Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian
WordPress now lets you add banners to your plugin pages.
Naturally, I added one to Impostercide that reflected my own brand of humor:
Which is now Nacin approved:
https://twitter.com/#!/nacin/status/149884924990734336
Add your own by creating an assets folder in your SVN repo (same level as tags and trunk) and add a file called banner-772x250.jpg (or .png). Make the image 772×250 px, check in your change, wait 15 minutes, and you’re done!
What to watch for: Javascript and Editor changes in WordPress 3.3 « WordPress Development Updates.
I don’t generally just toss up a link and walk away, but Nacin nailed it in one, for what you need to watch out for with WordPress 3.3. I’ve been SVNing it for the last couple months (very happily I might add) and only had one issue with a plugin. Use Google Libraries stopped working for me.
If you happen to be testing WordPress 3.3, or want to, the second Release Candidate came out this morning, and I’m keeping a Master List of all known issues, to be posted in the forums as soon as 3.3 is really real. Any help finding bugs is appreciated!
You’re hired to build a website and you decide that the best tool for the job is an open source application. So you install it, configure it, add in plugins, tweak the design, and make it a perfect site for your client. You explain how the CMS works, how they add pages, media, etc, and hand over the keys. Everyone’s happy.
Then a month or so later, the CMS releases an upgrade. Your client clicks the upgrade button (because most CMS tools have made that easy) and it installed, but now the site is broken. They contact you, complaining, and you end up spending hours of your time trying to calm them down, complaining to the CMS folks, and being grumpy.
And for a lot of you, this is your own damn fault.
I know a lot of website-building consultants, and I’m not saying this lightly. As a website builder, it’s incumbent on you, the person who installed the CMS, to make sure your clients understand the implications of that CMS, how upgrades work, and to arrange for support, just like you would for any vended product. Basically, if you don’t communicate and educate, you’ve done this to yourself.
Know This Is Not Different
Installing an Open Source product for a client is absolutely the same as installing a traditional, closed source, vended product. It certainly feels different, since there is a far more casual approach to a lot of things, but at the end of the day, your relationship with your client, and theirs with the software you install, is exactly the same, regardless of where the software came from and who wrote it.
A lot of companies worry about Open Source since it’s complicated and nigh impossible to sort out who you can sue if things go wrong. What happens if they vanish? What happens if it breaks? Really it’s not that different. If Microsoft went bankrupt today and closed all their doors, you’d still have everything you bought, but they’d be gone and you wouldn’t get any more help from them. Ditto Apple, and everyone else. In fact, it’s just as likely that a major Open Source app will vanish as it is a Closed Source, or bought out, or no longer supported. And at least with Open Source (and anything GPL’d), the code is mine to maintain as I see fit.
But really, installing a product is installing a product, and the work you do and the support you provide is the same.
Know Your Product
Never install a product you don’t know how to use. Personally, I never install a product I don’t use regularly (which is why I generally only install WordPress, and turn to Andrea if I need help with domain mapping plugins). My reason is that if you use a product, you know what you’re getting into, how it works, and preferably how to tweak it. Some of what you need to know about the product depends on how you plan to support it, but a good rule of thumb is that if you’re installing it for someone else, you either better be an advanced user of it, or know how to get answers, fast, without restoring to forum posts like “Help me ASAP! My client is down!” You’re a professional, you’re expected to learn to use your tools and act that way.
This doesn’t mean you have to know everything, but remember that your clients can use Google, and if they know your handle is ‘Ipstenu’ and they’re using WordPress, they just might search for “Ipstenu WordPress” to see what kind of person you are. So if they search for you and see you being snotty, or using l33t/IM speak in the forums, they might question your professionalism. But if they see you asking the questions they’ve asked of you, they may doubt you. A good idea is to be honest “I don’t know how to do that off the top of my head, so I’m going to research it and ask around.” Network. Ask your friends (you do have friends in your product’s community, right?) and keep in mind your visibility.
Know the Future
We can’t predict the future with any long-term accuracy, but we can prepare for it. If you choose to use a product, you need to know where it’s going. The day to find out about new features is not the release day, nor is it even the pre-release candidates or the betas! You need to be proactive, and keep in touch with the project, where it’s going, and how that impacts you. Every open source product allows for ‘nightly’ builds. These are the things you generally don’t want to run on production versions of websites, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run them on your site. Install the nightly release on a server, set it up so it auto-upgrades every night (or if you use subversion, set up a pull every day or every x hours). Include some sample data, include all the plugins you use on your client sites, and test it at least every week.
Doing all that is a lot of why, which is why some people don’t offer ongoing support (more about that in a minute). Even so, the only way to know your product is to know it. If a product is important to your bottom line, then it’s imperative you know it well. Pay attention to what will and won’t be changing in the next version, and if possible, know why that’s happening, so if your client asks “But why?” you can answer.
