Harmony Coburn

Today we start what will be a semi-regular series of interviews with Multisite owners to see how they’re running their businesses, what their challenges are, what their business models are, and even how much money they’re making.

Today’s interview is with Harmony Coburn of BetterWebsiteBuilders.com.

 
What are your sites?

http://betterwebsitebuilders.com (this is our primary multi-site)
http://extendedcarellc.org (this is our corporate client)
http://bettereverything.net (this is our seo blog platform – multi-site – that we hope to someday turn into a community of small businesses)

For purposes of this interview I will talk about BetterWebsiteBuilders.

BACKGROUND:

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself before you got into running your site? What is your background in?

I spent nearly 25 years in sales and marketing before discovering web design was my true calling. Web design has allowed me to combine all of my strengths and create a very healthy business for myself. You can read more about me here if you want more details.  (I am Harmony Coburn)

When did you start the site?

Betterwebsite builders was launched last spring – about this time a year ago.

Why did you start the site?

My business was founded in 2001 on the platform of offering a cost competitive “do it yourself” solution to truly small businesses that needed a website when designers were still charging 3k and up for “basic websites.” I knew there had to be a way for Joe Mom & Pop to leverage the web, and I did a lot of research to find a product that was developed by Trellix. It was a WYSIWIG website building tool that required no HTML knowledge to get a website up and running. I believe it is still offered by Earthlink.

After ten years, that product no longer met the growing needs of my DIY customers, so I knew I had to come up with something that would in order to avoid losing them and the recurring hosting revenue I make off of them.

I had developed several sites, as the designer/developer on WP for customers that are NOT do-it-yourselfers, and when I discovered how Multi-site works, I felt it would be a good replacement product for the old software.

RUNNING THE SITE:

Do you run the site alone?

Yes

How much time do you spend on it (per day/week)?

Two hours a day average.

How do you control splogs? / How much time spent? / Are they hard to spot?

I am not allowing instant access at this time.

How do you deal with people posting unwanted content? / Ever had issues?

We have a strict policy on inappropriate content. Since no one gets a site unless they contact us directly first, it’s pretty easy.

How do you handle your support issues?

Keep in mind, these are people that don’t have a clue (if they did they would be going to Weebly or some other “free” place, I’m sure). The people I get are people that like the personal contact (which is why I charge as much as I do). These are people that need their hands held. I offer a small amount of free support in the beginning – mostly by email where I direct them to one of the tutorials (if I’ve written it). If I have not written a tutorial, I will write one and then send them a link.

If they still can’t get it, they can buy phone support. In that case I will have them do a screen share using Join.me (free), or I will have them install logmein (I have an account with LogMeIn, so it’s easy to deploy).

I charge $65.00 per hour for support, but I only charge for actual minutes used. I have a “punch clock” installed on my computer so time tracking is easy. If they want to go that route I have them sign up for a billing account (I have hosted for years, so I have the AWBS billing platform) and make a deposit ($65.00 to $200.00 depending on how much help they are thinking they want).

Once we have established a working relationship, I will just invoice them monthly for the time used the previous month. What I have found is this model actually gets me more design and SEO clients than Do It Yourself clients – they start out wanting to do it themselves – then they find out how much work it takes and hire me to “just do it.”

I have decided to move away from the DIY model – I am going to just refer those people to Weebly (I am an affiliate). However, I plan to keep my Multisite for my own design business as well as a new “local” community I will be launching called DiscoverWhatsLocal.com … so many ideas, so little time.

Using multisite for my design clients saves a lot of time in the development process as well as the software maintenance. If WP Manage was not so pricy, I might go that direction instead of multisite – in fact I think I would much prefer it for the simple fact that I would prefer each client be installed on their own hosting account and not even need me for hosting.

When I started my hosting company, it was because shared hosting didn’t work for e-commerce, but these days I would just as soon let the client bring their own hosting. My passion is design and SEO/Marketing – I only became a hosting company out of necessity. A lot has changed in the last 12 years.

I started my business because I saw friends being “held hostage” by their web designer/hosting company – I never want my clients to feel it’s difficult to leave me. Of course, no one ever does leave me for that reason, but using Multisite does make it a little more difficult for them. What I mean is if they hire a new webmaster and give them their FTP info, there is a bit of “where the hell is my website” conversation that might have to happen… Is this really a bad thing? No.

Most of my clients have no clue their site is not “stand alone,” but I carry a small burden of guilt because I know the truth.

Do you use BuddyPress or some other type of community enhancing plugins?

Not at this time.

Do you focus on community/integration, or do you prefer to let blogs exist in a more private atmosphere?

Although we want to grow the community value of the WordPress Multi-site platform, we have not had time to yet, so each user sees themselves as a completely separate website.

What plugins do you use? (If you use too many to go into, what are some of the ones you wouldn’t want to do without?)

We use the following on every site:

• Gravity Forms
• WPMU Update notifications
• Login Image
• Remove WordPress Dashboard
• Easy Buttons
• Google Analytics for WP – multisite
• Subscribe by Email
• Display Widgets
• Image Widget
• Wp-jquery-colorbox
• Unattach

We offer many others, but the ones we see used (and enable ourselves) the most are:

• Portfolio Slidesho Pro
• WordPress Shopping cart by Tribulant
• WP-Property
• Less Than Web Testimonials

MARKETING

How did you first attract people to the site when it was new?

We had a base of clients.

How do you attract people to the site now? Is it the same?

We get new inquiries via our primary website from search engine results for “build your own website” and many referrals.

What do you find works best for attracting new members?

Word of mouth.

NUMBERS

How many sites do you have on your install?

32

How many new sites do you typically see per day/week?

Not really applicable to our model.

What’s your business model?

We are a Web Marketing / development company focused on TRULY small businesses. Our niche is offering the kinds of solutions and results that other companies only offer to businesses with large budgets for lower costs by leveraging open source solutions and keeping things simple.

I see on your site that you let users create a free site for 30 days. How is that strategy working out for you?

The 30 days free works out well. I haven’t had a lot of takers, but the ones that do it have stayed on OR hired me to do their site for them, so I guess that would be 100% conversion. Basically, if they take the time to actually build a site, they don’t want to let it go.

Only one client took me up on the “multiple sites” option, and he recently cancelled one of them. That came from my old model where the client could EASILY add another site at theirsite.com/2ndsitehere. They liked this because they felt they could get more use out of their single hosting account. With Multisite and domain mapping I couldn’t figure out how to make that work. (They can easily add a site but it’s at betterwebsitebuilders.com/2ndsitehere instead of theirdomain.com/2ndsitehere .)

Is your site profitable?

Yes.

