Preparing for Success: WordPress 3.5 and other goodies

Announcements:

• Be sure to fill out our 2013 Survey so we know what direction you’d like to see WordPress Austin go in 2013!
• Automattic is hiring!
• We would love people to get more involved in WordPress Austin. Plan your own meetups, help spread the love!

WordPress 3.5 updates – Pat Ramsey

Slides for presentation

• Version codenamed Elvin – over 6 million downloads
• Media interface is the biggest change:
  • ImageMagick is now used for image editing
  • Attachment editing now uses edit-post interface
  • Now you can do media management in WordPress
• Links are gone for new installs. Moved to a plugin
• Dashboard retina compatible
• Square buttons
• Privacy setting moved to Reading Settings
• oEmbed (the ability to drop in a link without HTML code and have the content show up as embedded content) supports Intagram, SoundCloud and Slideshare – automatic links (already working for YouTube and Vimeo)
• Add new plugins from your favorited plugins on the WordPress plugin repo
• New Default theme – Twenty Twelve. Excellent theme to learn how to modify/build a theme.
• Attachment editing now doing edit-post interface, with full post edit UI. Custom posts, etc.
• New hooks for edit screen
• show_admin_column=>true – custom taxonomies can be added to your edit post’s columns with a simple parameter.

Preparing for Success – Clark Wimberly

Slides for presentation

• What’s your flavor?

  • WordPress.com – Hosted, quick start, less control

  • WordPress.org – Downloaded, more setup, total control

  • BuddyPress – Bolt on social network features; basic social network architecture

  • bbPress – Stand alone or bolt-on forum features; available through a plugin

• Functionality and the future
  • Important to know if your functions are coming from a plugin or a theme in case you ever change a plugin or theme
  • Devs might consider using /mu-plugins folder to force functionality
  • WordPress is very backwards compatible
• PERMAlinks
  • Consider SEO issues
  • Once live, don’t change a URL
  • Decide on a URL structure ahead of time
  • do you want you.com/category/01/22/post-name or you.com/post-name
  • Yoast SEO plugin will help you rewrite permalinks if you need to do it, but try to avoid ever doing this
  • Redirection plugin
• Analyze this:  If you are taking money or have advertisers, you will want analytics
  • Google Analytics – Industry standard, basically free, deep data. There are a number of plugins that allow you to insert Google Analytics into your site.
  • JetPack Stats – Made for WordPress, loads in Dashboard, quick glance stats
  • ChartBeat – Premium service, live data, think newsroom
  • A/B testing – Bill Erickson recommends Optimizely and Nick Batik recommends Convert Experiments and Max A/B
• Who’s in Charge here?
  • Google Webmaster Tools
  • Claim ownership of your site
  • Alerts for common web problems
• Back that thing up
  • VaultPress – Premium service from Automattic
  • BackupBuddy – Premium service from iThemes
  • DIY – Easier than you might think
  • WPEngine – or other awesome hosts that perform backups for you
  • WordPress.com sites are automatically backed up
  • Practice restoring from a backup!!! Make sure backup files are valid, but also be sure you know how to do it!
• Other ideas?
  • Security/ malware checks – Sucuri
  • Pingdom – downtime detector
  • Server Monitor – Android app
  • Down for everyone or just me?
  • Hosts that are optimized for WordPress include: zippykid, bluehost, wpengine, dreamhost, hostgator, page.ly