but just in case you missed them:

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/#!/wpcandy/status/193742919528747009"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/#!/wpcandy/status/193742275187179522"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/#!/wpcandy/status/193738982448840708"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/#!/wpcandy/status/193739253363126272"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/#!/wpcandy/status/193732727709769728"]

Too much fun, really.

The discussion on child themes that Ryan Green led was well received, and he covered the essentials. I also enjoyed hearing about child themes from a user experience professional’s point of view. Though, I think the session itself might have served better in an intermediate or advanced user track. As the session went on the room seemed split: half were curious about framework options, and the other half already had a workflow in place they were happy with.

Russel Fair’s Less presentation generated some interest and fit in well with plenty of code examples to show off. On a personal level I’m still unconvinced LESS is really worth all the trouble, but I certainly understand the features it brings to the table better now than before.

I started a discussion in our forums on this topic, because I’m interested in what others have to say about it.

Housholder himself held a session that I wasn’t sure about until it was underway called The Future of WordPress in Nashville. Taking up both tracks as what could be considered the keynote session of the event (and also the first time I’ve seen Google Hangouts used to stream a session into another room to accommodate seating requirements) it turned out to be a nice way for Housholder to walk through the state of WordPress meetups in Nashville and how those attending could get more involved. It’s only fitting, I think, that all WordCamps have something akin to this to help get more members involved in their regular, smaller events.

He also introduced the group to WPNashville.com, a website he and his team are working on to offer a more ideal place to organize the group, citing problems relying on Meetup.com entirely as their motivation for putting something new together.

I selfishly look forward to seeing their development and what they put together at WPNashville so I can steal their ideas for updating and improving my own city’s WordPress meetup website.

You have to criticize something, right?

Really, my only criticism of the event would be what they recognized right at the beginning of the day: rooms were a bit overwhelmed with attendees (a good thing) and a larger venue will be needed in the future (also a good thing).

Oh, and I would also vote for two-sided nametags on badges in the future. No matter what you do, the laynyard always ends up twisted the wrong way. For your consideration:

Since the information you want to see is on the left, the side you’ll always see is on the right. It’s the Law of One-sided Conference Badges. But the schedule was on the badge, which is a definite plus.

Collection of presentations from speakers

There was a great group of speakers at Nashville, and though I couldn’t see them all in person I’ll be browsing their slide decks as they are posted. These were the speakers and their presentations, linked up if they’ve posted their slides:

• Kenneth White: Categories, Tags, and Custom Post Types! Oh my!
• Mitch Canter: The Blank Screen: Overcoming Your Fear of ‘Pressing From Scratch
• Joel R. Norris: A Beginner’s WordPress Bootcamp
• Ryan Green: Child Theme Frameworks Through the Lens of User Experience
• Rick Sanders and Tara M. Aaron: Copyright and Other Legal Basics for Bloggers (and Developers, too)
• Andrew Nacin and Samuel Wood: Otto and Nacin Show
• Brad McCarty: Making the Leap: From Hobbyist to Professional
• Michael Toppa: Dependency Injection for WordPress Plugin Development (and his post)
• John Housholder: The future of WordPress in Nashville
• Anna Belle Leiserson: Search Engine Optimize Your Site in Three Easy Steps
• Russell Fair: LESS, JS & WP (and demo theme on Github)

If you see other activity, or posts relevant to WordCamp Nashville, feel free to drop a link in the comments below.

Liveblog, duh

I also maintained a liveblog here on WPCandy for the duration of the event, which I recommend checking out if you want to experience a bit of the day for yourself.

Recommended food and drink

What would a WordCamp weekend be without an awesome bar or two? Nick knew his way around Nashville better than me, so he gets kudos for the couple of spots we enjoyed.

• Patterson House is one of the coolest bars I’ve ever been in. Pricey, but the cocktails were worth it.
• Sitar: I’m not normally crazy about Indian food, but this was a nice little restaurant.

What did you think of WordCamp Nashville?

I enjoyed my time in the Music City, and look forward to heading back soon. My next visit might not be until there’s another WordCamp in town, but hey, I’m comfortable planning my travel around where WordCamps are happening any given weekend.