What are your expenses per month? (hosting + any other expenses)

My fixed costs for hosting and other tools we need (for example all of our email clients are run through the Google Postini spam filtering system) are around $1000 per month.

Can you give us an idea about how much the site makes after expenses?

Well, those expenses cover a lot more than the WP multi-site, so I would say that my multi-site is primarily profit – that would be about $640/ month on that site alone in net profits.

FINAL  QUESTIONS/ADVICE

What are some things you like best about running the site?

• Ease of adding a new client.
• Ease of updating the software.

What are some things you like least about running the site?

• There are some challenges such as making sure the client logs in under the right URL to post so that the links in the emails sent to subscribers are correct and not at their sub site.
• Keeping up with the tutorials – support is tougher than I thought it would be. What is easy to me is not so easy to my customers

What advice would you give to someone that is thinking of starting a multisite?

1. Purchase a membership to WPMU
2. Participate in the community at WPMU
3. DONATE TO THE PLUGIN DEVELOPERS!!!

We are so fortunate to have these incredible developers that are willing to put themselves and their products out there on a wing and a prayer that they “might” get some money back for their time and effort.

I could not have such a successful business without Open Source!

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NOTE: Thanks to Harmony for letting us see behind her business a little bit. If you run a successful Multisite install, or you know someone who does who might be interested in participating in an interview, then drop me a line at joe@incsub.com. Interviews are conducted by email, so you can do them at your convenience.

Photo: vector retro studio microphone from Bigstock.

Joseph Foley on Google+

I had the opportunity to interview Tristan Gamillis this week about how Paydirt was created and where the team is headed.

1. Your slogan is “Time tracking and Invoicing for freelancers, by freelancers”. How did you decide upon serving this niche?

We’ve both been freelancing since high school and struggled to find billing software that really matched the freelance workfow. Sometimes you’re working at and hourly rate, sometimes at a fixed price, sometimes both, and the scope of a project oftens changes part way through. It’s complex, but any software made to do it needs to be simple. Freelancers need a billing system that’s simple, works with this freelance workflow, and is a pleasure to use. We were scratching our own itch.

Time tracking for freelancers is another can of worms, but I’ll get fired up and excited about that in a moment.

2. What inspired you to create Paydirt?

Many freelancers and partnerships are doing their books in spreadsheets and making their invoices in Word or InDesign because large accounting packages aren’t a good fit. We did too, and it can be a real timesink.

Freelancers also tend not to track their time – at least not dilligently – and often don’t realise how it affects their bottom-line. Even if you’re not billing hourly it’s crucial to track your time so you know if you’re quoting accurately. We wanted to find out why, so we interviewed every freelancer we could get our hands on, and the response was basically unanimous: most recognised the importance of time tracking, and they all said that they forgot to do it. That’s the problem: it’s hard to remember.

We knew we had these problems. Once we realised they were everyone’s problems we set about building a solution.

3. What unique features make Paydirt stand out from the all of the other time-tracking apps?

Time tracking that’s easy to remember! We’ve got extensions for Chrome and Firefox that let you track time straight from the page you’re viewing. They recognise when you’re looking at a page related to your client (it could be their website, a website you’re building for them, an email you’re writing to them, etc.) and add a small notification in the corner which lets you start a timer in one click. It’s helpful to have your time tracker one click away without having to open it or switch windows, but most importantly, it acts as a reminder.

For exmaple, I’ll be busy tinkering on something when an email rolls in from a client: “Can you check out this issue on our website? One of our WordPress Plugins is playing up.” Like a good freelancer I immedately open their site and start working on fixing their issue. This is when I should start a timer for “Website maintainence”, but usually totally forget. But Paydirt notices I’m working for my client and adds a link to start a timer for them, right there on the page.

There’s no code to add to the page or any tricky configuration. Just grab the extension and you’re good to go.

4. What are your future plans for expanding and improving Paydirt?

We’re currently developing mobile apps to help you track time when you’re on the road. We’d even like them to offer similar time tracking reminders based on your location (when you visit your client, for instance).

Other plans include custom invoice styling, expense tracking, and integrating with web services like Basecamp.

We take our queues for development from user feedback, so get in touch and tell us what you’d like to see! We’re always happy to chat.

Conclusion:

The interface really matters when you’re adding new tools to your freelancing toolbox, and that’s one place where Paydirt excels. If you’re struggling with accounting for your hours and your billing is in complete disarray, you need to check out this app and its unique features. We’re excited about where Paydirt is headed and we are planning a quick guide on how you can manage your WordPress freelancing business more efficiently using Paydirt. Follow @paydirtapp on Twitter for all the latest news.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

It's hell on the streets.

The WordPress theme and plugin community is in a sorry state. Developers stumble from town to town, cap in hand, begging for just enough donations or advertisement hits to make it through the day.

Okay – perhaps I am being a little hyperbolic. But with hopelessly outdated plugins, repository hacks, and the simple fact that honest developers can’t sell their themes and/or plugins via WordPress.org, surely there is a better option?

Many developers offer themes and plugins via their own websites, and there are of course well-established community sites out there (such as Theme Forest and of course WPMU DEV). It seems that developers have to work around the roadblocks set up by WordPress.org, rather than working with them (which would conceptually seem like a more mutually beneficial arrangement).

This post from Vladimir Prelovac (who heads up the team at ManageWP) is over 1½ years old, but its message is timeless:

I believe it is [...] human nature not to appreciate what is free. If somebody gives us something for free, most of us take it for granted as if it never happened.

But I digress. Whilst the developers over at WPMU DEV and other such sites work hard to produce high-quality, well-supported themes and plugins (for a reasonable price), there is a big gap in the theme and plugin development market that is currently unexploited. A gap that might soon be filled by an as yet unknown startup community website. That website is Theme Tailors.

Welcome to the revolution baby.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with the lead developer of this brand new community, Paolo Taiani. He can explain the concept of Theme Tailors far better than I, so let’s see what he had to say.

Explain the concept of Theme Tailors to our readers in 50 words.

Theme Tailors is a marketplace/community where freelance developers customize popular scripts, inspired by users’ desires.

• Members may submit customization requests for their favorite scripts and vote for each other’s ideas.
• Tailors may develop the solution for any highly-requested customization, and sell it through the Marketplace to members.

What problems does Theme Tailors solve for WordPress users?

The trend is obvious: more and more WordPress users are no longer satisfied with average functionalities of themes and plugins – even the most complex ones!

They want extensive customizations, but don’t have the financial means to hire top coders. Theme and plugin authors cannot always address every request they receive, leaving many unanswered.