This is where I feel Open Source has a clear advantage to closed source applications. Getting on the Microsoft Beta test list is harder than finding parking at the mall the weekend before Christmas. Getting on an Open Source beta test is about as easy as blinking. You can download and test all you want, every day, without asking special permissions.
Know What They Need
Before you go anywhere with a client, you need to ask them what kind of support they want. Are they going to pay you just to build the site, and then you walk away? Do they want to pay you a smaller fee per annum for support, a set fee for upgrades, or hire you at your normal rates to bail them out? Don’t let them drive your decision, though. You’re the one doing the work, and if you have zero interest in ongoing support, be upfront, tell them you’re just going to install it and they need to find other resources for help.
Don’t be a dick about it either, of course. Give them a list of people you know are good for help, some resources for the product, and maybe you can work out a deal with your friends. You get a small percentage of any client referred, for example, to your friend Bob who loves helping people dig themselves out of a hole.
Know What They Know
Any time you install software for someone else, you need to teach them. At the very basic level, they have to know how to use the product, otherwise you’ll get them emailing you new content to post for them. If you want to support that, great, but most people would rather not, so you explain how it’s used. Write up a very basic document for it, save it as a PDF, and include it in your deliverable. Update it when new versions come out and mail it to any client still on your list (i.e. the people who’re still paying you) or post it on your website for anyone to download.
Once your client knows how to do the basics on the site, go back to what level of support you’ve settled on. If they’re going to maintain the site themselves, you need to make sure they know the basics for that too! How to install a plugin, how to upgrade, and so on and so forth. This will make them appreciate you, and hopefully recommend your services to the next guy. Treat people well, it’ll come back to you.
For a product like Drupal, which doesn’t have a full-version upgrade as a one-click option, I usually tell people “Hire someone. It’s a pain.” Beyond that, however, you need to make sure they understand what new versions entail. A lot of people don’t know that WordPress considers a point release to be a major upgrade (i.e. going from 3.1 to 3.2 is a full new version of WP, but 3.2 to 3.2.1 is not). They need to understand that, so when they do upgrade, they know what they’re getting into and aren’t surprised by, say, a new admin menu.
This goes for plugins and themes as well as the basic product. Teach them how to edit themes the ‘right’ way. Explain that they may want to make a duplicate of their site to test upgrades on because, while most work just fine, you should CYA and so should they.
Know How To Communicate, Damnit!
Everything is built off of good relationships with your clients and the product. As we all know, the key to a good relationship is communication. If it’s not painfully obvious, you need to communicate clearly with both of them. Learn how to help non-techs, and learn how to report possible bugs to techs. Bridge the gap between the two, and learn how to translate, because sometimes that wild bug is from your client doing something no one predicted (it happens). You cannot exist in a vacuum, after all and no one’s a mind reader.
When you finish a project with a client, they should know exactly what to do to use the product, have directions on how to upgrade (or how to contact you), how to get help, and what to expect from you in the future. Clearly communicating these things will result in a happier experience for everyone. Or at least an opportunity to do the “I told you so” dance.
What Don’t You Know?
What are some of your tips and tricks for supporting your clients with open source products?
For a lot of people, BuddyPress is overkill. Personally I love it, it’s great to make your own ‘Facebook’ or ‘Ning’ type site. But there’s a time and a place for everything. BuddyPress’s intention is to let you build your own social network. This means that it’s a Big Dog type application, that it has a lot of bells a whistles. And while you certainly can install it and only activate a few, if you’re only doing it to use one of those things, it may be overkill.
I’m going to take this one by the numbers. Or rather, by the features listed on BuddyPress’s site!
I need to stress, since some people miss the point of these posts, that if you’re only going to use one feature of a product this big, you should reconsider if it’s the best use of your time. If you only want to use one for now, and plan to grow, that’s different altogether. In each of my examples, I’m presuming that the user plans to only use that one specific feature, and I will address alternatives.
Activity Streams
This is actually my favorite thing about BuddyPress. If you post in a blog, or a group, or a forum, all of that gets pulled into ‘Sitewide Activity.’ That’s right, every last bit of your site is on one big page! Now, if you’re only using WordPress as a blog (no groups, no forums, JUST a CMS/blog), you’d think “I want this because I want a page that lists all my comments from all my posts!” To an extent, you’re right. There isn’t a better way to do this! Or is there?
There’s already a widget in the default WP install and theme for ‘Recent Comments’ which shows all comments, right? And there are plugins that can show Recent network wide comments too. So if you’re really lazy, why not use Widgets on Pages and call it a day?