If you attended WordCamp in Nashville last weekend, share your thoughts on it in the comments below.

The post Review: WordCamp Nashville 2012 appeared first on WPCandy.

Anyone in the field marketing will know half the battle with launching a new website is creating a buzz about it. “Coming soon” pages are well and good, but what about a truly viral WordPress theme?

In steps Launch Effect, a WordPress theme by the guys over at Barrell a NYC based creative digital agency. In Launch Effect they have created a WordPress theme specifically for that purpose. It’s their answer to the question: “how do I attract my potential audience and get them to spread the word, all before launching a site?”

Launch Effect review gallery

In addition to the screenshots above, and especially if you are after an in depth look at Launch Effect, you can check out my video review of the theme below. Otherwise, feel free to skip down and catch my thoughts in good old fashioned text.

Video: A first taste of Launch Effect

Firstly, as you will no doubt have seen from the video I used a WAMP install of WordPress so certain elements of the theme will not work, such as sharing on social media sites. See this earlier post for a guide to install WAMP & WordPress.

Installing Launch Effect is the same as any other WordPress theme install, simply download from the Launch Effect site and the tough work is done.

Upon installation of Launch Effect you will notice a new addition to your WP admin sidebar entitled “Launch Effect”.

This is quite simple and gives some options such as Designer, Stats & Export CSV.

Using the Designer tab

Delving a little deeper into this admin sidebar and clicking on “Designer” brings up a nice user interface with a number of expandable boxes for you to edit the look and feel of the site.

As you will see from the image above we have a number of configurable options that allow us to change elements displayed on the front end.

Lets start off with the Head section, This expandable option gives us a number of user input fields to change elements within it like page title, meta description and keywords, favicon and so on. This section also gives us the option of uploading a social media thumbnail to display on Facebook, as well as options for TypeKit and MonoType support to change fonts.

The Page section gives us options such as background color and the ability to set a background image of your choosing.

Container gives us the ability to set the scene for the main section of the site where your message will be displayed for all and sundry to see.

Here, in addition to controlling the box size, position, and color, we can enable an effect like a dropshadow or a glow.

Launch Effect also gives us the ability to embed a video into the page, which it specifies should be a YouTube or Vimeo video.

Then there’s another background image button, which will override your background color you selected earlier in the container section if used.

As well as all of the above points the bottom half of the container section gives us URL input boxes at the base of the container for various social links, with options to disable them.

The Title section is well laid out with plenty of options. Launch Effect also gives you access to Google WebFonts, and you can simply select the font of choice and watch a preview come up of your selected font. There are also predefined font options if you’re not a fan of Google WebFonts. Similar options are available in the Sub-Heading section.

The next couple of options sections allow for control of the text that will show up within the theme. The section after that, though, called Signup Settings, is what really caught my attention.

This section is what really makes this theme stand out, with the real kicker being the unique URL generation for tracking purposes.

What I created with Launch Effect

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. My example doesn’t look amazing — no offense Ryan — but then again if I spent move than twenty minutes on it I’m sure I could create something really quite special. With a nice background image and tinkering with the text you could create a real unique presence for your business or promotion.

It was after I tweaked the content and the colors that I got quite excited with this theme. This is when I turned my attention to just how visitors will interact with the site, and what they will see when they arrive.

Once an interested party submits their email address, the message we’ve defined in the options greets them.

Here they can share the link socially, or if they want to link it on a blog article they can copy and paste their own unique URL specific to them. A returning user also has the ability to check their own effect on your launch by entering the same email address they originally signed up with.

Our user now has insight into how many referrers and how many clicks they have on their own unique URL. This is incredibly handy for end users, especially if you are running a competition based on traffic driven to the site.

Launch Effect comes packaged with its own stats tab, which gives information such as amount of visits a user refers, conversions, and conversation rates.

Have a high referring user? Why not email them directly and gain insight into why they are successful. Build a relationship and give them more incentive’s after all they may have a large social following who takes what they say as verbatim.

The emails here can also be exported in CSV format and imported into the mail program of your choice.

