Looking to set up a website using WordPress, one of the world most popular content management systems?

Assess your skills (ftp, html, css, php) and what you are prepared to do yourself, and how good you are at educatng yourself using the web.  Then consider your options.

WordPress.com PROS

• easy to get going even if no skills
• free, or can add premium feaures (they add up)
• videopress ($60/year)
• custom css for own styling or tweaks ($30/year)
• post or moderate using your phone (usa only)
• can map your existing  domain there ($12/year), or register a domain through them($17/year)
• they’ll keep you up to date with wordpress at least.
• language aspects are pre-loaded
• if you want to allow comments, wordpress.com has good antispam built in, althoiugh you can also add that feature (akismet) in to a self hosted site.
• you’re hosted by wordpress.com – so you are on a server where all the sites are running wordpress

WordPress.com CONS

What to do:

Consider

• your skill levels
• website requirements and it’s implications (eg:membership, comments – you need anti-spam)
• how much you are prepared to pay for someone to assist you if you need assistance.

It is free to open a wordpress.com site, so give it a go – you’ll need it anyway if you want to use their anti-spam service askimet, or the wordpress.com stats via the jetpack plugin.

If you are comfortable with doing many things yourself or are prepared to hire the skills you need, and know how to test your website and any plugins you add, consider going with a self hosted solution.  You can either do it yourself – there are heaps of guides out there.

If you want to get going quickly, I can have you up and running within a day if you use icdsoft as your host

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What potential customers will see if they have an adblocker installed

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photo by ecastro

A Seth Godin post on the irrelevance of price to content, struck me as relevant to plugin development.

People walking out of the afternoon bargain matinee at the movies don’t cut the film any slack because it was half price. Critics piling on to a music video on YouTube never mention the fact that HEY IT WAS FREE. There is no thrift store for content. Sure, we can get an old movie for ninety-nine cents, but if we hate it, it doesn’t matter how cheap it was. If we’re going to spend time, apparently, it better be perfect, the best there ever was, regardless of price.

It also made me think about the responsibility one has in putting something out ‘there’ – making it free does not absolve one of responsibility for it.  Certainly one should not put something half baked out there.  There are many plugins loaded up that never amount to anything – why do people bother?

Is it responsible ?

The culture of free

Certainly the culture of ‘free’ is (I think) changing.  Services like itunes have proven that there is a market for paid apps.  Some want to ‘pay more’  – they hope they’ll get a better product, and sometimes they do.

There have been many controversial posts on the web about the whole free/paid plugin question.

I’ve noticed that most of the time, when someone has paid for a plugin, they have a vested interest in telling the developer if they experience a problem on their system. This helps the developer understand if there aspects of server setup, or interactions with themes that you did not expect, or perhaps where there is a gap in the documentation or ease of installation.

When the plugin is free, while many are grateful and supportive, others can be quite harsh. A brusque “does not work” ! with no details. They do not stop to wonder why a highly rated plugin used by many does not work on their system – were they on an old core system, did it work on the default theme – who knows?

They slate it, uninstall and move on to the next free one.

The developer knows it works because he tested it (hopefully) on several wp versions, several browsers etc…. but clearly there was a situation somewhere that caused a problem.

Moral of the story?

Releasing a well developed free version is great for exposure, but do not do it unless it is reasonably robust and you are prepared to a some support ….

A free plugin I was using was not doing it’s job like it used to …. a quick look at both forums (wp and the well regarded authors main site) revealed a number of unhappy users. The developers who were perhaps too busy to dedicate time to the ‘free’ plugin, but could perhaps have handled the situation better…. what is left is a slight feeling of negativity.

Some developers have the attitude that they have offered up some code for free and users should debug it and modify it… well….. in some communities where everyone has some ‘expertise’ that philosophy is totally valid.

Too easy

However WordPress has become so accessible to so many. Many WordPress users do not even have html or css skills, let alone php…… As for basic debugging skills ….I sigh at some posts at wordpress – what do these people expect ?  that they can run their web design business leveraging off the good will of others ?