Extended Profiles
If all you need is fancy profiles, BuddyPress is way overkill. In fact, for super cool profiles, most people use a plugin to extend the defaults! What’s the alternative? There are a lot of profile related plugins in the WordPress repository, and it just matters what you want. Personally, I’d caution against using those default Yahoo/AIM ones in our current profiles, as they may be going away. By the way, many of those profile plugins can add in extra fields to use on registration as well, like Cimy User Extra Fields.
Local Avatar
This isn’t a promoted feature of BuddyPress, but I’ve seen a lot of people do this. Yes, BuddyPress can let you use local avatars for your users, this is true, however so can plugins like Add Local Avatars. Frankly, I’m a proponent of Gravatar, since it works, and much like YouTube, I’m no longer responsible for you uploading nudie pics. Keeps legal brouhahah off my back.
Friend Connections and Private Messaging
While there are plugins like Private Messaging for WordPress out there, I have to hat-tip BuddyPress for a fully integrated front end PM system. This is one of the moments where, hands down, I would seriously consider using BP just for one feature. Ditto Friend Connections. I’ve just never seen its equal, and since the odds are most people would be using it for both friends and PM, it’s a great reason for BuddyPress.
WordPress Blogging
I don’t even know where to start. Someone insisted the only way to use WordPress for blogging was to install BuddyPress. It was a moment where I wanted a button to press to make a giant mallet jump out of his monitor and bash his head in for not reading. (By the way, you also don’t need MultiSite to use BuddyPress anymore. It works just fine with single site.)
Groups
This is tricky. Part of me wants to say ‘Just make a page and let people comment’ because, to some degree, that’s all a group really is. It’s a fan page (ala FaceBook) which shows posts in reverse order. Like a P2 blog. Which means that it’s not insurmountable to make a single page for your site that behaves that way (or a subsite running P2 if you went the MultiSite way). But is that the best way?
Forums
If you just want a forum, just install bbPress. Nuff said. Now, knowing that bbPress 2.0 is now a 2.0 plugin, and that BuddyPress is still on 1.2 (I think), and that the import from bbPress 1.x to 2.0 is a bit iffy, I would really be cautious about using bbPress if I know I want to upgrade to BuddyPress in the future. Connecting the bells and whistles are interesting.
What about you? What reasons have you seen people use to justify BuddyPress when it was clearly overkill?
WP Grins SSL is in development. So there’s that.
Having already established that Forking is Legal, I felt it best to take the other end of the argument.(This was intended to be all one post, but at about 3000 words, it needed to be split up.)
Clarification here. Jigoshop is a product of Jigowatt. I call them Jigoshop in both my posts because it’s easier for my brain.
Gil Rutkowski remarked (without knowing I was already writing this):
Funny how people pick and choose between the “SPIRIT” of the GPL and its literal legal application to fit their argument. (@flashingcursor on Twitter)
We often sum up GPL as “Do what you want with this software. Just let other people do what they want with the software you make from it.” If you’re not familiar with it, I think I can sum up the spirit of GPL as “Don’t be a dick.” (Wil Wheaton in Exile) People get in a lot of arguments about the ‘spirit’ of things. You’ve probably heard someone complain “He’s following the letter of the law, but not the spirit.” Basically what that means is someone is obeying the law, but not what it means.
How can that even be? If the law is the law, then the law is the law and there should be no wibbly wobbly involved! It happens because of intent. The intent of the law in general is really something we shouldn’t have needed to be told in the first place, when you think about it. Primum non nocere: First, do no harm. Doctors are taught this, and you’d really think that’s self-evident! And yet, even the US Declaration of Independence starts out “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” If they were self-evident, why are we saying thing?
People are selfish. We care about ourselves first, then the people closest to us, and so on and so forth. To say the ‘spirit’ of the law means we’re no longer actually talking about the law as a legislative statute, but about the idiomatic application there of. We’re now talking about how we feel the law should be, which is pretty iffy territory. Talking about the spirit of the law brings up things like the moral ambiguity of the law, and the ethics we try to impose on others. What’s ethical for me may not be so for you, and so on.
So what does the moral aspect of GPL have to do with the recent forking of Jigoshop’s eCommerce plugin? Interestingly we can see how both parties ended up at the fork because they were selfish. Jigoshop didn’t want to give up control and neither did WooThemes. Neither was willing to concede, and in a way, they both ‘lost’ because of it.
Was Woo being a dick to fork the plugin? Yes. And no. You have to keep this in perspective.
You see, no one has made a ‘Killer’ eCommerce plugin for WordPress. Not even Jigoshop. From what I’ve been told, Woo has struggled to make their own killer plugin for eCommerce, and failed at it. I will leave it to others who actually use eCommerce on their sites to determine which plugin is queen, but I feel comfortable saying that taking someone else’s work, even when you credit them, can be a dick move.