The Launch Effect Theme Roadmap

I had a quick look through the Launch Effect site, and noticed that in addition to a support forum they also have a development roadmap that includes:

• Mail Chimp integration for automatically adding sign-ups to a list as well as powering post-signup notification emails.
• Mobile version.
• Ability to export and import theme options.
• Add color-calculation to “Go” button text color to work against lighter button backgrounds.
• Previewing Google Webfonts within dropdown.
• Test and reselect integrated Google Webfonts faces that work best with both Mac and Windows font-rendering.
• Expand to include a blog.
• Add slideshow embed field to theme options panel.
• Provide error messaging.
• Switch to color picker used by Twenty Eleven theme or similar.
• Provide theme as a plugin that can work as part of an existing site.

Two things that would improve this Launch

I noticed that the options box triggers were sometimes temperemental, and would quickly close then open again on click. The save button also could have been located at both the top fo the option box and at the bottom, but really these are relatively pedantic in the grand scheme of things.

Also, do you know what would make this a killer viral launch theme? The ability to use this theme as a front facing client site, while a secondary WordPress theme is viewable by the administrators until site launch. Then, when you’re ready, you can simply swap over the theme.

This may not be entirely possible and I may well be in la la land with this idea, but I think it would make it a standout theme for sure.  However the development roadmap does state that in the future they will “provide theme as a plugin that can work as part of an existing site,“ so hopefully it might become a reality.

Final Thoughts

What we have here is a solid viral WordPress theme that has a massive potential to attract and promote your business, service or product.

As a company looking to promote you could do a hell of a lot worse than Launch Effect. It’s a refreshingly different WordPress theme and one that does it’s job amicably. Its ability to promote using unique URL generation, login, and tracking really do make this a standout launch theme.

The post Review: Feel the effects of Launch Effect theme (plus video) appeared first on WPCandy.

I have used a range of platforms during my last five years in the e-commerce industry. From initial setup and product selection to writing product specs and content for the web, I’ve nearly done it all. And in my time I’ve always been a big believer in using e-commerce platforms for e-commerce and blogging platforms for blogging.

Of course WordPress is an incredibly powerful platform in its own right, with even more on the way with WordPress 3.3 on the horizon. E-commerce is still a growing field within the WordPress community, though, and the question remains: is WordPress really a smart way to manage online shops?

WooThemes think it is, and earlier this week officially released WooCommerce, their free e-commerce plugin for WordPress. WooCommerce is a fork of Jigoshop, which has caused a bit of controversy in the community.

Irrespective of that issue, right now let’s just focus on what WooCommerce has to offer.

Getting a shop started

To start things off I’m going to use the current WordPress default theme, Twenty Eleven. It comes bundled with every downloaded copy of WordPress, so it’s common and most should recognize the theme while we test things out.

Downloading WooCommerce is a matter of visiting WooThemes and signing up for a free account. You’ll want to do this anyway, since the WooCommerce documentation will require you to login to view it.

WooCommerce Options

Upon installation, which is as simple as installation any normal plugin, you will immediately be greeted with the WooCommerce options panel.

It’s a standard WordPress tabbed interface (which Ryan would no doubt like) with a number of options. The screens live under a new top level menu called WooCommerce.

The WooCommerce main options panel gives you the opportunity to select your base country and the countries you are willing to ship to. You can select whether you want USA only, UK only, or all but a certain country, and so on.

You also have the option to allow for guest checkout, which will remove the cumbersome need for your customers to register for yet another website. Force SSL is a worthwhile addition if your store grows and you want to give customers peace of mind via an accredited SSL certificate.

The WooCommerce CSS option will add the WooThemes CSS styling to the theme you’re using. See the screenshot below to see the difference between the CSS off and the CSS activated.

Without WooCommerce CSS

With WooCommerce CSS styling

If you cannot do without social media, Woo has you covered with ShareThis. Simply sign up at ShareThis and paste in your ShareThis publisher ID to enable your potential customers to do your marketing for you. The same goes for your Google Analytics ID.

Working with Pages

The Pages tab lets you define the pages for various functions of your store. WooCommerce actually creates all of these needed pages upon installation, which is a time saver. Also next to each shop page listed is a shortcode, which can be used at will to integrate certain shop functionality into a blog post or page.

