What is premise? Premise is the ultimate landing page optimization WordPress plugin, brought to us by Copyblogger Media Inc.

After spending some time using the plugin, I absolutely love it. There are a few things that could change to make it better, but let me dive into the review.

Premise General Settings

First, the general settings. You have the ability to set landing pages inside a sub-folder, in case you want to disallow all the landing pages in your robots.txt, or you can have them sit in the root, such as wpvibe.com/landing-page/. This is some serious forethought by Copyblogger Media on what people will want to do with their permalinks. Sure there will always be one person that wants to do something different, but this should cover the majority of people.

Premise also has newsletter settings. The plugin comes with support for Aweber, Constant Contact, and MailChimp, three widely used e-mail services for newsletters. It offers the ability to hook in directly and use your landing pages as sign-up lead-gen tools.

Next are the style settings. There are a lot of style settings. Global styles, Global Links, Wrap (content area), Header, Main Headline Area, Blockquotes, Notice Box, and a lot more. Endless style settings, to give you ample control over the style of your landing pages.

Premise Landing Pages

Next, the landing pages. Here is the sweet sauce.

When you go to “Landing Pages” in the left side navigation, you have the ability to view existing landing pages or add a new one.

Upon clicking Add New for Landing Pages, you’ll be given six (6) options. Sales Page, Content Landing Page, Pricing, Opt In, Video, and Tab Scroller. Each will provide you with different write page options, and they’re pretty straight forward given their descriptions.

The ample options that this plugin provides both in the settings and in the write screen for your actual landing pages is quite impressive. It does an amazing job and does exactly what you need it to do.

For a limited time, you can download this plugin for just $85, so hurry up and go download it! Click here for more examples of Premise in action.

The initial launch is offering the following features for self-hosted WordPress sites: WordPress.com Stats, a Twitter Widget (for your sidebar), Gravatar Hovercards, WP.me Shortlinks, Sharedaddy (WordPress.com’s super sharing tool), LaTeX, After the Deadline, and Shortcode Embeds.

This is huge.

One specific feature I’ve been waiting for is the Sharedaddy feature. The ability to have the fancy sharing options that WordPress.com offers its users.

Here is what it looks like and here’s how to get it.

click to download

Further more, you can read the backstory from Matt Mullenweg as to why Jetpack is so important to WordPress.

Some of the highlights are a redesigned linking workflow, a more streamlined writing interface, a refreshed blue admin scheme (which we use here at WPvibe.com), new Post Formats support, a new Network Admin, advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries, and most of all, with the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before.

Everyone (all 180+ contributors to the WordPress 3.1 release) is really excited about this release.

So what are you waiting for! Go upgrade your site to 3.1! (we already did

UPDATE: One thing that Brian Gardner just pointed out on Twitter, is that you no longer need a code snippet to disable the WordPress admin bar that was added to WordPress 3.1. That’s pretty awesome! Just go to your profile page and uncheck where you want the admin bar to show up.

Update #2: At the time of writing this, there are 21, 711 downloads of WordPress 3.1. Let’s see where it is at the end of the day

Today’s security warning is about the WordPress plugin “User Photo.”

This plugin has not been updated since 2008-12-4, which means over 2 years ago. You should always be careful when installing plugins that are over a year old, as it’s possible that older plugins can present a security threat to your WordPress installation.

This plugin’s security warning is the fact that when a user uploads an image for their user, it only checks the image header to see if it’s an image – even if it’s not actually an image.

How can I protect myself?
The security alert suggests that you can protect yourself by “hardening your webserver.” This is fairly vague, but I would recommend disabling this plugin altogether.

You can easily use the Gravatar service as an alternative solution, which would save you some bandwidth and allow users to always have an up to date photo without having to update on your site as well each time.

As a reminder, it’s always a good idea to keep your WordPress installation and plugins as up to date as possible. And don’t edit the core, if you can avoid it, so you can more easily upgrade.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My question to everyone out there is this: would you rather power your website by software that doesn’t get updated enough, or by software that gets updated too often?

While yes, the frequent updates may be somewhat annoying, it’s by no means a reason to complain. While people do find any reason to complain, there are better things you could find to complain about.

WordPress is free, so really you shouldn’t ever complain about anything.

I love WordPress, and I know other people love WordPress, so please, eveyrone, stop complaining about all the updates. It’s more annoying hearing you complain than it is for you to just click the update button and let WordPress update on its own.

One other thing to think about is security. A lot, most, if not all, of these frequent updates are security patches. It’s unrealistic to expect that WordPress is the perfect application and that with every release they will catch every single bug. The core WordPress dev team is active though, and responds quickly to security threats. That’s something you should be extremely thankful for, otherwise you would be left helpless and open to attacks.

And as a side note, I remember the days when the upgrade process was much more difficult. In fact, I remember when “Pages” didn’t exist, and they were “folders” instead…back in the 2003-days of WordPress. It’s beautiful to me, to see how far WordPress has come and to see the vision it has for the future.

Given that merger of StudioPress and Copyblogger, what sparked the interest in the first place?

It’s pretty obvious the reach that Copyblogger and it’s network encompasses… I saw how powerful the marketing channel was, and knew it as a great opportunity. There weren’t any red flags that went up with my early conversations with Brian Clark, so for me it was pretty much a no-brainer.

Let’s dive into WordPress themes. What has been your favorite part of designing and developing themes?

My favorite part of themes is most definitely the child theme development. I leave all of the heavy lifting of Genesis code to Nathan Rice and our incredibly talented moderator team. For me, I really enjoy extending it by way of the child themes. Our designer Rafal Tomal is such a pleasure to work with, as his eye for design is top-notch.

On the flip side, do you have a least favorite part of the process? Maybe something you see that WordPress could do a better job of?

Honestly there really isn’t. We’ve developed Genesis in such a way that flexibility and extensibility are simple. We’ve also made a decision to develop Genesis in a way that just “works” with WordPress functions and user interface. We decided it was far more important to go with the grain, than against it.

Genesis is an awesome framework, with loads of great child themes. I personally use them on a lot of sites now. What are some of the major improvements and enhancements that are coming for Genesis?

Genesis v1.5 will include a completely rewritten breadcrumb function, that will work with custom post types. It also includes a special Genesis Grid loop function that will allow us to create child themes that showcase featured posts and excerpts (in a grid format) on a homepage. Other than that – future versions of Genesis might include shortcode functionality, and some other “top secret” functionality.

SEO is important (to some, not everyone.) Copyblogger Media LLC has
the Scribe SEO product for WordPress. What kind of advancements do
you see happening with the integration into StudioPress?

I don’t know that it will be integrated in any fashion with Genesis or what not – do we offer a huge discount to StudioPress users? Yes, we certainly do as we feel that Genesis + Scribe is a huge publishing combination for new users.

Looking back at everything, would you have done anything differently?
Please talk about maybe one thing you did really well and one thing
that failed that you would have done differently.

Honestly, I don’t wish I did anything differently. Everything happens for a reason, and the ups and downs of my business and business decisions have ultimately placed me into the position where I am now. Which is Partner and Chief Product Officer of Copyblogger Media and I get the pleasure of working alongside some very talented people. As for doing something well, I’d probably say that taking chances was the key. That began with the risk of selling WordPress themes, which turned into the choice of flipping my business model and going 100% GPL. Then became the choice of merging into Copyblogger Media. As for “failure”, I guess one thing I failed at was not taking my business more serious from a legal standpoint – as I had to rebrand Revolution back in the day because I never performed due diligence on the name.

Throwing it back to you, have you ever used Genesis? What are your thoughts on it?