WordPress: A Prejudiced Commercial Ecosystem

You will find loads of commercially supported themes on WordPress.org but commercially supported plugins don’t receive that same blatant promotion. While theme developers and theme shops are making a substantial income, your average commercial plugin developer often struggles to find a way to cover the time spent on creating and supporting the plugin. Yet, both themes and plugins are subject to the same license. What gives?

Last week I noticed an interesting tweet from Drupal’s Dries Buytaert:

This refers to a comment by Jeff Sayre, a BuddyPress developer and forum moderator, as well as the creator of BuddyPress Privacy. Jeff is seriously considering switching his efforts to Drupal because of his recent experiences with the WordPress community.

Rarely have I ever seen a more courteous and informative exchange in the WordPress world than what I saw in the comments posted by Drupal community members in response to Jeff’s inquiry. In contrast, read some of the comments on Jeff’s update regarding his free plugin: Privacy Comes to BuddyPress.

Jeff makes an excellent point regarding the GPL:

Designers and developers alike should each be afforded the same freedoms granted by the GPL. In my opinion, anyone who does not fully support all rights given by the GPL license does not support its freedoms.

Granted, some plugin developers are better than others at monetizing their efforts, but all must overcome the stigma of creating something related to WordPress that isn’t totally free. The level of entitlement among WordPress users is astronomical, especially when it comes to plugins that are offered for free.

Try creating a WordPress plugin and see if you don’t receive several hateful emails because you haven’t updated your plugin or haven’t answered a support question or provided enough documentation. This is one reason many high quality WordPress plugin developers choose to sell their work, despite being shunned and/or openly mocked by leaders within the community. The WordPress project has a hard and fast “fall in line” approach, and if you disregard community “requests”, your business may be on the line, perhaps even set up for potential ruin.

Newsflash: Selling Free Software is OK!

Unlike the Drupal community, WordPress already has several high quality and fairly well-known sources for acquiring commercial plugins. Yet, commercial plugin developers are still regarded as second class citizens. It also doesn’t help that some commercial plugin developers take a self-righteous approach to their pricing, claiming that their small price tag means that they don’t even wish to make money.

There is nothing wrong with making money, even a large revenue stream, by selling open source software. The GPL means free as in freedom, not free as in beer. You have the freedom to make as much money as you want to. The libertarian, free market aspect of open source software is often unpalatable to scholarly types who are constantly crying out for the redistribution of wealth at the expense of individual freedom. They cannot stand to see someone succeed and make money from open source software.

Commercial plugin sites, such as WP Plugins and WPMU DEV, have been largely regarded as anti-community spirit. However, it’s important to recognize what the GNU GPL actually stands for when it comes to selling free software:

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible — just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.

If WordPress leaders and community members continue to mitigate the freedoms afforded by the GPL, we’re going to lose excellent developers like Jeff Sayre. The WordPress community needs to make a concerted effort to curb entitlement among its users and stop promoting an emasculated version of the GPL.

There are many high quality developers of the caliber of Jeff Sayre who are capable of producing enterprise-class extensions for any open source CMS. However, due to the present anti-capitalist sentiments in the WordPress community, it’s no surprise that many are finding that they can no longer subject their businesses to an atmosphere that inhibits the freedom and innovation available within the GPL.

Entrepreneurs need freedom in order to establish viable revenue-generating businesses that will support their families. Just because the tools I use for building are open source, doesn’t mean I can work for free, even if I’m producing another open source tool for others to use. It’s simple math. My hope is that the WordPress community will grow into a more thoughtful and respectful discourse that respects different opinions. I would also like to see 2011 be a pivotal year in which commercial plugin developers are not regarded as second class citizens. Your thoughts and ideas for making this happen are welcome in the comments.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Yesterday we looked in detail at one of his plugins – WP Answers. WP Answers is a plugin that enables you to run a Yahoo Answers style question and answer website. Unlike the themes that are similar, the WP Answers plugin works with any theme – just choose which page you want it to appear on and it integrates seemlessly with the rest of your site.  You can use your theme’s CSS, the plugin’s styles or you can use the color picker to generate some new colors for it.

