Small Business Success

This month’s WPToronto East meetup focused on small business. A recurring theme from our discussion was the importance of “content first”. That is, getting your page content ready before you start building a new website.

We took a peek at the new WordPress Websites product from GoDaddy, which uses a unique wizard to ask users about their business. Based on the information the user provides, the website is pre-loaded with placeholder pages and content.

We also looked at the upcoming release of WordPress 4.7. The new visual edit shortcuts in Customizer were well-received, as was the introduction of Post Templates. Developer notes can be found on the Make WordPress Core blog:

Twenty Seventeen, the new default theme for WordPress, will be shipping with WordPress 4.7. From WP Tavern:

Twenty Seventeen is the shot in the arm that WordPress needs to make it easy to set up a business website with a trusted, well-supported theme.

It’ll be interesting to see how small businesses put Twenty Seventeen to use, and how Twenty Seventeen will work alongside plugins like Beaver Builder.

Speaking of page builders…

Page Builders

We discussed “mega themes” for WordPress:

And page builder plugins:

Tool Recommendations

For locking down sites before they’re ready to go live:

Handling forms:

Formidable (lean, responsive, dev-friendly)
Formstack (SaaS, build then deploy anywhere)
Ninja Forms
CFDB
Gravity Forms

CRM & analytics:

IDEs for web development:

Editors:

Plugins:

WP Editor (syntax highlighting plugin)

Q&As

Some members came to the group with specific questions. Here’s what we talked about, including links to relevant sources:

Want to have a separate homepage and blog page?

Create two pages, e.g. Home and Blog
Update your Reading settings to use a Static homepage
Use the Blog page for Posts

What are some good resources for brushing up on dev skills?

HTML5 & CSS: MDN, Codecademy, CSS Tricks
JavaScript: MDN, Codecademy
NodeJS: Felix’s Node guide, The Node Beginner Book
AngularJS: A better way to learn AngularJS, Airpair tutorial
REACT: REACT for Beginners, Learning React
WordPress REST API: SitePoint tutorial, WP REST-API docs

Does Jetpack support local site development?

Yep! You’ll need to enable Development Mode.

Has the WordPress plugin review process changed?

The guidelines were updated to reflect existing practices.

Additional Notes

Thanks to Robin for putting these additional notes together.

The GoDaddy review post to which I referred is GoDaddy Launches New Onboarding Experience for WordPress Customers | WordPress Tavern.I ran across this post, A Glance Into Web Tech.-Based Text Editors’ Text Management | Eccentric Computing, which is a technical review of a few of the web-based editors discussed yesterday. It’s over my head technically but interesting nonetheless.These are links I gathered and reviewed in preparation for the session largely because I’m planning to try out 2017:
1. WordPress (official):
2. other:
  Re editors, the CSS editing and management capability in HTML Editor | UltraEdit that I mentioned was HTML Tidy; see HTML Tidy command. It also provides HTML validation which I consider essential in an HTML editor but the key for me was Tidy and its not my primary editor. It’s also a CSS and PHP editor. The editor’s developers say it has 2 million users.
  
  The 2 URLs for 4.7 notes using the tag “4.7” are 4.7 | Make WordPress Core(yours) and 4.7 | Make WordPress Core (mine).
  
  I don’t recall if you found the Pippin Williamson post on page builders but here it is just in case you didn’t get it: WordPress Page builder plugins: a critical review – Pippins Plugins. His comments on the use and role of page builders in general is worth reading. There was quite a reaction to his post because of his reputation.

Image credit: paulbr75 via Pixabay