WP Builds

WP Builds Newsletter #31 - Gutenberg Cloud, WPForms buys forms plugin and robots on asteriods

I've often pondered the idea of setting up some kind of SaaS product, something that I could build and then turn it over to the public and they would be able to purchase it from me on a monthly basis. I think that when people do this with WordPress it's called WaaS. Is that right? Well, one of the things that I've always wanted to do was to set up a system where clients could sign up to a monthly / annual website plan, pick a theme that they liked, pay and it would all be automated - done for them (and me) as if by magic. Arindo Duque has built such a thing and, honestly, it's a little gem that you ought to explore if this idea has ever tempted you too.

WP Builds Newsletter #30 - WordPress 4.9.9, Gutenberg updates and the world's oldest cheese

I’m not that keen on writing. It’s one of the things that we all have to do, but it’s not my greatest strength as you can tell if you are reading this. What I dislike more than just writing though is writing proposals for prospective clients. I don’t like it because I’m not very good at getting my points across all that succinctly and I find it hard to get into the ‘style’ that I need to adopt to make it have a fighting chance of being read and accepted. Well, don’t you love living in the age of the internet where there is an online service for just about everything that you could possibly need in life? Adam Hempenstall discovered that there were people like me all over the planet; people who needed to hand writing their proposals.

WP Builds Newsletter #29 - New vunerabilites, Drupal Elementor and significant Chrome updates

We have a 'special guest' called Paul Lacey from Dickie Birds to discuss the always relevant subject of pricing, and more specifically do better paying clients mean 'better' clients? We all know that the answer is, annoyingly, sometimes, it all depends and maybe! Ha! There's no guarantee that, just because someone has deep pockets, they are going to fun to work with. Sometimes the fact that a client is paying more for your WordPress products and services means that you have more 'bandwidth' to absorb the many problems that arise during your website build, but equally, clients that have very tight budgets can be very demanding of your time and have expectations far above what their wallet will realistically allow!

WP Builds Newsletter #28 - Long live the Classic Editor, Gutenberg updates and AI taking our jobs

Right, so we know that WordPress is pretty cool don't we? Glad that we got that straight. It does heaps of things really, really well, but honestly, it's got limitations! That's why we have plugins! A few years ago I needed to build a site for an estate agent (realtor for you folk over in North America I think). This site needed the ability to show a list of properties on the market, but the client wanted the users of the site to be able to filter the list of properties so that only the ones that matched their criteria were shown to them. So... houses under £300k, with a garage.... Well, trying to pull that off in WordPress is jolly hard, but thankfully Matt Gibbs got there before you! He's created a plugin called Facet WP which is the answer to all your filtering prayers (you do have filtering prayers don't you)!

WP Builds Newsletter #27 - ClassicPress fork, multisite media library and cPanel acquired

This week we have Eric Debelak on the podcast talking about... what else... Gutenberg! Eric is a bit of a fan of Gutenberg. So much so in fact that he's spent quite a bit of time working on a project specifically for Gutenberg. It's called WPBlocks.Party! Seeing as how the WordPress community is full of clever people, those same clever people (like Eric) decided that it would be very nice to have more than just the standard set of blocks that Gutenberg comes with. We need more than just text and images and videos in a modern platform don't we?