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Lesson Info

Trustworthy Themes/Plugins Q&A

Let's take some questions. Yeah, go ahead. I just have a question about the licensing and the upgrading and all that stuff. I know. Um, there's various ways sometimes. Well, I assume it's like any other software. You you buy the license, and then you can use it for a while, but an upgrade comes along. You may or may not have to pay for it. How can you just talk about that? About what ongoing costs might be or what might trigger that theme that you bought to be useless, Like an upgrade to sure WordPress itself. So you know, a lot of a lot of theme developers plugging developers or whatever they're offering their new model nowadays. Used to be it was just a one off. You paid 99 bucks, you got to plug in. And the time the updated that you got the update. Now they've kind of seen that, you know? Well, we can kind of charge for this, or we can charge a maintenance for you, whatever they want to do. And so, generally, with a lot of these, you're gonna pay on upfront cost, and you're gonna ge...

t access to that for X amount of sites or X amount of time. And so if you have it on X amount of sites, you will get support. The big thing here is the support and the updates. That's what they're really selling your support in updates. And so for the majority of them, like if I bought a plug in, that was only supposed to be on two sites. If I'm running it on three or four, theoretically, I only get support and an update for the sites that I'm technically registered for. Right, Um, if you let that lapse and you don't pay it, like for the year for the month or whatever it is, theoretically, they don't have to give you the update when you know when one comes out. Um, that's that's the killer. So you know, if you want to use this plug in or want to use this theme and you want to keep it running and up to date with WordPress, you have to pay that fee. If not, you get kind of left out in the cold. The things that will make plug ins and themes break WordPress is a constantly evolving piece of software, right? They have a core team that is constantly writing and rewriting and changing and all kind of stuff. If you follow a couple of wordpress developers on Twitter, you will quickly see how angry that get at the changes that these people make all the time because they have to make adjustments to their themes. So they're plug ins to everything. Um, for instance, I I used to work at I themes. Okay, that's where I work. That was there, training guy. And so at I themes before a new release of WordPress, they would, you know, for like, a week or two, or depending on how big the release of the new version of WordPress was, they would be heads down just going back through their inventory, updating all of their stuff to work with WordPress. Every theme that they've done since the beginning, every plug and they've done since the beginning. It doesn't matter how popular anything, they still have to do it. And so, you know, they're charging you for that labor, essentially, you know, and so things that would make it break our whatever the WordPress team decides to change hooks, PHP calls database, you know, way database is queried or whatever it might be, um, so and it's a lot of work to keep up with that. You know, I've talked to a couple of my developer buddies, and they they all say It's a bear to keep up with and I don't doubt it bit its just like Adobe or any or Microsoft or anybody else having to keep up with the evolution of computers. Same. It's the same premise. Um, you know whether or not this pricing model is fair, in a lot of sense is is kind of up for debate, because if I buy something, it should be mine. Technically, right, I don't feel like I should buy a product when they have to have a subscription to it as well for it to work. But I understand why they're doing it, so it depends on the company and how they do it. But you know, most of them offer both they offer, you know you can buy it and own it, or you can buy it. And here's continued support for well, for instance, a lot of us don't upgrade every time Adobe comes out with a new version of creative suite, you know, for not making that much money. Sure, but a thing that might trigger us to need to is if we for other reasons, have toe upgrade, you know, we want to goto lion or something, right? You know, So I'm just wanting what you could just you could just continue to run wordpress three when we're pressed three point whatever comes Absolutely. Unless unless there's, like, a glaring security hole that they bring out that, you know, it's something like that that triggers them toe upgrade. WordPress friend, your you're taking a chance if you don't move on. But I worked at a place not too long ago that we had. Our intranet was on WordPress and we had a plug in that was running in there that kept people from the outside out, you know, is a lockout plug in or something. And we updated one night to WordPress 3.0 from WordPress, 2.9. It broke that plugging completely. The guy that was developing the plug and had stopped development, employment, and I could not, because it was one that tied him with our active directory well and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I couldn't justify finding another plug in or another solution in time because we had to show this at, like a trade show the next day. And so what we did, we just rolled WordPress back to 2.9 and we ran 2.9. The whole time I was there, it went up. You know, it's all the way up the WordPress 3.1 point two by the time I had left that job and we're still running WordPress 2.9. So there's nothing wrong with running an older version of WordPress as long as everything you have is not at risk or anything else. Now you know people like me. I like to be on the bleeding edge because I have to teach it or whatever. But you know, most people, they'll be fine. I mean, like, for instance, most people that use Photoshopped, they don't the functionality that's been Photoshopped. Most of the core features have been around since version six five. Something like that, you know, So really and truly, most of us could get by with photo shop six Photo shop. Seven. Uh, we'd like to have CS five because it's got the bells and whistles. But I could do just about all of that stuff in an old school way. Right? So it's that's just what do you know? The process we have to go through. So, Justin, I know we don't have time to go through and ask you about what your opinion is on every single theme out there. But we have a couple that have been coming up over and over again. So one is the pro photo block. Um, find net that River River Things haven't looked at it, but I will Look at it. It's a pretty common one that, uh, that photographers use. And then, um how about graph paper, press graph? Paper press? Yes. That was the other one I couldn't remember. Hey. Yes, Thank you. They are a great place for photographers and people wanting to do a portfolio. So, man, big ups to whoever put that in the jet. So graph paper, press, great WordPress themes overlooking that. $100 off. There you go. Internet. Um, if you check out some of these themes, some of these for photographers are absolutely awesome. Um, where's that one that I like a lot This one is actually kind of cool. So it's called Sidewinder, and so it's got really big images that just kind of flow through. I mean, that's that's really cool. Um, let's see. F eight is a really