We understand that an author can always add features that are needed by all users, but adding a feature that will only be used by <50% might not make sense. We are here to fill that gap.

On Theme Tailors, a customization request voted by many isn’t only a popular feature users wish to have – it is also an appealing product for a Tailor to sell!

Mods will be sold through the Marketplace to multiple users for a fraction of the price it would have cost one individual.

What problems does Theme Tailors solve for WordPress theme/plugin developers (or “Tailors”, as you call them)?

Most freelance coders work on mods for their clients, and get paid once for their hard work.

We offer them the opportunity to build a library of theme and plugin modifications and sell them through the marketplace, potentially bringing repeat payments. There is almost always more than one person looking for any given mod.

One mod on Theme Tailors could make a Tailor thousands of dollars, compared to maybe a hundred dollars when built for one client! 

Users pay less for mods, whilst developers get paid more!

How did you come up with the idea?

To quote Tim Berners-Lee: “A wonderful, but closed garden, cannot compete with the beauty of a wild and untamed jungle”.

Theme and plugin customization is already a business, but it is too scattered to be as efficient and prosperous as its potential offers. Right now, metaphorically speaking, there are many closed gardens. Theme Tailors is there to provide the substrate for the wild and untamed jungle (of theme and plugin customizations).

What solution are you bringing to the market that doesn’t currently exist?

Our model could be called Reverse-Group Buying. “I would buy it if it existed…”

In group buying sites, products and services are made available with great discounts, when an elevated number of sales are reached.

On Theme Tailors, users express their ideas publicly; highlighting which customizations could be successful if available and marketed at the right price – and every Tailor in the community has the option to provide them. After users have purchased a mod, they can leave a review, which is visible to all users.

This method is used a lot in support forums, but I have never seen it applied to an open community.

We also offer the opportunity to submit custom requests specific to a user’s needs. Although the concept is nothing new, hiring a freelancer in most marketplaces can often be a gamble. I use job boards a lot, and often get the feeling that I am throwing a stone into a pond. You never know who is going to apply, and whether they will be knowledgeable of the script you need customizing.

Hiring a WordPress developer no longer has to be a crapshoot.

On Theme Tailors, each showcased theme and plugin features its own job board. This will be a plus for both Tailors, who will be able to keep track of requests made on products they know, and for users, who will have a better opportunity to deal with someone proficient with that particular script.

In addition, not all Tailors will be able to bid on “custom requests”. Bidding is only allowed when they have obtained the Verified Tailor status. A Verified Tailor must have ranked at least once in the “Top Tailors” monthly competition.

Each month’s top ten bestsellers obtain the Verified Tailor Badge and as a production incentive, the option to start bidding on Custom Requests, thus making extra money. In our opinion this will offer reassurance for members submitting custom requests. They will only deal with individuals who really know what they are doing!

To make sure custom requests aren’t left unanswered when the Top Tailors competition begins, we selected a team of trusted Tailors within our coding circles.

It goes without saying that should the original author of any script listed register an account and let us know, he would immediately get the Verified Tailor status, no questions asked!

How have you overcome the potential copyright issues regarding Tailors selling modifications to premium themes and plugins?

The product review policy is clear:

In the case of mods that implement few new functionalities, Tailors are allowed to sell auto-installing plugins. If theme files modifications are necessary, they can provide code snippets and instructions/examples to apply them.

This will ensure that only buyers of the original theme can take advantage of mods sold through Theme Tailors.

Pirates aren't welcome.

How long have you spent on development? Were there any major obstacles to overcome?

We developed this during our spare time as freelancers. We started over 6 months ago when MarketPress 2.0 (the core of Theme Tailors) was released. The biggest obstacle was finding the time to work on it!

The site is literally brand new and you are currently in a beta stage of development. When do you anticipate going “live”?

We have only been online for a week and are testing all functionalities in live mode with real members for the first time. We have found some minor bugs that are almost all fixed now – it shouldn’t take much longer.

Theme Tailors is a brand new service, and its success will rely largely upon the number of active Tailors and members that you attract. What is your marketing strategy, and how do you anticipate your user base increasing over time?

Theme Tailors is a start-up and fortunately not our core business. We have patience and we are aware that it won’t be easy to turn this into our full time job, but we are willing to try!

We will start by developing some free and premium plugins to attract visitors and possibly other developers.

Our first plugin, TT CloudFlare for WPMU (provided both in free and premium versions), is already available on the site and we are confident it will bring visibility.

We will soon release a couple of MarketPress “goodies” too, like the MP Total Front End Plugin.

All of these things are part of the customizations made for Theme Tailors and are the best examples of what we can make. We will work hard to rank properly in search engines, and have some experience in web marketing.

Finally, Tailors have an extra incentive. The top three bestselling Tailors in each month will equally share a bonus equal to 20% of Theme Tailors total revenues. This may not be very interesting today, but look at it with an optimistic attitude and that could become a major incentive in a near future.

Who doesn't love a bonus?

We hope that all of these factors will help us to emerge.

How do our readers get started with your service?

They can start by registering and having a look around.

If they are WPMU users, they can’t miss the CloudFlare plugin for WordPress Multisite. Since we installed it on our networks, page load times have dropped tremendously, and we were able to disable all caching plugins. If that isn’t enough, we no longer have to worry about comment spamming and splogs.

What Next?

I am sure many of you will be excited by the concept of Theme Tailors. But its success will largely be based upon the number and engagement of its early adopters. As with any community, it will only ever be as powerful as its user base.

Anyone who has a passing interest in WordPress (that’s you at a minimum) should get involved with Theme Tailors. The power of a strong community could tear down the barriers of cost for any number of theme and plugin mods. Head over there now:

Creative Commons images courtesy of sunshinecity, Casey West, Niklas Morberg, sushi and Stéfan

Tom Ewer on Google+

So we discuss a wide variety of topics here on WPMU.org and from time to time you’ll hear an announcement about a new product or addition to the team over on our sister site, WPMU DEV.  That’s really where I spend a majority of my time, and I gotta tell you, it seems every day some new idea, tool, snippet or site comes across my screen that is downright impressive and brings a smile to my face.

We even have a showcase page with many of the awesome sites that are using or powered-by WPMU DEV products.  Pictures are pretty, of course, but behind that site or service is a real-live person who’s working hard and using our products and services to get the job done.  We’ve decided it would be fun to go ahead in 2012 and feature one member each month right here on WPMU.org.

Our first one of the year is Mustafa Uysal, creator of the niche blogging site, LettoBlog.  Read on to hear Mustafa’s story.

1. What was your inspiration for starting LettoBlog?

The starting point for LettoBlog was to create a simple, powerful, functional and compatible blogging service. Secondly I wanted to create a local WordPress market for Turkey. I decided to go for it and LettoBlog was born.

