Takeaways from Cloud Computing Expo 2011
Thanks to our wonderful hosting partner, Rackspace, beAutomated received free admission to this year’s Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara. I attended for 2 of the 4 days. While this conference is more enterprise IT focused, there were plenty of small business and software application takeaways.
Before beginning my notes, I wanted to express my delight in gaining confirmation that our niche business of building custom WordPress plugins provides immense value to businesses and organizations of all sizes. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) like ourselves accumulate years of knowledge that simply get lost within larger IT operations. ISVs provide affordable niche skills to clients who are concerned with turnaround speed. The value of custom core applications for businesses far exceeds anything that the cloud itself can provide, simply due to the nature of cloud software being contextual for a wide audience. Also, automation is considered essential for businesses of all sizes to control operating costs and enable superior, unique functionality that puts users in the driver’s seat. Finally, because change delivers business value, we’ll always have work in our industry!
What’s in a Phone Number?
Today’s topic is an example demonstrating the difference between requirements (marketing based) and specifications (engineering based). We have a simple example of one form field, where we’re adding a telephone number to the User Profile panel in the WordPress back end. We’ve often come across requirements like this where what appears to be a simple task becomes a bit more involved once we work on converting our client’s requirements into engineering specifications adequate for building robust software.
We typically start out with obtaining basic requirements from our prospective clients to understand the scope of their project concept. We want to ensure there is a designer involved, or somebody qualified to make design decisions when they come up. On the back end (wp-admin) we generally stick to the design conventions already there, though there may still be design implications requiring a designer’s input. Once we have all the requirements on the table and design mockups ready, we then ask questions that move us towards specifications, adequate for estimating cost and timeline for production.
Plugin Strategy
In our last blog post, Built To Last, we mentioned the necessity of building into the core of WordPress and never modifying existing plugins, themes, or core files. We wanted to expand on this topic a bit and explain more about these best practices with what we’re calling “Plugin Strategy”.
WordPress was traditionally a blogging platform and has evolved into a full featured Content Management System (CMS). It is even more than that to PHP developers. WordPress serves as a PHP framework—providing many tools and resources for developers to design their plugins with.
Despite all that WordPress has to offer developers, many don’t necessarily take the time to learn what all the core can do. This can mean reinventing the wheel by bringing in performance costing library files that otherwise aren’t necessary, making custom User Experience (UX) elements that don’t match WordPress, or creating plugins that are essentially islands to themselves based on how they store data and only mildly hook into WordPress.
Built To Last
In October 1972 the new Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system experienced what could have been a disastrous failure. An automated sensor that detected the train approaching the terminus station was supposed to slow the train down in preparation for the stop, however it reversed and sped up the train to 70MPH. The operator couldn’t prevent the train from running out of elevated track, resulting in the train falling onto the street below. Good thing this accident was part of a series of test runs with only a few individuals involved. Engineers fixed this and other problems in what was then a futuristic designed automated system that has since served the public well for nearly 40 years.
Not everything is built to last. Often times quality gives way to budget shortfalls or pressures to produce rapidly. Lackluster quality can in the worst case scenario lead to accidents and even death. Accidents cannot always be avoided, but they can often be prevented by planning well, providing detailed product specifications, building carefully, testing rigorously, and maintaining vigorously. With respect to websites, the areas one generally needs to protect are: image, operations, and valuable customer data. It makes sense to take as many measures as possible to prevent one’s Internet operations from ever becoming a train wreck!
We recently discussed the topics of WordPress security and performance as they relate to plugins. These topics aren’t necessarily the driving force behind custom plugin development, but they most certainly should be major considerations throughout the product lifecycle as internal and external forces develop. Changes that occur over time include server software developments, web browser developments, database buildup, WordPress core developments, theme and plugin developments, and JavaScript library developments.
Understanding DNS for Faster Website Migrations
At beAutomated we strive to be consultants first and programmers second because we want to ensure our development work produces maximum benefit. In serving our clients we often get requests to assist with data and site migrations, and we usually end-up educating clients about DNS—Domain Name System—on top of discussing the various types of hosting plans available to them.
Folks usually get confused about DNS whereas it’s reasonably simple for most purposes. Probably the biggest cause for this confusion has been the routine push by web hosting companies to get their customers to move their name servers along with their website files and database data. Instead, one can use their registrar’s built-in DNS hosting to simplify the process and make it faster and easier to switch hosting companies when necessary as well as to divert other services such as email to separate hosting providers. Using this configuration approach can save on costs by providing needed flexibility.
