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WordPress Site Management Best Practices – 5 Bad Habits to Avoid

In my experience as a WordPress developer and consultant, I have run across many users of WordPress who fall victim to some very bad habits. When consulting clients about WordPress site management, I’ve seen a lot, and I’ve fixed a lot.

Here are some of the most common bad habits that I’ve come across when it comes to WordPress site management. I’ll tell you what they are and how to fix them. Some of my comments might seem harsh, but consider it a dose of tough love. I’m trying to help you, not insult you.

If you are blogging for money or maintaining a professional brand image, don’t try to chintz on these. Bad habits will end up costing you more in both money and time. If you don’t know how to do some of these, it is prudent to either learn or to hire someone (even if that is just on a consulting basis). It will save you money in the long run! [Read more…]

WordPress Trends Infographic

By Chad Butler Leave a Comment

WordPress continues to grow in market share. At present, it powers over 20% of all web sites. When you consider sites that are using content management systems, WP’s market share is 58.5%, with the next closest being Joomla at 9.5%. There is no question that WordPress has momentum to grow some more and I’ve staked a big piece of my business on it.

Nick Roach at ElegantThemes has put together a nice infographic to visualize WP’s growth trend.

View the full WordPress Trends Infographic designed by ElegantThemes.com.

RocketGeek.com Rebuild on Genesis 2.0 Framework

By Chad Butler Leave a Comment

With the launch of Genesis 2.0, I have been getting my hands dirty with the Genesis Framework. I’ve always liked the framework, and I’ve owned it for quite some time; but I never really got in there and made full use of it.

After giving butlerblog.com a makeover with Genesis 2.0, I moved on to rocketgeek.com where all of the support goes on for WP-Members.

RocketGeek.com had launched in 2012 for supporting WP-Members and was built around Twitter Bootstrap. At the time, I liked what I could do with Bootstrap, and since part of the site’s function is to show how flexible the WP-Members framework is, that gave me the opportunity to do some pretty cool things with the plugin framework. To make these reproduceable for users of the plugin, these were all written up as example code on the site in the “How I Did It” category.

But there is always room for improvement. With Genesis 2.0, I decided to get in there are give that site a makeover. It is not fully complete, but the Phase 1 build is launched. Go over to rocketgeek.com and take a look. The site is running on Genesis 2.0 and WP-Members.

Here are some of the cool custom features that I did (and I’ll be adding these as new tutorials in the “How I Did It” category):

Unique login page makes use of the Genesis full width template so we don’t show two login forms (body and sidebar widget). Also, this page uniquely styles the login form and adds some text for non-members inviting them to learn more about joining.
Now running the WP-Members with the Genesis Stylesheet Pack Add-on. There will be additional stylesheet add-ons in the future, but I am still trying to get through plug-and-play stylesheets for the plugin to integrate with the various StudioPress child themes. And as Brian Gardner continues to roll out new versions of the various child themes for the 2.0 Framework, that will likely keep things pretty busy over here.
Site continues to run with the WP-Members PayPal Subscription Add-on, which will be getting a major update after we roll out and test it on the site.
More to come!

There is still a lot to do for Phase 2, but I am excited about the project. For those of you that liked the Bootstrap Tabs that I had done as an example on the old site, I’ll be doing another tabbed customization of the login/registration form combination as part of Phase 2. The Bootstrap version was pretty tricky to implement. I hope that this new one turns out to be an easier customization for general users to implement.