2. I see you have a whole team on LettoBlog.  How did you all meet and decide to work together?

When I decided to begin the LettoBlog Project I discussed it with my brother first and he joined as a “tech ninja”.  Then I told and invited a few of my friends and they joined.  Our big advantage is that my bro is a computer engineer and I’m a student at computer and instructional technology department, so we have many friends with an interest in WordPress.

3. How did you decide on WordPress as the software for your services?

WordPress is a powerful CMS (since version 3.0) and, in fact, maybe the best reason is the “Developer Community.”  Many developer clubs sell their WordPress products such as plugins and themes. This allowed us to purchase what we need, and we haven’t needed more development.

Also personally, I’m big fan of Automattic’s open-source approach. I believe that these guys are really working at “making the web a better place.”

And finally, many success stories (edublogs.org, blog.com) encourages me to use WordPress.  I trust WordPress and decided to use it as our web software.

 4. What were your biggest obstacles in getting LettoBlog running?

WordPress updates are really tough for us.  We are using over 350 plugins and themes so when we want to update platform, we need to test their compatibility.  On the other hand, sometimes server management becomes a challenge for us as well.

 5. Which WPMU DEV products have you found most useful?

In fact we are using many WPMU DEV products.  But the most useful plugins: multi-db, Pro Sites, domain mapping, and MarketPress.  I want to thank WPMU DEV for offering these products and being our valuable partner.

6. What product or feature would you most like to see developed by WPMU DEV in the future?
Actually I know some improvements but specifically, a stats plugin and spam protection plugin (such as akismet) would be great.

So there ya have it.  Many thanks again to Mustafa for taking the time to respond to the interview.  Do you have a fantastic site using WPMU DEV products?  I’d love to hear from you and discuss the possibility of being one of our featured members this year.

Drop me a line via our contact form.  Please mark it to my attention in the subject and include a link to your site and a list of products in your initial contact.  There’s only 12 months this year (natch) and one of them is already taken so availability will be very limited!

1) Tell our readers what Pressbooks is in less than 50 words.

PressBooks is a simple online book production tool, exporting books as: EPUB (for Kindle, iBooks, etc), typeset PDF (for print), and web (public or private). PressBooks is powerful enough for publishers, and simple enough for authors. It sits atop WordPress, but it’s a complete reworking, tailored for making and distributing a book.

2) How does Pressbooks work?

If you’ve used WordPress, then PressBooks will be familiar and comfortable, though a little different. We’ve stripped out much of the Admin, and rebuilt it with simplicity and focus in mind. We’ve built on WordPress MultiUser, with each book is a “blog,” and each chapter is a “post” (custom post type of course).

The main admin panels are Book Information (where things like Book Title, copyright information and ISBN can be added), and Text where you organize your text, and of course there is User Admin and Media Admin, and a couple of other limited settings.

We’ve strived to make the UI sensible and suited to the task of making a book, and spent an awful lot of time building and perfecting the export tools so that you get a nice, clean, valid and well-designed epub (the open ebook format) out the other end, as well as a beautifully typeset PDF, if you want to send your book to the printer or print-on-demand service.

We’ve added some default ebook designs (these are epub CSSs), and will very shortly allow users to upload their own epub CSS. In the works are similar features for web & print.

We also do some XML exports (for instance an InDesign XML format), but these are more experimental at the moment.

3) What problem does PressBooks solve?

Mainly: PressBooks makes it easy to make beautiful books in multiple formats, from one “source file” … online.

I think it will solve some other problems, such as collaborating on a book. But, generally we believe it should be as easy for writers and publishers to make and distribute a beautiful book (ebook or print) as it is for them to make a beautiful website. We are replicating for books the model of the web (and WordPress in particular), which is: “build on a solid, structured framework, and apply different styling (Themes & CSS).”

We see no reason this model (content + structure + presentation) should not be applied to books as well.

4) Have you had much interest from writers so far (examples of some books would be great)?

Actually we’re not fully tracking what books are going from PressBooks into distribution channels, but we know of a few (beyond the book we did with O’Reilly, “Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto.”).

Harvard Business Review Press published “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently,” with PressBooks as their production tool, and they have another book in the works. We’re working with Columbia Business School Press on another project, and in fact Ciprian Gherghescu just published: “How To WordPress – 10 Easy Steps to Creating A Killer Website Using WordPress” …

We’ll be adding distribution at some point, but the main thing we want to do is give publishers and authors a very powerful, but straightforward publishing process…. and we’re less worried for the moment about what happens once we’ve helped someone get a book out the door.

5) What are the benefits to Pressbooks as opposed to other self-publishing models?

We’re not really a self-publishing platform, any more than WordPress is a self-publishing platform. We’re a very good and powerful tool that will help any publishing entity (from individual authors to the largest publishers) have a more efficient and sensible digital publishing workflow.

Still, a self-publisher can upload a Word file to Smashwords or Kindle Direct Publishing, and that would be “easier.” PressBooks offers a whole other level of control of your content, what happens to it as you are creating it.

6) Do you have plans to release any plugins so that WordPress users can publish books from their own site?

There’s an existing plugin that does that — Anthologize — and our model will be a little different, focusing on making a more powerful book production & distribution environment.

We do plan to enable importing from an existing WordPress blog into PressBooks – which currently isn’t possible. In the works.

As we start implementing some other neat features that could be applicable to other WordPress users, we’ll be releasing those plugins to the wider community.

7) At the minute Pressbooks is all about publishing a book – do you have plans to integrate social media or marketing tools to help writers promote their books?

Yes! We think the Trojan Horse in PressBooks is: “What happens when books can easily (with the push of a button) get online?” … and the answer is: all the wonderful stuff that happens with other kinds of content online: sharing, linking, commenting etc. So now that we have the core of PressBooks working well, we’re starting to evolve the idea of how we can start really exploring what it means to be be producing & distributing a book in an online environment – which includes social media & marketing tools.

In fact, we’d like books to be considered social media as well.

8) Where do you see Pressbooks going over the next few years?

We have two things we’d like to focus on:

• 1. We want to help make it really easy and really cheap for all kinds of publishers (from single authors to huge companies) to make beautiful books in many formats
• 2. We want to really explore what it means to have “books” online as structured web objects…

Intrigued by PressBooks? Check out their demo slides, visit the PressBooks website and sign up to get started.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

So we were stoked to sit down and discuss with Brad Markle of Inmotion Hosting (virtually via email of course) and gather some of his thoughts behind this handy plugin.

First off, Brad tell us about your Memory Viewer in your own words.

