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WordCamp Soltau Recap

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Last weekend Taco, Karin and I from team Yoast attended a new kind of WordCamp. A WordCamp Retreat. Located in the North of Germany we experienced a very relaxed WordCamp with some interesting differences from your regular WordCamps.

I’ve written a full recap for WP Tavern which was published this morning, and this is one of the things I mentioned there:

Most of this was made possible by the location. Hotel Park Soltau is located in the North of Germany surrounded by woods and heath. The hotel was reserved for WordCamp attendees only. Everyone stayed there, ate there, and networked there. It was an incredibly immersive experience on a different level than any of the other WordCamps I’ve attended.

I highly encourage you to read the rest on The Tavern and do let me know if you have any questions.

On Theme Onboarding in WordPress

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One of the actions that raise a lot of questions over for clients over at WP ServicePoint is the moment when a client decides to switch to a new design, a new theme. It’s one of those actions that is surprisingly poor handled by the vast majority of the themes out there. A few of the questions I saw in our mail queue made it very obvious that there are themes out there that really shouldn’t be handled by new to average WordPress users.

That’s a bold statement, right? Well, yes it is, but it’s also true. And yes, some of those themes were the kind that tries to solve every damn website layout solution out there in just one theme, but truth be told, there were some themes that were in itself simple enough, but required just too many steps to make them look anything like the demo. And that’s just not okay.

A while ago my son wrote about his general onboarding experience as a WordPress newbie. In the second step, he describes the experience of activating a theme for the first time. What was very clear to me from that exercise is that that particular onboarding experience is just really poor.  We should be doing better. And since we’ve started building premium themes as well, I started looking around to see what was out there.

Some plugins are already doing it right

Turns out, there are some plugins that are doing it right. A great example would be Yoast SEO‘s plugin that provides a wizard that runs you through setting up the plugin configuration. Their inspiration comes from WooCommerce’s wizard that helps you set up your shop.

Some smaller plugins do a simplified version of that. Upon activating the plugin a few short and simple options are presented, some pages (required by the plugin) are automatically assigned and or created, that sort of thing. WP Car Manager is a good example of such a setup.  So what about themes then?

Theme onboarding

I’ve looked extensively at the vast list of premium (and free) themes available to me, but none provided a flow that would solve the issues and questions Roan ran into. The “best” solution I found was upon activating the theme, redirecting to a setup page inside the WordPress Dashboard. On that setup page, a whole range of instructions was provided on how to set up the various parts that made up the whole of the design. Think menu, frontpage settings, import demo content, import widget settings, install required plugins, etc. Array Themes is one of those theme shops that handle this very nicely in their themes.

But, I was looking for a complete solution where Mike McAlister from Array Themes’ implementation would be the end-point of a wizard like setup – like Yoast SEO is providing– not the first step.  So, I turned to twitter to ask for help:

Hopeful Results

Turns out, there are really not that many solutions out there. There are two platform dedicated solutions out there that are interesting, but since they rely too heavily on the specific platform they’re designed for, they’re not really that useful. One solution is for onboarding themes from ThemeForest/Envato (demo video | code on Github) and the other was the general WordPress + BeaverBuilder theme onboarding experience on the GoDaddy hosting platform (blog post, demo video, some code on Github).

But there’s hope. I was introduced by Ana Segota to the most promising solution out there. It turns out to be a project that is currently in the works and it’s called Merlin WP by Rich Tabor. The demonstration video shows what happens when you activate the theme and how it takes care of installing required plugins, installing demo content, importing widgets and more.

Clearly, there’s movement on the Theme Onboarding Front, and I for one am very keen to learn how Rich plans to add all the necessary flexibility in there. There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with a smooth running wizard, provided you allow for options and opt-outs – like for instance, not all themes will be installed on new sites – and extra steps and integrations like licensing for example.

So, I’d love to know what you guys think about this. Would love to have your input on what scenarios should or should not be included in such a wizard or if the premise of such a wizard is even a good one? Do let me know in the comments!

Demo Screencast Preparation Steps

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I love discovering new cool WordPress plugins/solutions and I love it even more if the developer has taken the effort to create a demo video of the plugin in action.

However:

So, let’s address that. What is my opinion about that? I think it comes across unprofessional and sloppy. There, I said it.

Now, it’s very easy to criticize something, but it takes effort to actually come up with a solution. Or rather, in this case, steps to take to prevent sloppy demo videos. On that note, I’d like to share with you the steps that I take before I start recording a demo.

Screencast demo preparation steps

Time needed: 2 minutes.

In order to produce a clean and distraction-free screencast, follow these steps:

  1. Close all non-related apps

    All non-essential apps should be turned off before you start recording.

