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Newsletter Glue, is it for you?

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Sorry about the corny click-bait title, but it’s the mood for today, so I’m just going to roll with it.

Over the summer I saw Lesley Sim tweet about a new plugin she was introducing and it peaked my interest! It solves a very particular niche, but one that needed a better solution than what’s out there currently.

Publish new content and then …

When you regularly post new content you’d love for you audience to find that content, right? So, in order to make that happen, you’ve no doubt created a newsletter for people to subscribe to.

But here’s the problem with that. You have to go into Mailchimp to physically publish those newsletters or use the ugly RSS powered solution. Both are not ideal. And this is where Newsletter Glue comes into play.

Easy set up

The plugin, in a very simple way, connects your site with your Mailchimp (or a few other newsletter services) audience list and integrates inside your editor quite smartly. When you’re getting ready to post your new article, just click on the checkbox to send that post out to list and you’re golden. Couldn’t be easier.

Just check out this video where Lesley explains the flow of the plugin:

I’ve already implemented their plugin on a couple of sites now. You even get some styling control over how your post is going to look as email.

All in all, I’m a big fan of Newsletter Glue, almost as much as Lesley loves pizza I think. There are a few things I’d like to see added, though.

  1. I’d love for a custom text area below the post being sent. It allows for you to add a CTA or some explanation.
  2. Not being able to use this integration on Custom Post Types is a bit of a bummer. Allowing for all content to be pushed out would be wonderful feature.
  3. Scheduled posts should be sent out as an email at the time the post is scheduled. Not when you schedule the post. Or so it seems they’re being processed.

But that’s it. It does what it promises wonderfully. Go and test for yourself!

Update:
Lesley reached out to me and let me know that all items of my list will be added in the short future. Today, October the 7th, every single item on my list has been added and/or fixed in the plugin. I am impressed.

WordProof awards €1M grant by European Commission

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This week was an exciting week for Dutch startup WordProof as they were awarded a €1 Million prize by the European Commission.

With this contest, Europe aims to stimulate the use of blockchain technology to solve social problems. WordProof, founded one year ago, managed to leave 175 participants from all over Europe behind. Which is quite an impressive feat for this young startup.

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The plan and schedule for WordPres 5.0

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Ever since WordCamp Europe 2018 in Belgrade, people have been anxiously waiting for the release schedule of WordPress 5.0. Specifically, when will Gutenberg finally been added to core.

Well, the wait is over. Matt Mullenweg published a plan for WordPress 5.0 over at the Make WordPress Core blog. This is what he had to say about it:

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WordPress.com, Jetpack and How It’s All Changing, Maybe?

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Having a commercial version of WordPress alongside a non-profit version has been confusing. Especially to those starting out with WordPress, but not exclusively those new to it. It would be a great win for the WordPress Community if Automattic’s flagship product, WordPress.com, would rebrand itself to Jetpack.com. I have said this, half-jokingly, in the past decade to anyone who would listen. #sorrynotsorry.

But with WordPress.com now allowing for plugins and themes to be activated on their platform, the lines get even more blurry.

The Need to Make Money

Since Automattic is running on venture capital money, at some point it’s going to focus on monetization even more. If you have been paying close attention to how the sign-up between a stand-alone WordPress installation and Jetpack has changed over the last couple of months, you will have noticed. For a brief period, the free option was even hidden in the “Skip for now” button below the pricing table you’re greeted with when you connect Jetpack to your site.

You may have also noticed Automattic opening up their affiliate program. It includes Jetpack, WordPress.com, and everything WooCommerce now. All clear signs that Automattic has made monetization a higher priority in recent months. And judging by a tweet sent out yesterday at the Affiliate Summit, Jetpack is taking a very prominent role:

Changes in Branding

What’s even more interesting, navigating to the WordPress.com main page–make sure you’re logged out–will show you a WordPress frontpage without any signs of a W. Meaning the WordPress logo. I’m not sure when this changed, but it’s a very clear sign that WordPress.com’s branding is changing.

It’s just pure speculation on my part that this will lead to switching from WordPress.com to Jetpack.com, but I for one would welcome the change. I also think it will help send less of a mixed message for those entering the WordPress Community, Automattic’s affiliate program or both. 😉

5 Steps to Consider When Taking over a Slow WordPress site

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If you provide WordPress services sooner or later you will run into a client that has had their site built on WordPress by someone and are now concerned with the website being slow and they want you to fix it.

You start looking into it and notice their hosting is a bit sucky and also their theme was poorly built or they’re using a “premium” theme that is isn’t all that great for performance.

It is a real challenge, how do you go about it?

1. Explain what is involved to the client

The client already did some investment on the website and they may not be very happy to invest a lot more. Try to reaffirm their purpose and then state what it will take to get there. Don’t compromise or settle for less simply because they already invested. It will be worse if they invest some more and keep the same problems. Establish your terms and what it will take for you to become the tech CO for their website. Because that is what you’re signing up for when you say yes.