WP Answers works on a points-based system. When users register they are allocated points – points are deducted when they ask questions and are added when they answer them. There are loads of other great features so check out my full post on WP Plugins.

Earlier this week we featured Seth Shoultes over on the WP Plugins blog. Seth is from Salt Lake City in Utah. He developed the Event Espresso plugin which you can buy straight from WP Plugins. On Monday he introduced us to his wife, his cute little boy, his dogs, and his love of coffee. I wonder if that’s where the title for his plugin from, eh? :)

Event Espresso is an amazing event management plugin for WordPress. It has all of the features that you’d want from an event management plugin, and a few more. You can create events and event categories, add surcharges, set up a payment gateway, send out emails and newsletters, export CSVs. Check out my full post at WP Plugins. You won’t be disappointed by Event Espresso – I wasn’t!

This week we featured Jonathan O’Shea, a developer based in sunny Wales in the UK. He developed both the Welcome Box and Post PDE plugins. Jonathan sent me a picture of himself with a cat on his knee, which made me happy. Anyone who sits at their computer with a cat on their knee gets a gold star from me. If you’d like to read more about Jonathan, his plugins and his development process, hop over the WP Plugins blog for the full story.

On Wednesday we featured Jonathan’s Plugin Welcome Box, a popover plugin that is easily customized to display webpages or images. You can use it for advertising, marketing and promotions. You can check out all the details right here.

One that we’re excited about is the SupportBird plugin, which gives you a simple and effective WordPress help desk to help you keep your customers happy. Submissions are saved as custom post types and categories can be defined on the plugin options page.

Stay up to date with all the news from WPPlugins by subscribing to their blog.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Features

• Spacing control
• Hyphenation
• Intelligent character replacement including smart handling of quotation marks, dashes, trademarks, ellipses, math symbols, ordinal suffixes and fractions
• CSS Hooks for styling ampersands, uppercase words, numbers, initial quotes and guillmets

Out Mini Review

If you’re looking for an easy way to improve the typography of your WordPress website then the WP-Typography Plugin offers a good solution. I particularly like the feature that allows you to add custom diacritic word replacements e.g  automatically replacing cliche with cliché, or cafe with café. This could come in really handy if you’re frequently using words that require different accents.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Features

• Remove and delete old revision data
• Optimize database

Our Mini Review

I like having cleared out my revisions. It makes me feel all clean and shiny. However, I was a bit scared when I did it as I was terrified that my page would disappear with it – perhaps that says more about me than about the plugin. The ability to optimize my database is great but I would love some additional features for this plugin, especially the ability to exclude the latest revisions from being deleted.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Features

• Show overview and memory usage on dashboard
• Multisite version available

Our Mini Review

This is a great little plugin to help with site diagnostics. This is especially helpful if you are having problems with your memory limit, as discussed in this post here. It’s a simply idea but it’s very effective and gives you just the information you need if you are having memory problems.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

1. Bots, robots, crawlers, spiders, whatever you want to call them – these are what determine where your site appears in the search rankings;
2. People – we want to make people happy. If people are happy then they link to us and if people link to us we can get higher rankings and then more people can find us who will link to us which will raise our rankings and more people can find us and on and on.

While WordPress comes pretty well SEOed out of the box the balance is still not the easiest one to achieve – with so many people using WordPress you can’t just throw together a website, stick some content on it and expect yourself to rank high. There are millions of people out there just as desperate as you to get on to the first page of Google. And remember, if you don’t rank, you don’t exist.

If you’ve got an hour you could spend some time watching Joost de Valk from Yoast, who’s immensely qualified to teach you all about WordPress SEO.

WordPress SEO Presentation at A4UExpo London from Joost de Valk on Vimeo.