  2. Use a dedicated Demo Desktop screen

    Consider using either a dedicated clean account on your computer, or if you’re using a Mac, use a dedicated screen for your recording.

  3. Kill all notifications.

    Make sure you kill all notifications before you start recording. In OSX you can do this easily in your the Notifications pane in your general settings.

  4. Set up a fresh demo installation

    Create a new and fresh local development environment with a domain name that reflects the purpose. DesktopServer will allow you to do that, for instance.

  5. Update all the things. WordPress, plugins, themes, and translations. Yes, all the things.

    Not having any updates available will allow all those OCD viewers of your screencast to focus on the actual screencast.

  6. Dismiss all notices in the Dashboard

    All those upgrade and other kinds of notices are distractions. Perhaps even use a clever way to hide and combine all those notices, but that’s a different subject 😉

  7. Hide the toolbar, bookmarks in your browser

    There are possibly personal and/or private links in your bookmarks bar, so it’s probably better to remove it while recording.

  8. Hide all the browser extensions and plugins

    This is easily done by either using a private browser window or to slide the address bar all the way to the right.

  9. Make sure you have a fitting desktop wallpaper if you have the possibility it might be shown when clicking around

    If you’re recording your entire screen and you need to click around to show what you want to show, you may want to consider a friendly background image.

That’s my demo preparation checklist. Obviously there are some things to consider when actually recording as well:

  • Use a storyboard if it’s a long demo with lots of steps
  • Do a proper introduction starting at the beginning
  • Explain your steps while you’re doing them. Don’t assume the audience knows why you click somewhere
  • Get a proper microphone that records something that’s actually similar to your voice
  • Do a proper recap

So there you have it. Problem and solution. I’m sure there’s tons of smart stuff you folks do as well when creating demo videos and I’d love for you to share them in the comments!

Further reading

Help! WordPress Won’t Do Automatic Updates!

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As you may have seen WordPress 3.7 just got released and with it automatic updates. Now, in some cases, people may discover that their particular sites can’t update automagically. In my findings in the sites, we manage for clients the most common reason is that you have had to update WordPress previously by entering your FTP credentials. If you’ve done that once, changes are WordPress remembered those for you, but in this case, those credentials need to be placed in your wp-config.php file in order for the automatic updates to work.

Luckily, all you need to do is add the following:

define( 'FTP_USER', 'username' );
define( 'FTP_PASS', 'password' );
define( 'FTP_HOST', 'ftp.example.org' ); // this usually can be 127.0.0.1

If this doesn’t work, you may need to add a few more constants–find more here–but in my experience, this solved all the issues we encountered. If you need help from a WordPress specialist, feel free to contact me.

WordCamp Europe: For The Greater Good

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Back in 2008 when I started to take over and clean up the mess that was the admin side of things of the Dutch WordPress releases, forums and translations, I got to know this one fellow who was helping me out a great deal. Zé and I got to talking —more like slow chatting via Skype & email, but you get the picture 😉

We soon realized that the International WordPress Community and all its assets needed a lot of love to get up to get to the same level as WordPress.org. One of the things we talked about was how beneficial a strong European WordPress Community would be and how we could achieve that. That was the first time we talked about what is about to happen for the very first time: WordCamp Europe. When I met Zé at WordCamp Netherlands, which I co-organised, back in 2009 we sort of started planning what we saw as the European counterpart of WordCamp San Francisco.

In the years to follow as I started attending and speaking at more European WordCamps (WordCamp Köln, WordCamp Portsmouth, WordCamp Sevilla, WordCamp Edinburgh, WordCamp Lisboa, WordCamp Norway, WordCamp Transylvania) I got to know a few more lovely people who shared our vision and a plan started to brew. Fast forward (a few years) to October 2012 at the WordPress Community Summit in Tybee, Georgia, we— a bunch of that group was attending— got the go-ahead from WordCamp Central.

stadspodia-leiden


After months of carefully looking for venues, speakers, volunteers, sponsors and everything else imaginable, we set a date in early 2013; 5, 6 & 7 October in the beautiful city of Leiden in the Netherlands. Right now there are only 38 days left to go and that makes me über excited. There’s still a lot we need to do, but the dust is starting to settle and I’m incredibly looking forward to what’s going to be the awesomest WordCamp event I’ve ever been to.

There are going to be a lot of speakers, European & other, that are going to do their best at entertaining and educating you. All designed to leave you to realize there’s a larger European Community out there. One where we’ve got lots to learn from each other and see common ground instead of borders.

All of this will flow back to the project itself and we’ll all come out of this better than we did going in. That’s at least my vision.

If you haven’t signed up yet … why not?! If you have.. please come say hi in 38 days.