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
- 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
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