WordPress Website Performance
Performance is one of the major purposes behind custom software development, alongside functionality, security, interoperability, and support. Performance is of major importance not only to website visitors but to search engines such as Google.
Researchers also claim that website users are affected by speed, while speed decreases they increasingly begin to leave and try other links instead. WordPress powered websites are particularly vulnerable to performance problems due to the plethora of themes and plugins that often get applied to these websites on top of WordPress’ already extensive core. Many of the plugins available today do not follow best practices for performance, whether they are free, premium, or even custom.
You might be surprised to learn that every single plugin you have installed gets loaded with every single page request. If the plugin has nothing to do with the page being requested, most of its logic is usually skipped. If the plugin does filter or otherwise hook into the content of the page somewhere somehow, most of the logic within the plugin will be executed in realtime. Individual plugin logic may or may not be optimized for performance. Regardless of whether the plugin is performance optimized, every plugin will affect your website’s performance to some degree.
Outsourcing Plugin Development
Outsourcing as it relates to custom WordPress plugin development refers to hiring contract developers from outside your business to fulfill the programming of your custom plugin development project, ideally including some of the engineering design planning as well. Offshoring refers to outsourcing to overseas contractors. Software development is an area of expertise that is most often outsourced and many times is offshore outsourced.
We have a little bit of experience on this topic and thought we would contribute to the discussion. We hope that we might help the WordPress webmaster audience understand some important items to consider when deciding where to obtain external resources.
Being a U.S. based contractor ourselves plus having more of a U.S. based audience, we are proud to advertise that we produce all of our work locally in the U.S.A. We distinguish ourselves from our competition, local and abroad, in certain respects.
WordPress Security
Security is one of the major purposes behind custom software development, alongside functionality, performance, interoperability, and support. Our clients mostly shop for new functionality for their WordPress powered websites. While security isn’t typically much of a selling point, it should not be just an afterthought. Security as a concept is part of almost every piece of software in use. Security requires continual attention from all parties, and separates amateur from professional developers. Installing WordPress themes and plugins from unknown developers opens-up all sorts of security risks that all webmasters should be aware of.
When security problems arise, they tend to be major. So a little preparation can save a lot of fan cleaning! To use another cliché: Once bitten, twice shy. Security is a topic that evokes many stories and charged emotions. Everyone we know has had run-ins with security. For example, ourselves and a couple of our clients were hacked in the past by robots spidering for known vulnerabilities seeking to install malware.
What does the malware that typically affect websites do? It usually causes pop-ups containing scams or trojan horse software that seeks to charge you money, steal your contacts, steal your visitors’ information, or infect your personal computer. While these automated robots don’t usually cause irreparable damage to your website, they do rattle your nerves and waste a ton of your time doing clean-up work on your live website that your visitors and clients are looking at. The vast majority of these security breaches are bots rather than “black hat” hackers. These breaches are intended to go undetected for maximum exposure.
Theme and Plugin Differences
Randy and I had a fun discussion the other day about the programmatic differences between themes and plugins. For the most part, anything you can program within a theme can be programed into plugins, and anything you can program into plugins can be programmed in a theme. So how do you decide which to use for a particular purpose? The answer is simple—PLUGINS!
As we tweaked our site’s theme, Boldy, we had to decide on whether to strip functionality that we didn’t need out of the theme, replace functionality with other plugins, or move functionality into new plugins for eventual release to the WordPress Plugin Directory for community benefit. For example, the “Share” button on the bottom of blog posts (below). The design of the button was part of the original theme. We moved that functionality over to a plugin, which could potentially be replaced with something such as ShareThis or AddThis. We decided to make this a plugin, because it represents functionality more so than page design, and could be useful to other sites—not just ours. We did the same thing with the contact form that was part of the original theme.
Other examples of functionality built into the theme we found were (1) Smooth Navigational Menu, (2) prettyPhoto lightbox, (3) Twitter integration, (4) Cufon font smothing, (5) Nivo Slider, and (6) custom search box. All of these features should ideally be built into plugins, not kept within the theme. We might get to moving those someday!
Tweaking Boldy
Our recent site relaunch was based upon a free Premium WordPress theme, Boldy by Site5. Leading up to our new site release and since that time we’ve released significant updates to this theme. There have been so many rather bold adjustments that we decided we would let the world know what exactly the process of tweaking an existing theme entails. We’re also planning future posts on the related topics of performance, security and interoperability.
Here’s what all we did to make “beBoldy”…
Call us
Free WordPress Plugins
Blog Categories
- Blog (23)
- Podcasts (8)
- Portfolio (2)
- Tips and HowTos (10)