One of the reasons that WP Help desk shut down apparently was that they found it hard to find good staff who were prepared to put up with abusive users of free plugins. How sad

The dangers of too easy and free…..

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It was gratifying to have my development approach so well demonstrated recently.

Lifehacker (from Gawker ) without javascript enabled

Gawker and Lifehacker  had some major problems due to their over reliance on javascript, or rather in particular an aspect of js.   See the wall street journal article. With what Gawker and Lifehacker had done, any bad piece of js would break their webs – what a risk to take.

The situation and reasons are documented quite nicely by

• Mike Davies: isolani – describes the dangers of hashbang urls and the reliance then on perfect js
• adactio – describes the robustness principle and why this is important
• Kyle Neath – on why url design is important.   See the section on querystrings – this is how the wordpress event management plugin can be very powerful through the  use of parameters passed to the query string.

Good plugin development

I have always  developed starting with basic validated html that is not reliant on css, let alone javascript.  Css and if absolutely necessary javascript are added only after the whole thing works with the just the html.  Go ahead – try to create a event using my events plugin with javascript disabled  … yes you will see a whole host of recurring event options that you did not even know were there, most importantly, it will still work!

Remember to switch the js back on again before you start wondering why all sorts of functionality is not working!

I have been increasingly concerned about the over reliance on javascript, in particular how easy it is for a plugin with poor js scripts to break bits of your website.

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Message received was:

Catchable fatal error: Object of class __PHP_Incomplete_Class could not be converted to string in C:\web\wp28\wp\wp-includes\formatting.php on line 405

I had previously worked through another problem with this 9640 patch.  While it fixed another problem, I then started to get this one.  Eventually I found this   http://lists.automattic.com/pipermail/wp-trac/2009-July/053190.html, and  it dawned on me,

Red dawn in Sydney

A test system – plugins not fully uninstalled….Hmm…   In testing amr-users, my user reporting plugin, I have had several plugins installed that create user data, not all of them active now.   I dived into phpmyadmin, deleted any usermeta that related to plugins not in use, and viola – user editing problems fell away

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I always knew that there was a lot that one could do with text widgets and the way that wordpress works, and yet I still found myself wishing that the search widget was different and not wanting to hard code the code in the theme, but have it work across themes etc etc etc….

And then the light bulb lit up:

For a cleaner leaner search widget that says “search”, not “find”, create a text widget and enter:

<form id="searchform" action="" method="get">
<input id="s" type="text" tabindex="1" size="16" value="" name="s"/>
<input id="searchsubmit" type="submit" tabindex="2" value="Search" name="searchsubmit"/>
</form>

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You are simply wasting your time and making it harder for your valid visitors and for valid emails to get t o you..

Jason Priem puts the case fairly well.

So what to do?

Use a good spam filter.    Gmail does the best job so far and yes you can continue to use your domain name email.

I have the following setup:

1. email@domain is forwarded to Gmail
2. Gmail set to send as email@domain
3. Email software (outlook or thunderbird for eg) set to use IMAP against Gmail (use folders and lables work well together, are synschronised)

This means that I have a local backup of everything that is on gmail (yes – maybe gears is also kinda a local backup), and should Gmail fail, I simply unforward from my domain email and start accessing it directly from the email package.

A while back when Gmail seemed a bit slow, I tried taking it out of the loop, but with a couple of weeks was back again – their accuracy in handling spam is amazing, less spam and less false positives – this makes all the difference.

Some detail on the battle.

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There are a number of places where one can find images that one may use to complement a website or article:

Stockxpert has an excellent set and is probably the best place to start

• their photographers are vetted
• the photo’s are excellently tagged and categorised to enable searching in a variety of ways.  the lightboxes help you bookmark and save.
• the prices are reasonable, and the images are royalty free.
• Note that you cannot use the material for resale – check and understand their standard license

Flickr is also a possibility, although since it is not primarily focused on providing stock images, it will probably be harder to find suitable images.  Here you must ensure that you

• use the advanced search criteria to select only those images with the appropriate license
• check the specific image license and follow the terms (ag: attribution)
• the tagging and categorisation are not designed for our purposes

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I will also be evaluating this area for a client who is considering using this.  We are cautious as reputation, integrity and authenticity are important.