My plan was to put together one post. But like all great plans it fell apart. Too much information! So, before we look at content, we’ll start at the beginning.

How to Tweak your WordPress Installation to make those spiders happy

1. Choose your domain

You’d probably be surprised by just how many people use both the www and the non-www version of their website. This tends not to be an active choice but something that they’re just unaware of doing. There are actually two ways of viewing a website – one is with www and one is without www.

Why does this cause a problem? Because search engines will index both versions meaning that you have duplicate content. And spiders really, really hate to munch on the same piece of data twice. While many search engines now have the ability to combine the results and pass them on to one domain, this doesn’t always happen. All of the SEO benefits that you’ve worked so hard to achieve will be split between two addresses, thus diluting your rankings. Plus, you should decide whether you want a www or non-www site to be ranked. Don’t let a spider decide for you!

By logging in to your WordPress administration and going to General Settings you can determine which address your site should use. Like so:

You can read more about www/non-www problems, including how to fix the problem by editing the .htaccess file to create a 301 redirect, here.

2. Solve your canonicalization problems

Yes, I know, why did Google have to use the word “canonicalization” for anything? It’s so looooooong and unwieldy.

Alright then word geeks, here’s something for you.
Canonicalization comes from the Latin word canōn from the Greek work kanōn which means measuring rod, or standard.
Here’s a definition:
Canon: a fundamental principle or general rule: the canons of good behaviour.
If you want to read all of the definitions you can see them here

Anyway, back from the English lesson: there are four versions of any web address:

• www.mywebsite.com
• mywebsite.com/
• www.mywebsite.com/index.html
• mywebsite.com/home.asp

Like I said above, what the Googlebot does is picks the URL that it thinks is best. We don’t want that. Even if you’ve specified that you want to use either www or non-www, there are still two options left for Google to choose from.

In 2009 Google announced a new link element that would clean up duplicate urls. Good news for us! Here’s what it looks like:

This tells search engines that the preferred link is example.com rather than www.example.com. You can read more about the changes on Matt Cutts’ blog .

Or you can watch him talk about it here:

To implement this you can install the Canonical URLs for WordPress Plugin by Yoast.

3. Avoid duplicate content

Even when you’ve solved your canonicalization problems you will still have issues with duplicate content. This is because a spider will crawl your archive pages, search results pages and pretty much everything you’ve got. The WordPress codex does have a page about optimizing your robots.txt file.

Or you can install another Plugin from Yoast called the WordPress Robots Meta Plugin.

Hmmm… I’m starting to sound like an ad campaign for Yoast – but seriously, Joost de Valk does have the best info about WordPress SEO out there. I promise I’m not a fangirl! (not much, anyhow).

Here’s a video from Yoast showing you how to set up the robots meta plugin:

How to use the Robots Meta Plugin from Joost de Valk on Vimeo.

4. Pretty up your Permalinks – the big debate!

A permalink is the link to an individual post or page on your website or blog. When you first install WordPress your permalinks will be set to something along the lines of:

My initial plan was to tell you to simply change your permalinks to this:

This means your permalinks will be the post or page name as opposed to some random letters and numbers.

This is what I do with my own homepage, but that’s a pretty small site so this structure should never cause me any problems. However, Sarah pointed out to me that if you have a large number of WordPress posts or pages this can cause your site to slow down. She sites this from the WordPress codex:

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.

Did you know that? I didn’t know that! But then I have never actually sat down and read the WordPress codex from cover to cover (or page to page….). I mean, has anyone actually done that?

It turns out that WordPress has to do a whole lot of work having to differentiate between posts and pages when loading your site. If you’re like me and you have a tiny site it’s unlikely you’ll notice the difference, but for massive sites you could be looking at your site slowing down considerably. And as we will see in a moment, speed really does matter.