Speaking of shortcodes, I would really like to see shortcodes generated for each product created on the back end. Imagine how powerful it would be to write an informative blog post in your niche, and then hit the user with a couple of related products right in your post.

Catalog

The catalog section allows you to select whether or not you wish to display fields for SKUs and the weight for products. If enabled, these in turn show up on the product pages themselves.

Another useful feature is the “Cart redirect” option, which will redirect customers to the cart after adding a product to it. To be honest I have seen some e-commerce platforms built from the ground up that didn’t have this option. For me, this is a must have feature. Others may disagree, but I think showing end users the cart after purchase deters them from searching for more interesting items. It gives the impression that you have filled your cart, so you should pay for it and leave.

Image options are configurable here as well. The sizes here will depend on your WordPress theme; just pick something that will tie in appropriately. Other options such as currency for prices and decimal placement etc are all configurable here as well.

Inventory

The inventory options allow you to select whether or not you wish to enable tracking of stock, display notices of low stock and so forth. This won’t really be necessary if you decide to sell digital products, but if you have a shop or warehouse full of stock and you want to give notice or warning when they are low this is a must have. The option to hide products that have low stock or have reached a threshold is a nice plus that puts WooCommerce up there with some dedicated e-commerce platforms.

Shipping section

Quite simply: this section gives you the option of enabling shipping calculations, as well as a shipping calculator.

Note: The shipping calculator is a fantastic feature for any e-commerce platform, let alone a WordPress e-commerce plugin such as this. However to get the most out of it you will need to pay for an extension via WooCommerce called Table Rate Shipping.

The ship to billing option will only allow shipping to the billing address. This is handy if you’re concerned about fraud, but would I use it? Probably not. People like to pay for goods and have them delivered to a variety of addresses, whether it be their work place or a friend’s house as a gift. Of course it’s just an option, and it’s always good to have options.

Tax options

Tax settings, for me, will make or break any e-commerce solution. The companies I have worked for in the past have had exacting requirements on taxation. Shipping to the US, EU, UK and other countries each have their own taxation rules.

The added benefit of this section is you can allocate tax rules based on the designated country. For example US has different tax rules for different states, same as the rest of the world. This option really is one less headache; trust me I have been there and the fact this is part of the system is a great addition for anyone thinking of creating an online store with WooCommerce.

The option to display prices inclusive of or exclusive of tax is useful if you are a business to business company, since It gives them a clearer indication as to what their cost will be, and what they will get back from the tax department on business purchases.

Shipping methods

Love them or hate them, WooCommerce has a number of configurable shipping options. I for one am glad to see care has been taken with this section. Shipping methods can be a pain. Also worth noting: you do have the option of enabling free shipping as well, site wide.

So we have flat rate shipping which is useful if you have struck a deal with a delivery company or are just trying to compete with other online stores.

There is also a per order charge or per item charge (drop down selection) you can also choose whether to have your shipping taxable or not, whether to charge handling fees, etc. To get the most out of the individual producing shipping options you will need to pick up the Per Product Shipping extension from WooThemes for $50.

Method availability is an excellent feature, since if we allow everyone to have the same level of shipping then things could get messy. By clicking on method availability this opens up the drop down whereby you can select specific countries to give a certain shipping method too.

My reservation with the system in it’s current format is that every online retailer is different and has different needs. It would have been nice to have a way to charge different amounts depending on a locale / country by default. This is not a deal breaker though, and a paid for extension is available (see above image) called Table Rate Shipping which extends this section significantly for $50.

Payment gateways

Gateways could make or break WooCommerce; thankfully we have options. BACS payments are supporting, which can be useful for those looking to deal with business to business customers for large orders. This isn’t the first time I have seen this method, but it’s still a welcome addition. PayPal support is there, though only standard PayPal, as well as Cheque payments.

Payment methods in WooCommerce

Again, other payment options are available as commercial extensions Paypal Pro, webcash, 2checkout, Payson, Paygate and Authorize.net, each for $50 from WooThemes.

Adding products to the store

So those are the options we have. What next?

This is where the fun starts: time to add products. Adding a product is a relatively simple affair. First, we’ll add a category.