The Memory Viewer plugin allows you to see WordPress’ memory usage at several points while WordPress loads, and it also gives you a summary of all MySQL activity. This is great if you have a heavy WordPress installation as it can help pinpoint where in WordPress an issue may be.

What led you to develop this particular plugin?

Working for a large hosting provider, we work with various types of clients. Being in the Shared Hosting business, many of our customers run WordPress sites, and sometimes they get flagged as using excessive server resources. While it is easy for anyone to get a website up and running with WordPress, not too many users understand what MySQL usage is or how CPU time and memory are “shared” in a shared hosting provider. This plugin was written to help users pinpoint possible bottlenecks in their WordPress installation.

How does Memory Viewer help during development?

During development, the Memory Viewer plugin is a great way to see how many MySQL queries you’re running and how long each query is running. For example, if you have a bad loop in your code, you should be able to easily pin point the excessive queries. Also, if your queries are calling too much data, for example if they call everything when they only need the `id`, they may be able to see a bump up in memory usage.

How can Memory Viewer help a regular user?

For the regular user, the Memory Viewer plugin most likely isn’t going to make too much sense to them. I can see however a ‘regular user’ being contacted by their web host about their account’s resource usage, and then passing the Memory Viewer plugin results to a developer for further review.

Anything else our readers might find useful?

The WordPress Memory Viewer plugin is still quite young, it’s only been around for a month or two. We’d love to hear comments / suggestions as we’re eager to make the plugin as good as it can be.

 To me, one of the coolest things about Brad’s interview is to see how this plugin came out of a real problem that needed a solution.  Massive props to InMotion Hosting for releasing this tool for free to all!  This kinda action shows a thoughtfulness to the community.  They even provide a thorough guide to using memory viewer right here.

Have you guys used memory viewer yet?  Be sure to send Brad and the team at InMotion Hosting some love in the comments or even provide suggestions as to what else you’d like to see :)

Tell our readers what Manage WP is in less than 50 words.

ManageWP is a powerful all-in-one management dashboard for multiple WordPress sites. It gives users ultimate control over their websites from one location, with one-click updates, scheduled backups, user management features, site cloning capabilities, and many other spectacular features.

What problems does Manage WP solve for WordPress users?

ManageWP was designed to solve an array of problems that all WordPress users face when dealing with multiple WordPress websites. The most significant problem that WordPress users have — and this, admittedly, exists with all content management platforms — is that they need to login to each and every one of their WordPress sites to perform menial day-to-day tasks: updating plugins and themes, running manual backups, checking user-generated content, keeping an eye on traffic, ensuring that everything is running smoothly, and, our favorite, updating their WordPress sites to the latest and greatest versions.

Ideally, is this what those users want to be spending hours on a daily basis doing? No way! It’s not fun, it’s not efficient, and it’s a task that prevents users from focusing on what’s really important: their customers and their readers.

We had these problems, and we wanted an all-inclusive solution. So, when we couldn’t find one, we decided to take action. We created a single, unified dashboard where all of the WordPress action takes place. This allows WordPress users to save tremendous amounts of time and money. And current customers love it.

One of our most popular features is our one-click login, thus giving our users unparalleled access to all of their WordPress websites with ease. Another popular feature is our automated backup solution — it allows our users to schedule daily, weekly or monthly backups to one of five possible locations (their server, Amazon S3, Dropbox, external FTP, email). And for WordPress developers and web hosts, our clone tool has proven to be essential — it makes creating fully-featured WordPress sites from existing WordPress sites or templates a breeze. And it just keeps going from there.

We designed ManageWP to solve real problems, and that’s what we are doing, and that’s what we will continue to keep doing far into the future.

How did you come up with the idea?

The initial concept for ManageWP came to me when a friend of mine noticed that he had trouble managing a couple of websites; I was managing around 30 at that time. I eventually realized that the world’s biggest Internet publishing platform needed a quality solution for managing multiple WordPress installations, far beyond what WordPress Multisite offered. After that, it was just a matter of getting to work and creating it, which was no easy task.

How long have you spent on development? Have you come up against any major problems?

It’s been around 18 months since we began, and we have a dedicated team of about 10 people. Even with that, there were many challenges along the way. For example, we had to come up with a secure protocol to handle all communication between the blogs and WordPress, as we did not want to rely on the built-in XML-RPC. It would potentially publish user credentials without encryption, which is not good at all. So we came up with an OpenSSL encrypted communication solution (because we here at ManageWP take security very seriously). Our next significant challenge was in making all our features work across thousands of different WordPress setups, on top of thousands of different server configurations and hosting environments.

We knew it was going to be a significant amount of work, and with the time and money invested, it’s been no cakewalk. But we are so proud with how far we have come.

Automate your backups

Your website says that more than 80,000 websites are being managed by ManageWP – how are you coping with that huge volume of sites?

We are thrilled to help manage so many websites (the actual number is over 100,000, counting our Enterprise users). We are having a genuine impact on the WordPress community, and that makes us even more happy to be a part of this thriving and passionate community.

As for dealing with the huge volume, since we had our beta available since day one, we have had an impressive amount of time to polish ManageWP and test it on various configurations. Because of that, the volume of support is manageable by our team. And we have put great effort into writing efficient and adaptable code. Either way, we fully believe we will be able to handle any service load that our customers demand in the future.

You’ve been in a free beta period for some time now – have you learned anything that has surprised you or made any major changes as a result of user input?

Absolutely! Our initial idea was to create a premium product with a pricing model very similar to VaultPress, which charges $15/month per website for backup features alone. We ran a pricing survey and discovered that a lot of our users found even $1/month per website too expensive, so we ended up finding ways to reduce the cost of our infrastructure. This considerably reduced our initial prices and allowed us to create different tiers. Now our prices start as low as $0.10/month per website, with up to $4/month per website for our Business package. It includes many features that users would have to pay for with a number of alternative and un-unified services — like automated backups, SEO statistics, keyword rank checking, and up-time monitoring, just to name a few.

The second thing I learned is that, as the founder of ManageWP, I need to start listening to user feedback as soon as possible. There is a wealth of very smart ideas that will help improve products, and interacting with users as much as possible helps to ensure that our customers know that we are listening.

What have you got planned for the next year?

Next year will be very special for ManageWP! We will continue integrating with popular cloud-based services to take ManageWP to the next level in WordPress management. We have the ultimate vision of making ManageWP the first dashboard any user with a number of WordPress sites will want to see when they wake up.