In contrast to what I’ve just said, she recommends the following:

• Do not start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields.
• Don’t listen to permalink advice from SEO experts who know nothing about WordPress. Keep your site running fast and let the content speak for itself.
• Select a structure that starts with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.
• Make sure to end your structure with either %post_id% or %postname% (e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/) so that each permalink points to an individual post.
• Do not put your site url in the permalinks slot. You must use one of the structure tags, or a combination of tags only.

However, my favourite WordPress SEO expert recommends that you use the /%postname%/ setting. Argh! Much confusion.

After much head scratching I would go with Sarah’s advice. She is basing it on this post by Otto on WordPress and I think he makes a convincing argument. The thing is, so long as you make sure you include /%postname%/ at the end of your permalink string it will still be perfect for  SEO purposes.

Tip: If you are going to change the permalinks on a WordPress site with a number of posts and pages already then you will need to redirect the old permalinks to the new ones. You can use the redirection plugin to do it for you.

You can improve your permalinks even more by installing the SEO Slugs Plugin. This plugin gets rid of any common words like “a” “the” “it” and will improve your SEO.

So, http://mywebsite.org/how-to-seo-your-wordpress-website

Would become: http://mywebsite.org/seo-wordpress-website

Much better for people and for bots!

5. Speed matters

Early in 2010, Google announced on its webmaster blog that it was incorporating site speed as one of its 200 signals used in search rankings. Actually, it had been doing this for a while but that was the big announcement. This means that the speed of you website is important. There are a number of ways to do this – you can optimize your WordPress template or you can install the WP Super Cache Plugin. Even better – do both.

The WP Super Cache Plugin is not the easiest to set up so here’s a video from Website Marketing Guru to help you out:

6. Keep your code clean

Another issue that’s kind’ve related to speed is code. Remember that a spider doesn’t care what your website looks like, it crawls the code. And it doesn’t crawl all of the code. It only crawls about the top third of it. Confusing code can get the spider all messed up. By keeping the functions, CSS and all the different template elements in different files, a WordPress site is already making it easy for the spider. It also makes sure that the important content comes at the top with things like the sidebar and footer coming later.

But it is always worth running your website through the W3C Markup validation tool.

I ran my website through it so that I could smugly show you a screenshot of the Validated message. But my validation failed :( Here is my shame:

Will get that fixed before my next post.

6. Sitemap

Once you’ve got your website up and running and your code validated, you should submit your website’s sitemap to the various search engines. Your sitemap helps a spider crawl your website more easily. I admit to being guilty of only submitting my own website to Google but if you are being thorough you would submit to other search engines as well.

Here are some tips from the WordPress codex:

• submit your sitemap no more than once a month
• make sure you have content that can be scanned – around 10 posts/pages should be enough
• have a site description ready to submit to the search engine
• keep track of when you have submitted your site. It won’t do you any good to submit more than once in a month.

You can easily generate a sitemap and submit it to Google by using the Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin.

If you are using a WordPress Multisite Installation then you could try out WPMU Dev’s SiteMaps and SEO – WordPress MU Style. This will submit a sitemap to Google for all of the sites on your network.

7. Breadcrumbs

Like your sitemap, breadcrumbs are a great way to help users and spiders to navigate your website. Here are mine:

Breadcrumbs are easy to implement and are great for navigation. Here’s another plugin from you-know-who to get your breadcrumbs up and running.

8. Pages and Posts

So you’ve got some blah posts which you don’t really care about, rants and ramblings, etc. Others are more important, you’ve spent ages crafting them, they’re great linkbait and you’ll be sad to see them scroll off your blog’s front page. Make your best posts into pages, that way they’ll always be there for spiders to crawl.

It is also important to keep sending crawlers back to your older posts. To do this make sure that you link back to older posts that are relevant. This gives the spider a helping hand through your site.

9. Optimize your images

There two ways you can optimize your images:

1. File size
2. Alt tags

You need to do both.