After you added a new product category it’s then on to adding a new product. This is where things get really interesting.

Clicking on Add a new product throws up a screen similar to what you will see when creating a new post on a standard WordPress install. You will, though, have a few new options.

Product Entry

I’m a bit picky when it comes to e-commerce, so this is where I got excited. It’s nice to see a useful selection of tabs and configurable options. First up is product type, which you can select from options that include Simple, Downloadable, Variable, Virtual and Grouped.

Simple quite literally means simple, or an easy-to-configure product with minimal options.

Select Downloadable and your greeted with these product type-specific options:

Product Options for Digital Downloads

Upon first review the “Upload a file” button here didn’t actually work. It has been fixed with the 1.0.1 update, however. Good thing it works now, since it will no doubt win favor with those who wish to set up a digital download store, such as (for example) selling WordPress products like themes and plugins.

Each respective product type carries its own range of options, so if you are looking to set up downloadble products WooCommerce has you covered, and if you have products with options you are also covered.

The “Up-Sells & Cross-Sells” section allows you to manually input a product and then allocate it to your current product, in a similar vein to Amazon’s “Customers who bought this, also bought this” feature. Initially this option was giving me trouble, but that problem seems to have been fixed in the 1.0.1 update as well.

Your visual store

Now let’s look at what your customers will actually see and experience. WooCommerce includes breadcrumbs for navigation as well as some rather excellent sidebar widgets like the price filter (love this), top products and a handful of others.

Product page in all it's Twenty Eleven Glory

Product pages are handled very well in the Twenty Eleven theme, and demonstrating that it can be used with this theme highlights the helpful nature of WooCommerce.

Product reviews

Having worked in e-commerce for a while now, and having heard various social media gurus state that sharing on social media is where it’s at, I remain old fashioned. I’m old fashioned in the sense that I believe a decent review of a product can affect the opinions of an undecided buyer.

Add a review to a product

WooCommerce has us covered in this respect, using a simple ratings system built on top of the WordPress comment system and using a handy star rating.

Reporting and figures

Everything so far is lovely. But what about the hardcore store owners? I want facts and figures. I need store reporting.

This, again, is taken care of.

If you have installed WooCommerce by now you will have noticed that on your Dashboard you have some new widgets:

• monthly sales overview,
• recent orders, and
• recent reviews, which you can amend, trash, publish and so on.

WooCommerce Reporting

Beyond the widget, your WooCommerce menu also provides a link to a full reporting screen (shown below) that’s similar in structure to the WooCommerce settings pages. A tabbed interface with a number of options for each tab which gives you better granularity in terms of drilling down to what you need.

WooCommerce Reporting Tabs

From this tabbed interface we can get an overview of daily sales, monthly sales, product sales, top sellers, and top earners. All of these options can be chosen from under the sales tab.

Clicking on customers gives us better insight into total sales, as well as total guest sales. Total guest sales is a nice feature that shows all of those who have purchased without signing up. The stock tab gives you an overview of what is running low and what is out of stock.

Final thoughts

There is an awful lot to WooCommerce, and if you read this whole review you’re likely on your third or fourth coffee. By now you might have even downloaded the plugin and formed your own conclusions, which I encourage.

This is what it’s all about: feature rich for the store owner and easy to use for the customer.

The front-end user interface that WooCommerce provides is pretty darn good, with a smooth easy to use system. From a store owner’s perspective, an interface that’s easy for customers to use will lead to more sales, to a degree.

Would I recommend WooCommerce to others? Yes I would. Your store can be set up on its own or bolted to your existing blog in a relatively short period of time. It has a great user interface and above all else it’s easy for the customer to use it and make purchases. From a WordPress administrator’s point of view it is relatively easy to utilize add products and, well, administrate the shop.

In the end that’s what it’s all about: feature rich for you, the store owner, and easy to use for the customer.

Before the 1.0.1 update I would have given WooCommerce a 3, but with the update it’s a solid 4 out of 5 mints. With paid extensions and plenty of themes to choose from the first week it’s availble, it would seem that WooThemes is investing quite heavily into this side of their business. And it could end up paying dividends for them. WooCommerce is one to watch.