Furthermore, we will be working closely with other influential companies in WordPress community to bring their products and services closer to our user base. This will ensure that the tools and services that WordPress users value the most will also be available within ManageWP. Ultimately, it will add tremendous value to every WordPress user and every WordPress company that wants to provide the ultimate value to customers who manage any number of WordPress sites.

But for those who want a little taste of what we have in development… we are working on enhanced security tools, internationalization, and improved automation of various WordPress management tasks. All of these, and more, will continue to make ManageWP an exciting and essential tool for those who want to save time and money with their WordPress management.

Finally, if any of our fellow WordPress users want or need a service that can completely revolutionize their multisite WordPress management, we invite them to check us out and let us know how we can help!

Want to learn more? Check out this video:

ManageWP Tour from ManageWP on Vimeo.

Tell our readers what Infinity is in less than 50 words?

Infinity is the first Anti-Framework – A Theme Development solution to free you from Frameworks. It gives back freedom to site owners and WordPress developers by letting you pick the features you need for your projects.

How did you come up with the concept?

Bowe: This is quite a long story, so bear with me here. About two years ago I was working on a non-profit WordPress MultiSite/BuddyPress community for people with Cystic Fibrosis. Developing such a huge multisite network install with a main BuddyPress community, potentially hundreds of user blogs, turned out to be a huge undertaking.

I dove into the world of WordPress theming because I wanted my community to be unique and to make the design consistent across the BuddyPress community and the blogs. Before I knew it I was deep into WordPress development and while I absolutely loved it, the learning curve was high. I felt that the energy I wanted to use for building my community and making it something unique was wasted on learning how to make theme options panels for my users, properly enqueueing scripts and setting up child themes to make it all managable.  Every time I thought I got something right, I read one of those damn tutorials from the WordPress gurus who told me that I was doing it wrong. It frustrated me because I felt I was on to making something great, but was not able to get it to the point where it felt it was ready. I’m a community builder who knows HTML/CSS but I’m not a programmer. And I felt quite lost in the world of WordPress development.

During that time I reached out especially to the BuddyPress developers to ask for PHP code examples and snippets, and one of the guys that always helped me was Marshall. I eventually hired him to help me with my project. It took a lot of pressure of my back, and we quickly became friends in the process. He had been coding for 10 years and had been focusing on large scale MultiSite projects for a while now. The things that took me days to figure out took him 20 minutes. Often he came up with solutions where I could expand upon his work without having to learn actual PHP, and this sparked an huge idea in both of us.

What if I would tell him the problems I encountered building my WordPress community, and he could find ways to solve them? What if he could focus on doing technical stuff behind the scenes the right way, and make them easy for me to use them?

That was the core idea behind Infinity more then a year back, and after a year of pretty much full time development, it has turned into something much more we could ever imagine, and something that we are very proud of!

What makes Infinity different from all the other frameworks out there?

Bowe: One word; Freedom. We use the slogan “More Freedom to Create” for a reason. Infinity is an anti-Framework; it frees you from Frameworks.

During my time researching the frameworks I could use for my community, I often felt that certain features were missing, or that the groundwork laid by the Framework developers did not fit my workflow. And still today there are hardly any Frameworks that really include MultiSite and BuddyPress support – it is often an afterthought  added by developers so they can say that they support BuddyPress/MultiSite. We strongly felt that we could really innovate with Infinity with this.

For example, a framework might come with a great option panel packed full of features, but I wanted to use this theme as the parent in my MultiSite network. How would my users respond to such a thing? The WordPress admin is hard enough for n00bs. Before I knew it I was spending days removing features, forking templates and getting a headache. And what if I wanted to add just a few more options? I would need to modify templates and learn PHP, or hire a developer. It just wasn’t what I wanted.

Infinity is different. Every single aspect of Infinity is modular and we spent a huge amount of time making it extremely easy to use, even for the non-technical user. With Infinity everything can be configured through a few special configuration files. These files contain normal human-readable text where you tell Infinity exactly which features/theme options/shortcodes you want to use on a per theme basis.

What our your favorite Infinity features?

Marshall: There are so many! But I think one of the most exciting things is the modular approach we took. Infinity has a powerful API where every feature, theme option, shortcode or widget can be enabled and disabled on a per theme basis. All this can be done through a very easy configuration file.

Here’s an example:

[feature]

buddypress-support = on (this would add a bunch of BP options to your dashboard)

custom-css-options = on (enables you or your users to change colors)

header-logo = off (if you would like to disable the header logo upload feature)

The same is applied to adding options. If you want people to upload a photo to display in their blog sidebar, for example, you would simply do this:

[sidebar_user_photo]

type = "upload" (this is the type of option you want to add)

section = "general" (in which section of the option panel you want this to show)

title = "Your Photo"

description = "Upload a nice photo that will be displayed in your sidebar"

This option now shows up in your Dashboard right along with sample code to insert into your (child) theme template.

The cool thing about this is that the configuration files cascade down into Child Theme and Grandchild Themes (more about that in a bit!) so you could enable all kinds of features for your main community site, and simply disable them for the user blogs in your network. Because WordPress developers can easily create “Features” just as they would create a WordPress plugin, our community site will have a special section where these features can be downloaded and dropped into your Infinity theme.

This is a great concept that really excites us because of the possibilities and flexibility it offers, especially to Multisite projects.

There are a lot more though, but this interview is already getting quite long so maybe a short bullet list with some links attached to it would help!

• Infinite Child Themes
• Easy Dashboard Builder
• 100% BuddyPress 1.5 and bbPress support
• Full Multisite compatibility. Build large theme ancestries with very little effort.

We’re working very hard on getting all the features documented and we’ll write a lot more about them on our community site.

What are the benefits of Infinity for WordPress developers?

Bowe: Do you want to hear something crazy? Infinity and all it’s features are not even tied to a specific theme!

Infinity is our flagship theme where you can build Child Themes upon if you want too. It has BuddyPress 1.5 support built in, 60+ hooks, an easy Grid System and uses all the latest WordPress standards like get_template_part. But here’s the fun stuff: you can add Infinity to ANY WordPress theme and use its powerful set of built-in Features for your commercial themes or client projects. Free of charge, and we will even help you do so.

Marshall: A short technical summary would be: Infinity is simply a powerful layer of re-usable and highly extensible features that sits between WordPress and your theme(s), without locking you in to a specific design model.

Bowe: As soon as you add Infinity to your theme you can stop worrying about a lot of things, and spent more time creating awesome designs. Which brings us back to my long story at the beginning. With Infinity, I do not have to worry about doing things the right way, Infinity does this for me.

I do not have to mess around with complicated PHP code. I can develop WordPress themes exactly the same as I used to do, but at the same time use Infinity to make things a hell of a lot easier, and a lot more fun.