File size
The size of your images really does matter. In fact, it’s one of my major bugbears. If you’re one of those people who takes high res jpegs straight from their camera and puts them on their website then chances are that I hate you. Reduce your file size. You need a maximum of 72ppi for an image to be viewed on a screen. Anything more and you are taking up unnecessary space on your server and wasting people’s time. In SEO terms, this will slow down your website and, as we have already learned today, Google uses your site’s speed to rank you.

Alt tags
You really should be using alt tags. There are many people who are visually impaired and who use screen readers to browse the web. A screen reader can’t describe an image, what it does is read out the alt tags. If there’s nothing there then there is nothing to read and that person has no idea what you’ve put on your website. You don’t want to discriminate against the visually impaired, do you?

In addition, Google does crawl your alt tags and that is more information that you can use for your SEO. So you keep yourself happy and keep up your accessiblity standards at the same time.

It is true that filling in Alt tags can become a bit annoying, especially if you have hundreds to do. If you want an easy (but not perfect) way to deal with it you can use the SEO Friendly Images plugin.

This will fill in the alt tags with the post title and the name of the picture. Not necessarily ideal as your alt tags should include a description of what the image is, not simply its title. But it is an improvement.

That’s it for tweaks and plugins. Next time we’ll get to get down and dirty with a bit of content. And, of course, more plugins!

Here are all the Plugins we’ve used so far:

• Canonical URLs for WordPress Plugin
• WordPress Robots Meta Plugin
• Redirection Plugin
• SEO Slugs Plugin
• WP Super Cache Plugin
• Google XML Sitemap Generator
• SiteMaps and SEO – WordPress MU Style
• SEO Friendly Images

Have I left any basic SEO tips out? Leave them in the comments below and share the SEO love.

A pop over that appears on your site’s initial load can get all of the good stuff out there without being intrusive. What makes it different from a pop-up? Well, for one thing it’s not so annoying, it doesn’t jump up out of nowhere, shouting “Look at me!” Seriously, no one likes a pop up, right? The pop over is a much calmer creature. It’s just there, hanging out, telling people the stuff that they need to know.

What can I use the pop over for?

• encouraging people to sign up for a mailing list (with the right code you can even have the mailing list signup form in the pop over)
• advertising a special offer
• showing a new video that you think your visitors will get particularly excited about
• showing off your latest product
• Maybe you’re just feeling very mushy one day and you want to thank people for dropping by.

Sites that use the pop over have reported that visitors browse more of their pages and spend more time on their site. That’s pretty nifty.

All good stuff, but what distinguishes the pop over?

The pop over plugin allows you to target specific visitors to your site. You may not want to display it to everyone who visits your site. It has the following rules that you can choose from:

• Visitor is logged in;
• Visitor is not logged in;
• Visitor has never commented;
• Visit via a search engine;
• Visit not via an internal link;
• Visit via a specific referrer;
• Popover shown less than.

Examples

Mr D is trying to encourage a bit more community spirit on his site. He wants to get people who feel a bit shy to get involved. So he has a pop over for everyone who has never commented.

Ms S is running a campaign with another site. She wants to give everyone who has visited from that site a special message when they land on her homepage.

Let’s see it in action

So, my mailing list is pretty thin and I’m dying to keep people up-to-date with the goings on in my life. I mean, really, who wouldn’t want to know all about it?

I know that everyone who is logged in will already be signed up so I just want the people who aren’t logged in to get my message. My plan is to have my mailing list sign-up form embedded in the pop over to make it easy for them. I’m using Mail Chimp which kindly generates the code for me. Other mailing list services will often do the same.

After designing and grabbing the code from Mail Chimp I drop it into the pop over content box and select “Visitor is not logged in.”

Here it is in action:

You’ll notice that in the top left hand corner is an obvious “X” for closing the window. In the bottom right hand corner is this message:

If your visitor clicks on it then “bye-bye” pop over window – for good. Although, if you’re just giving your visitor good stuff they’ll probably never need to press it.

You can download the pop over plugin and learn more about in on the WPMU DEV site.