This review was completed using only the free download of WooCommerce and the Twenty Eleven theme.

The post WooCommerce Review: A new e-commerce plugin to watch appeared first on WPCandy.

Sometimes the line between hobbyist and professional can be a blurry one. And regardless of your chosen niche, whether it be cooking, knitting or coding, there are the essential readings, books, magazines and, nowadays, websites that everyone reads. The WordPress Bible, 2nd Edition is just that book for WordPress.

While reading it I was constantly reminded of the Haynes Manuals for car enthusiasts.

Where the Haynes manuals shows you how to disassemble and rebuild an entire car, Aaron Brazell shows you how WordPress works and how to work with it. Every aspect of WordPress is coverd and is done so with little fanfare or flourish.

But this is in no way a complaint.

Explanations are clear and concise with lots of tables, screenshots and code samples. Narratives for the most part are left completely out. The book seems to be written with the assumption that the majority of readers will not read it starting at page one. Instead, I imagine it sitting on people’s desk ready to be referenced when a new solution or knowledge of a particular aspect of WordPress is needed.

There are also some truly standout sections that go beyond WordPress, including BuddyPress, caching and backing up. Additionally I have found myself flipping to Appendices A (WordPress Hook Reference) and B (Template Tags) rather than going to the WordPress codex site or doing a Google search. It might be my personal tastes but I find the simple descriptions and tables easier and faster for referencing.

I imagine the WordPress Bible sitting on people’s desks, ready to be referenced…

Living in Austin I had the benefit of meeting with Aaron Brazell at a local coffee shop to pick up our review copy of the book in person. We spoke for a short time about himself and the book. He explained some of the many changes he had to make between the first edition (which came out around the time 2.9 was released) and the second edition. These include adding custom post types, custom taxonomies and totally rewriting Chapter 22 which covers multisite functionality.

Aaron has worked with WordPress since 1.2 and as one of the founders of WP Engine he works daily with optimizing, scaling, and protecting WordPress sites and his expertise really shows in the WordPress Bible.

While it doesn’t feature an iconic Terry Davey cut-away cover illustration like the Haynes series did, the WordPress Bible goes just as deep into the nuts and bolts of what makes WordPress work as the series of automotive manuals does for cars.

This review was completed with a copy of WordPress Bible, 2nd Edition, provided to WPCandy for review purposes. It is the publisher’s custom to request an Amazon review in exchange for the copy which the Author has done from his personal Amazon account.

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It has been my experience that even experts in a field sometimes need a refresher in the basics. Either the fundamentals have changed since they were students or there are minor details that they never need to know before. Sometimes you just need to go back to school.

Just as important are the subjects it doesn’t cover.

WordPress For Dummies, by Lisa Sabin-Wilson is the perfect primer for WordPress. Between the iconic yellow covers are the integral basics everyone should know but maybe didn’t learn. I have never had the need to really dig in and learn about WordPress.com, setting up a MU network or importing a site from Blogger, but it’s all in there. And I know I’m not the only one who has had a client ask a basic question that just stumped them. This is the perfect go-to resource for those situations.

This is also a great book to suggest to clients. It can turn a novice into a capable user pretty quickly without going into advanced topics that might result in a 3am phone call because they broke their site. Advanced users might scoff at the sections on “Uploading and using images…” or “Setting your profile…” but these are important basics that one might gloss over when introducing a newcomer to the world of WordPress.

Just as important are the subjects it doesn’t cover. There are no advanced chapters that will make your clients eyes haze over. It seems the author, Sabin-Wilson, intentionally kept PHP references, and any mention of editing files to a complete minimum.

No one wants to be caught buying or reading a “For Dummies” book that deals with their profession but this one might be worth the risk. Because it is a “For Dummies” book the writing is very lighthearted, instructions are listed step by step and there are heaps of screenshots and URLs. WordPress For Dummies holds your hand and shows you the fundamentals rather than lecturing you.

It makes you comfortable learning, even if it is something you feel you should have known already. Because of that it deserves a place in your WordPress library.

This review was written using the Kindle version of WordPress for Dummies 3rd Edition.

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