Why an affiliate program?

If you want to generate some additional interest in your web site offerings, an affiliate program may be a way to go.  It is an encouragement to interested parties who have found your product already and presumably like it,  to write a review of your product or offering and to link to it.  Of course some do this more elegantly than others….

Some affiliate services out there are (and yes there are affiliate links behind some of these !):

• Affiliate-Ladder.com
  • keeps you within their system it seems, so the link is to their system and they then redirect to the site you are advocating.  This is not great – means that you cannot link to subpages of the site.
• 1shoppingcart.com
  • offers a self branded affiliate program

  …

• There are more reviews of affiliate software , but I do not have any personal experience of these

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This is good and bad -> good -> will probably be up to date with latest web possibilities and bad in that it may not have had time to get robust.

At this point I have not used all these products, however I will be putting a new of membership sites live in the coming months, and intend to update this post with our experiences.    These notes represent our initial evaluation based on freely available information.

Requirements:

• a plugin type solution, could be one that requires integration, but no hosted solutions (want to minimise third parties)
• membership levels (free, or trial, and paid levels)
• may require rss or podcast secure access
• at least paypal gateway
• want wordpress blog posts to convert to  be emailed out

Your Members by New Media ( first choice so far)

• Paypal payment gateway, and Clickbank
• Single One off Payments(long Term or Pay per post)
• Subscription
• Free and Trial Membership, multiple roles
• Post/Page Delay – useful for course content delivery
• Protect parts of posts using Private Short Code, or
• Complete post protection
• Secure RSS with Tokens – allows full content feeds
• $50 for single license
• $200 for developer license
• domain registered since May 2008, newish
• a very human face, you can see who the guys are (Tim Nash and Sean Barton)
• I like the style of the website – augers well for the style of the code
• also has a affiliate program – vetted
• Support
  • manual
    – could use an update, but not that hard to get going
  • forum – they guys are very responsive
  • they do have some screencasts

Memberwing

• has a free version, without the gradual content.  Otherwise
  • $80 (automated membership, else manual effort needed, Also more gateways.)
  • $100 including the gradual content
  • $200  unlimited domains
• Teaser markers not that intuitive for non-tech clients – I’d like a more user friendly way – will have to think about it…
• Forum says “coming soon… “
• Uses paypal IPN (works with paypal standard), authorize.net, 2chcekout, Trialpay etc
• implements google’s First Click Free – is this a good idea or not?
• has a separate gradual content plugin ($80 for single, $150 unlimited)
  
• has a not completly setup affiliate program – missing the name in the email title!
• domain created July 2008
• No humanness, although I believe Gleb is the man – contrast to the shopp plugin where Jon is quite visible and forum active.
• I tend to be influenced by the style of the site as a guide to the “panache” (or cleverness of design) with which a plugin is developed.  Gleb – vamp up the style and get the forum going!!!
• Functionality wise it looks good -I have to give the free version a go and if the quality looks good, then give the premium a go.
• has an affiliate program so may be more reviews out there than would be otherwise – common sense and pinch of salt required!

Wishlist Member

• Unlimited Membership Levels, Free, Trial, or Paid
• Sequential Content Delivery
• Subscription Length Control
• Secure Content, partial content display
• Secure RSS feed key
• Supports PayPal, Clickbank, Google Checkout, and 1ShoppingCart.
• has lots of support videos
• no demo, but videos essentially deliver that
• Online “ticket” support M-F 9-5, nopublic forum – no visibility of general queries, no forum
• Has a customer area for when one has purchased
• $97 – One domain, updates and 3 months support (30 day refund offer?)
• $297 – multi-site-own personal domains (ei: not a developer license), updates plus training material
• domain registered since April 2008, newish
• no visibility of frequency of updates
• appears to rely on paypal, or quick pay pro to do any recurring subscriptions – have to set the products up in those system.