One of the best examples is the automatic style and scripts enqueueing that comes with Infinity. By adding a few simple lines into the infinity.ini configuration file I can do all kinds of cool things:

[style]
buddypress_development = "assets/css/bp_development.css"
lightbox_css = "assets/css/lightbox.css"

[style_conditions]
is_buddypress = "buddypress_development"
is_page:portfolio = "lightbox_css"

These 5 lines were all I needed to enqueue two CSS files for my theme. I’m even using WordPress conditionals to load the lightbox CSS script only on the “Portfolio” page, and the BuddyPress Development only on BuddyPress pages. This is a basic example, but you can do some extremely powerful and creative things without getting a headache!

I’m able to create themes for my clients/customers and give them the power to customize the theme without me having to step in all the time. I’ve cut back drastically on support because they can use the configuration files to disable/enable features, build their options and much more.

Marshall: You can use the same configuration files to build entire option panels with color pickers, uploaders, sliders and all the well known field types like text, radios and drop downs, etc.

Do you think it is useful for less advanced users? What will they get out of it?

Bowe: At the end of the day we wanted to empower the people who have awesome ideas for building websites or communities with WordPress. We wanted to create a free GPL solution that could power their WordPress (Multisite/BuddyPress) communities and offer them more freedom then with any other solution out there.

While Infinity contains a lot of power under the hood, and there is always some learning to do, you don’t need to do a whole lot with Infinity. If you just want to focus on building your community the Infinity Base theme is perfectly suited for that!

Marshall: Infinity is also a great choice for non-developers because instead of hiring a developer to create that portfolio page for you, chances are that someone else made a Portfolio extension and share it with the Infinity community. We are still in Private Beta we have a lot of things to finish up before release but we anticipated that people would be asking for all kinds of features from the start. We love that, and it tells us others get excited about Infinity too! Even Bowe keeps bugging me about things I need to add to Infinity on a hourly basis.

Because our Component API makes it easy for developers to create these extensions, our community will have a special section dedicated to them where less advanced users can simply download the extensions and use them in their projects. Simply by dragging and dropping an extension folder into your Child Theme all the new functionality and options for this extension will automatically be added to your Infinity Dashboard. Here’s an example:

So no more setting screens spread all across the WordPress dashboard, making things a lot easier for you and the users in your Multisite network.

Tell me a bit about how Infinity utilizes HTML5 and CSS3.

Bowe: Our Infinity Base Theme uses the HTML5 doctype which means that it’s HTML5 ready. Also our the Base Theme is fully responsive, which means it looks great on all devices including mobile phones. That also includes for the BuddyPress pages! If you want to check it out just visit bp-tricks on your iPhone/iPad or any other device!

We’ve chosen not to go the full HTML5 route just yet, but plan to do so in the future, when we are 110% sure it works across browsers.

We do use a fair amount of CSS3 to spice things up. We split all of the design elements into a seperate file called “design.css”. Base.css contains all the essential wireframe css and design.css contains all the sexy CSS3 and images.

We’ve done this so developers can easily start with a completely blank slate and develop unique looking Child Themes based upon our Infinity Base Parent Theme.

We already have quite a few Child Themes ready, and one of them will be given away for free to our Beta members. It’s called Infinity+ so that should give you an idea of what it will look like ;–)

The idea of infinite child themes is pretty cool in theory, but can you give our readers some examples of how it can be utilized in practice?

Marshall: Absolutely! At first we were not completely sure on how this could be utilized but as soon as some of our clients started using Infinity we heard some pretty amazing stuff..

One of our clients created a Parent Theme which contains all of the templates, options and features for their entire network. Basically like the “master” theme. Let’s call that the “Animals Theme” to help you visualize this.

First they created child themes we call “Pets” based upon the “Animal theme”. For instance:

“Cats” “Dogs” “Fish”

These pets child themes would contain a few template modifications and some specific Theme Options specific to that category. Let’s say the Dogs theme has a different homepage template, several dog related widgets activated and default images related to dogs. Also, these child themes contained some custom options for the animal lovers specifically related to those who have pets.

Finally, they started building grandchild themes based on those Child themes. So the “Dogs” Grand Child Themes could be a Labrador Theme, a Golden Retriever Theme or a really tiny theme especially for chihuahuas!

Now that you have all this set up, the really fun stuff begins! Because like a waterfall everything cascades down from the Granddaddy Theme. For example, you could add a nice BuddyPress Profile Widget (included with Infinity Base btw) into your Sidebar and it would show up everywhere.

Or if you would like to modify an option and change it to fit the (grand)child theme you could do this:

Animal Theme Options file

[your-animal-photo]
type = "upload"
section = "general"
title = "Your Animal"
description = "Upload a nice photo that will be displayed in your sidebar"
default_value = "images/animal.png"``

Grand Child Retriever Theme

[your-animal-photo]
section = "general"
title = "Your Retriever"
description = "Upload a photo of your retriever that will be displayed in your sidebar"
default_value = "images/retriever.png"

Now this option will have a different default image and description.

When are you moving from private beta and unleashing Infinity on the world?

We are working extremely hard to get everything ready for release. The current version of Infinity is pretty stable and most our time is spent on fine tuning, writing documentation, creating awesome Infinity Child Themes and collecting feedback from our rapidly growing community. We hope to release Infinity to the public by the end of October and celebrate the launch with some great Infinity Base Child Themes with responsive design, BBPress and BuddyPress 1.5 support and a bunch of other great features. For free!

Until that time we would like to invite the WPMU.org readers to try out Infinity by joining our community. If you are a developer and want to help us make Infinity even more awesome, be sure to get in touch with us through twitter (@PressCrew) or by sending us a message on http://community.presscrew.com

They can do so with the special sign-up code “White Russian”. Which reminds us.. It’s time for a drink!

Greetings, Marshall and Bowe

Thanks Marshall and Bowe! We can’t wait for the public release! All you guys should head over to the Presscrew website and check it out now.

Here’s his advice on using WordPress at enterprise level.

1) How do you use WordPress in Enterprise?

In Enterprise terms I work mainly on NHS projects for Barnsley Hospital and we were one of the first (I sometimes like to say ‘the’ first but sadly I don’t have solid evidence of that!) NHS Trusts to move to WordPress for our external public facing website.

We launched the WordPress powered site in 2008 and since then its been an interesting journey trying to find the best mix of WordPress elements to fit the requirements for such a site. WordPress has been a perfect fit for our public site and we haven’t looked back.

The next phase, and you could say this is more ‘Enterprise-y’, is to move our old creaking Intranet tool over to a WordPress (multisite enabled) installation running on Windows servers and serving more than 2000 staff over many different locations.