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A Reboot of Some Sorts

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For many, many, many moons, this blog has been slumbered. Not quite dead, but certainly not alive and kicking. And as I’ve hinted on twitter a couple of weeks back, this is about to change. WP Realm started out as a multi-person project, but from now on this is a one-man project handled by me, Remkus.

Forces have been set in motion to give WP Realm a reboot of some sorts. Our focus on the community aspect of the WordPress project will remain strong, but we’ll be adding a few things to the mix.

New Content

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How to get started as a WordPress Developer

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WordPress is the web’s most popular content management system powering over 70,000,000 websites worldwide. With this amount of mass-usage, some of the most talented developers around have chosen WordPress as their development platform of choice. These developers aren’t born with the skills to make WordPress functional and elegant.

Fortunately, there are numerous resources to help developers hone their WordPress mojo. This article is intended to serve as a resource for both newcomers and seasoned developers to both learn how to develop better websites and how to find answers to often ambiguous or complex questions.

1. Prerequisites

As far as development goes, WordPress has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any platform. This doesn’t mean that anyone can become without having any other web experience. These the folowing items are the foundation of any WordPress Developer’s skills.

HTML, CSS & JavaScript

HTML, CSS and Javascript are the basic building blocks of the web. Having a solid grasp of these tools will help immensely when developing on WordPress, or any other web platform at that. Luckily these languages are relatively easy to learn, but it takes time to master. There are countless books and online courses around to teach you these skills. I recommend W3 Schools to learn the basics then moving to a more advanced course like Lynda.com or Treehouse. There are also countless books available.

PHP & MySQL

WordPress’s Content management system is written almost exclusively in PHP with MySQL as it’s database backbone. Having a grasp these two technologies will help you develop better on the platform. Lynda.com has a great introductory course to PHP & MySQL which will walk you through building your own (custom) CMS. Though many the things you learn, such as database queries and includes are handled by WordPress through its own functions, understanding what these functions actually do under the hood will help you build sites better.

Local Development Environment

Having a local development environment allows you to work with WordPress on your own computer and is the quickest way to develop sites. This is part of any standard development workflow. There are several ways to install WordPress locally. The easiest way to do this is with something like BitNami which allows you to install all off of the WordPress components through an easy to use application. To get more advanced install an AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. MAMP is a good way to do this for users on a Mac. WAMP is a good tool for users on a windows machine. The most advanced users often opt in to installing these services individually and often replace the standard PHP install with PHP-FPM and Apache with NGINX for better performance while using fewer system resources. Who Is Hosting This also offers reviews of the top shared hosting packages, which could be a great option for developers just getting started, or is having trouble working from a local server.

Staging Environment

Once changes are made to a site locally, in a standard development workflow, the next step is to push the files to a staging environment. This will mimic how a production (public-facing) website will loop and perform, but is not publicly accessible. Launching a small cloud server instance through a company like Digital Ocean is an affordable way of creating a staging environment on a dedicated cloud server, less than $5 per month.

Note: Amazon Web Services and Rackspace are the top two providers of cloud servers, but Digital Ocean is much cheaper, and is a startup.

Text Editor / IDE

Choosing a text editor can be a very personal choice, such as choosing a brand of cars. With that being said, some text editors are much more fit for WordPress than others. The editor of choice for most WordPress developers is Sublime Text 2, which is an open source text editor with a wide range of features. Pauluund has a great post on Web Development with Sublime Text, which will show you all of the key features that a WordPress developer would use.

2. Working With WordPress

Now that all of the prerequisites have been met, it is time for the fun part, working with WordPress.

Installing WordPress

Installing WordPress is super-easy with the famous 5-minute install. One thing to note is that the instructions are listed on the WordPress Codex. The Codex is WordPress’s living documentation, and is a great point of reference for almost any WordPress issue.

When Things Go Wrong…

Most, if not all developer run into problems, especially when they are first getting started. When this happens, it is important to find the right place to get support.

Getting Basic WordPress Support

WordPress is a thriving Open Source project with thousands of active community members. Many of them offer their assistance through things like forms and Q&A sites. For most questions, the best place to go is the WordPress Support Forums and post the issue in the appropriate category. Most posts get responses (and subsequent answers) within a matter of hours. Be as specific as possible for the best results; the more information the better.

More Advanced Support

Another place to get support is the WordPress Stack Exchange. Similar to Stack Overflow, there are hundreds of daily active users. Please note, Stack Exchange has very specific rules for formatting and what questions should be asked, keep all questions on the WordPress topic. For more generalized programming questions, Stack Overflow is the appropriate Q&A Site. All of the questions on these sites are geared towards developers.