Amember.com

Amember control panel

• Has a plugin to integrate with wordpress, however the admin area has a very different look and feel from wordpress.
• $179.95 to $200, plus extra for cms plugin
• For incremental contemt (I guess this is the course type iodea, one may want amemberincremental
• forum support, accessible to public, and posts say support is great
• It is not completely clear to me at this stage, but it appears that the products provided in this joint venture between ithemes cory miller and David Moskowitz are in addition to amember: http://www.membershipacademy.com/wordpress-amember.php
• domain registered since 2003, more established
• I don’t like the look and feel of the control panel – what does it look like in wordpress?
• has some possibly useful demographic reporting
• It was first choice – see how far I got here

WP Member – advanced membership Plugin

• Dedicated wordpress plugin – may make for a more consistent admin interface
• Various levels of support, plus you can buy on-demand support
• Uses Paypal IPN
• Variety of membership types, levels
• Subscription control, teaser pages
• File download and link protection
• Requires IonCube Php extension
• Yearly license fees, (1 – $34.99, 5-$51.99 and 10-$84.99)so this means ongoing costs for your client.  This differs from the others in that they often simply restrict the upgrades that you have access to.
• domain registered since July 2008, so relatively new

wp-membership.com by Synergy Software

• has a demo where you can logon as admin, not enough pre-populated data – would take a bit of effort to test out.
• a forum which at time of writing was rather empty
• offers paypal and authorize.net
• similar to suma in having consistent look and feel but not that sophisticated in functionality yet, but probably has all the basic needs.
• Single instance, plus authorize.net ($30 + $10)
• offers a range of pricing for developers from $142.36 for 5 to approx $900 for 60+
• domain registered since October 2008, so one of the newest
• They need to provide more info to attract me.
• One has to enter/specify the posts that are restricted, or the categories.  We need also the shortcode idea with a “teaser” – that should be easy to add in though.
• users don”t seem to be integrated with wordpress users – why not, also has own pages.  From a design point of view, I’d rather worth with wordpress’s design than alongside it.

Suma Membership and Subscription Management

• has a demo site
• $199, one time, not transferrable,  no developer arrangement, so must buy in client’s name to be legally correct
• Uses Paypal express as payment method
• Says it requires you to have a PayPal Website Payments Pro accoun, so that means $30 a month at least.  Not sure why it says this, since the Express checkout can be free of monthly costs.
• Support – appears to be via  an email address only – no forum, no humanness
• Can download an evaluation copy
• Very much a part of wordpress, so consistent look and feel – looks like a clean, simple setup (nice for non tech clients), but probably limited to exactly what its says – paid subscription and membership – no drip feed, no course content
• domain registered since September 2008, so relatively new

Not a Plugin, but may be helpful to some – also indicates complexity of integration?:

membershipacademy

• Actually more of a facilitation service where David Moskowitz helps you get going with a membership system.  I found it amusing that it is essentially a meta membership site – a membership site about having a membership site.
• It also has a useful review of membership site software, although many of these are separate from wordpress or are hosted versions.
• Demo site: http://www.wordpressamember.com

Avoid the following

Don’t worry – there is a no follow on the links…..

membership-plugin.com

• Avoid..My feeling is not good about this one:
  • absolutely no “human face”, hidden domain name ownership
  • no forum, just a support form
  • Bullshit? I quote “Membership Plugin is the most sought after and most used wordpress membership / subscription plugin in the world” – I only found a mention it after several days.. .
  • Manual page text links don’t work
  • annoying animations
  • Site is hard to read green/blue text on green/blue background ??

wpmembersite.com

• what the ? See above (except there is a name attached)
• it’s a one pager and seemingly unattended
• ! video which clearly shows old wordpress and there is not much else there – maybe it does something, who knows
• support forum link is full of crap

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