At the exact same time that WooThemes is being a dick for forking, they’re doing a right thing. No that’s not a typo, they are doing A thing that is right. We all know that ‘hacking core’ for WordPress (or any app) is a terrible thing. Merging changesets is a nightmare, no matter what tool you use, and a fork makes it just as hard to incorporate changes. So would not a better solution be to make a WooTheme add-on plugin that just changed the parts of Jigoshop they didn’t like? A Woo/Jigo integration plugin?
That would be a wonderful, perfect world. Let me know when we get there. Sometimes the direction of a plugin is such that you have to fork it to do what you want. The developers don’t want to follow your dream of unicorns and puppies. Until we reach the perfect world, we fork. Now, it took a bit of reading to verify that WooThemes was unable to make their desired changes without editing core plugin code. That left them with only a few viable options. They could submit the changes to Jigoshop and hope for the best, or they could hack the Gibson. Basically, this was the best choice for WooThemes and really, nothing’s wrong with that.
The problem is that WooThemes is going to be making money off this acquisition. Their WooCommerce plugin will be free, just like Jigoshop, but just like Jigoshop, they aim to make a living off the plugin. Off someone else’s work. To be fair, that’s what I do. I support other people’s ‘stuff’ all the time. I’ve not written a lick of code for Windows in years (except DOS and PowerShell scripts) but their products pay my bills. Does that make me a thief?
No, it makes me an opportunist. WooThemes is being opportunistic as well. Remember how I said we are, all of us, selfish? Well so is Woo. They see a chance to make money and use a plugin that works, and not their own with a weird history. (Did you know Nacin was once going to head up WooCommerce before he was snatched by Matt? That’s fun to look at in retrospect.) Woo had a series of unfortunate issues with their own plugin, and it never worked right. They weren’t a dick because they talked to Jigoshop first (they didn’t have to), and I rather hope they said ‘Okay, we’re going to agree to disagree on the direction of the plugin and fork it.’ If Jigoshop first learned of the fork via Woo’s blog post, then they were entirely dicks.
Was Woo being a dick to ‘head hunt’ the developers? Yes. And again, No. Yet again, perspective is important.
I said before that the developers they ‘stole’ wouldn’t have left if they had a reason to stay. People leave companies all the time for myriad reasons. They also stay with companies for others. In the ‘traditional’ corporate world, people get a job and stay with it for a million years. In the freelance world, though, people switch jobs around a lot more. Even so, people only leave companies for three reasons:
That’s really it. So if someone chooses to leave a company, options one and two are there on the table, and you have to be honest to ask if they would have left if Woo hadn’t made the offer? And there’s where the dick move possibly lives. Was it Woo’s promise of skittles and beer that made them leave, or was there something wrong at Jigoshop? It’s far too early to point fingers at anyone, especially the developers who may discover they made a poor choice. You have to take risks, after all, or you never succeed.
WooThemes was dickish if they bribed away the developers. But they weren’t if this was just one of those serendipity moments. What if the developers said ‘Wow! Woo shares our vision!’ We don’t know, so we have to speculate, but either way, the decision was the developers and not WooThemes or Jigoshop, so any dickery actually belongs to the devs and them alone.
Since I was asked, my personal opinion is this: WooThemes pulled a dick move which in no way violated the letter or the spirit of GPL.
See the spirit would have been violated if, as another shop did recently, they lifted the plugin wholesale, made a couple tweaks, rebrand it, and released it without telling anyone. You know who I’m talking about here. That was violation of the spirit of GPL. But WooThemes was upfront about this. They talked to Jigoshop first, and everyone seems to have known what was going on before the news broke.
While I dislike that WooThemes did this, I will defend their right to do so (and Jigoshop’s right to be upset) until the day we all stop using GPL.
The whole reason I wrote the first post, however, was the high number of people I talked to who said that the spirit of the law was violated. It really wasn’t. Yes, these were dick moves, but the spirit of the law is the meaning, and the meaning of GPL is that you can’t impose more restrictions on a GPL product than it started with. No one did that. What Woo did was pretty shitty to their neighbor, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t kill GPL. It hurt feelings and left a bad taste in the mouth, but that’s not the spirit of GPL either.
The Spirit of GPL is freedom. It’s sharing your work, working together, and when you take someone’s work, being open about them and crediting them. And while you don’t have to like what Woo did, they did not harm the spirit of GPL, because we’re all here, talking about it and still abiding by it.
I can but hope that the fallout from this is that we’ll finally have an eCommerce plugin that stands up as the best because of worth and not because that’s all we’ve got, but we’ll have to wait a couple of years for that to settle.