2) What applications do you run alongside WordPress?

The most obvious one is SharePoint, which is a great tool but very frustrating unless you have a tonne of funding and technical resources. We use this for mainly document management which its very good at out-of-the box but for simple website building and content management it really struggles with the basics and is incredibly difficult to use.

3) What sort of issues do you face?

The major one for me, and I suspect a lot of other Enterprise organisations is their reliance on Microsoft server technology. The NHS is deeply enthroned in the Microsoft ecosystem for both hardware and software and staff resources.

What this means for WordPress is your IT team will not be able to realistically support a fully-blown LAMP set-up meaning you will have to run WordPress on an IIS server, something that until very recently was a huge pain in the arse.

Thankfully, Microsoft have jumped onto the WordPress bandwagon and have developed a set of tools that allow PHP/MySQL applications to seamlessly run on your Windows-based Servers. You can read more about this move on the Ubelly Blog and from a great old post over at the ‘WordPress on Microsoft Blog’ titled ‘Why the BLEEP is Microsoft doing this?!?!‘

4) How do you deal with the fast release cycle?

I run a development server that is a mirror of our live site and generally spend around 2 to 3 weeks testing (when I get chance) that  everything is working before we do the switch on the live site. We have had no technical issues yet.

The UI changes to the dashboard can be a little tricky as they always require an updated training session. Thankfully we have culled our editors down from over 15 to just 3 in recent months (purely editorial reasons) so this isn’t too much of a problem.

5) What sort of processes do you have in place for upgrading WordPress?

See above. One thing I will add is that you shouldn’t rush into upgrading. A lot of the time a new point release will come out just a few days after a major one so its better to hold out as long as you can.

6) What advice would you give to anyone planning to use WordPress at enterprise level?

Get you’re strategy right (plan, plan then plan some more) and if you need to, don’t even mention WordPress or PHP or MySQL or Open Source or anything like that. These terms can scare large organisations and because tools like WordPress are free they sometimes see that as a weakness in value.

My top tip is just call your project the ‘solution’. If you are building an Enterprise website/intranet/whatever, don’t even say what technology or systems it will run unless someone asks. If you have your technical strategy right it really shouldn’t matter.

7) What your essential plugins for using WordPress for enterprise?

Gravity Forms for data collection and surveys and bbPress for forums(the new 2.0 version). These are not only essential in so many ways they are also pretty reliable as they have some serious development weight behind them.

Another one I’ve been touting lately is the ‘Front End Editor‘ which allows users to change content without having to access the dashboard. However our strategy for editing content is tightly controlled so until we open this up to users I don’t have a need for it personally.

8) Anything else our readers would find useful?

Don’t worry about the ‘Microsoft barrier’. If you are semi-technical and want to play just install a version of Windows Server then hit yourself up with a copy of WebMatrix from the ‘Web Platform’ team. This will install WordPress (and some other CMS tools) for you on your local machine and you can play around and maybe start developing themes/plugins.

If you want to take this further then download a Virtual Machine (VM) product like Virtual Box, install a local Windows Server with IIS and have yourself a decent little development box that you can show the nay-sayers just how well (fingers crossed) it all works.

Finally, remember that the largest UK-Enterprise of all, the British Government uses WordPress at Number10.gov.uk if that’s not enough to convince your organisation that its a decent product then you are out of luck.

(header image CC license Dunechaser)

Dave Coveney

Back when I was at WordCamp UK I attended a session on using WordPress in Enterprise. I made a video of the session but I went to upload it yesterday, fired up my laptop and it wouldn’t switch on :( In the meantime, however, I interviewed a couple of the panel members by email so that any of you who couldn’t make the session can still have the benefit of some of their sage advice.

Today’s interview is with Dave Coveney. Dave is Director of Interconnect IT, a Liverpool-based web company that has built websites for the likes of Telegraph Media Group, Greenwich PCT and Informa PLC. He also gave my favorite presentation at WordCamp UK – he even gave away Skittles! Yum.

Okay, here he is:

1) How do you use WordPress in Enterprise?

We don’t! We’re not really a large company, so we have a WP website, of course, and we will probably use WP for our ticketing system in the future. However, we do implement WP for a number of Enterprise clients. For example, one multinational gas company uses a WP site as a way for users to anonymously flag up safety concerns. They also use various other blogs for internal communications on a range of matters.

2) What applications do you run alongside WordPress?

One of our clients, Lloyds List Group, uses WP for marketing landing pages. The forms on these (Gravity Forms based, incidentally) then feed directly to Salesforce.com, allowing their sales teams to follow up the generated leads. Other clients use APIs from other systems to help show information, for example flight information on the NATS (National Air Traffic Service) corporate site.

3) What sort of issues do you face?

Getting WP into the intranet is a tricky one. Ultimately, Sharepoint is the corporate darling – and for good reason. The infrastructure it requires is well understood, it has amazing workflow and security capabilities, and at the same time it can power a corporate intranet and even, should you wish, an external facing website. However, Sharepoint is clumsy for standard corporate communications. Trying to face off Sharepoint with WP will *always* fail, because they are not the same offering. Instead, WP should be sold as an ideal solution for running hub pages and internal and external communications sites. For now, WP for intranets is going to be largely limited to smaller organisations. It’s brilliant for companies of, say, twenty or so people and probably up to around 100+. But in an organisation of 50,000 it just doesn’t have the tools required, and they’re a long way from being available.

4) How do you deal with the fast release cycle?

We don’t! We actually review the reasons for changes and then carry out upgrades at our convenience. However, that’s not for everybody – you have to understand what the security bulletins mean, you have to have a properly secured server, and you have to have good working practices. It would be nice if there were frequently patched, stable enterprise releases that had no more than annual release schedules. One day, a company with a lot of enterprise clients will fork or create a WP distro in such a way and it will be one step closer to getting broad acceptance of the system.

5) What sort of processes do you have in place for upgrading WordPress?

We have staging servers running copies of the live site. We test the upgrades here first, and develop an upgrade plan. We then use this to upgrade the main sites promptly. There are always backups available in order to allow for a rapid roll-back if required.

6) What advice would you give to anyone planning to use WordPress at enterprise level?

Go for it, but don’t think it’s the panacea to all costs and savings. Be prepared for resistance in many quarters, and get your explanations of the benefits *and* disadvantages in order.

7) What your essential plugins for using WordPress for enterprise?

That’s an open ended question and I don’t think there’s any answer as each implementation is different! WPDirAuth is useful for LDAP authentication. A lot of our stuff is custom and unreleased, so we can’t really list those out.

(header image CC license Dunechaser)