good one. Where's immense? There it is. Immense. Is another one of my favorite ones. I love these full screen photo themes because they have this, you know, big ability to showcase your work. And here's another cool thing about it. You notice when I resize the browser window, that image dynamically gets smaller, and that's done through, you know, some CSS trickery and whatnot. Um, I can't show the site here, but one of the best examples of this is somebody who has had their own site built. Alec Baldwin's website is fantastic. Hey, uses WordPress for his sight, and I won't even give the address because I'm not sure I can, but he uses dynamic re sizing for his photos to, and so it's always a big picture of his face or something. But it's really cool. Looks kind of like this, actually, does it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, but I mean, this is a great way to showcase, you know, big photos, great work and so graph paper press. Let's go back here. I'm sure what they charge anymore So you can get all the freebie themes into a quarterly thing of 49 bucks. An annual thing of 99 bucks You forever for 2 99 If you do these, you get access to everything they have and everything they produced during your subscription period. So if you did the annual, you'd get access to everything they have and then everything they do within the year, everything that you know same thing with quarterly or forever. So I mean to 99 for everything. And they have ah, bunch of themes, folks. I mean, it's, you know, a pretty good selection. So, yeah, look at all those. All right. We'll ask about one really popular one that keeps coming up with the photo. Kratie. Dan F. Says, What are your thoughts on that? It seems relatively popular. What was the name Photo? Kratie. I'm not saying that. I think that's how you pronounce it, how you spell it. It's p h o T o c r a t I. I'll take a look. Okay. I have a question from a quote dog who would like you to explain what hooks are hooks. Okay, so basically, when people are writing code for WordPress, they have toe hook in to WordPress. So, like the way that we display thumbnails for instances like PHP, the thumbnail or the way we display the content and where prices PHP the content, right? So if they change something like that, a theme that's been using that legacy code is busted, so they have to Then go in and reevaluate and look at the hooks and, you know, change it up accordingly. So hooks are just ways that developers are piggybacking on the existing WordPress system. A question from Elizabeth M. As just a follow up. So its graph paper press, a builder or a child theme or a steam developer graph Paper presses a theme developer. They're all standalone themes that run on their own. They don't require a core or anything like that. So they're all all stand alone. Okay, there's so money. There's there's quite a few questions about, you know, specific. Sure, but, um, there's a question from Bridget Tow who asked Well free themes get the same update Attention as a premium? Or could you get stuck with a theme that may break when we're press makes update? You can definitely get stuck with one that doesn't done. It doesn't get updated because sometimes people will just, you know, it's very easy to develop your own WordPress theme. If you know PHP and you know CSS and all that stuff. And then a lot of people that do their first theme, they release it for free, and then it's just kind of out there. Luckily, though, they have that compatibility wizard on the right hand side of the of the thing. And so if a lot of people have tried it and it broke with that version of WordPress, that's why you need to look at that Ah lot if you can. Justin Veil, Fuji Photos is asking, Could you please again define the difference between framework and themes? So let's take a look at a theme, Okay? Ah, theme in and of itself is this stuff here, right? All this information and so that contains everything that has to do with word President, index, all that kind of all that kind of jargon, right? And so a theme is something that can stand on its own without the help of any other software. A child theme that runs on a framework has toe have that framework in place in order to work. So if you went, for instance, to Studio Press and you went into their themes and you bought just one of these themes myself, I'm not even sure you can. But if you bought, let's see no. So you have to get Genesis with it. You see this? It says theme plus Genesis framework. These themes will not work without the Genesis framework because, you know, clothes don't look right unless they're on a person right there, just kind of lay around. While this theme would just kind of lay around and do nothing unless it's attached to that framework So they have toe the themes constrained on their own child themes and frameworks have to go together. Question from an studio. What is the loop in WordPress? And do we need to know how to use it when we're using themes? Or does the theme take care of that? The theme will generally take care of the loop, the loop. All right. This is something that baffles a lot of people, especially people who are trying to develop their own WordPress theme. Okay, the loop is what tells WordPress to go out and get the content that you're producing the loop and it's called a loop because it just loops around looking for content, right? It just It's like a circle, and it's looking for content. And as it finds, continent pulls it out. It gets it into this into the cycle of your blog's your blog's posts. In other words, okay? And so the loop is a Siris of PHP call outs, and you can see all those here in the WordPress Codex. If you go to Codex that wordpress dot org's slash the underscore loop. You can see all of this. The loop determines what is displayed content, title, blah, blah, blah. Okay, the loop also allows for, you know, multiple block post to be displayed. There are ways to modify the loop, and some themes make a use of that so they only display two or three posts on the homepage or they have a featured section in the post section underneath. So, for instance, if you look at some of these themes here this, for instance. Okay, on this theme here, there is a call to the loop up here that is calling these featured posts to allow them to cycle through like this. There is also a loop down here that is displaying the latest posts. Okay, so the loop just pulls things that you tell it to pull in by default. The loop looks like this, and a lot of you're gonna look at that and, you know, think matrix. And that's OK. There is a plug in called Luke, buddy. There is a plugging called Luke money. And basically, you can go through and set different queries with Luke, buddy and then display information dynamically. So you can say, OK, I want you to go out and get all the post that air this category and display it here. I want you to get all the posts that are this tag and display it here or this author and displayed here. Or you can say this author with this tag in this category, I mean, there's countless ways you can do it. And if you go to plugging buddy dot com and look at Luke, buddy, you can see that to my knowledge, is the Onley plug in that does all of this stuff? I mean, it's a crazy, crazy plugging that does this. And so it integrates with builder that does not fully integrate with a lot of themes. Yet it's it's really knew. Okay, does not integrate with a lot of themes. Yet most theme developers air working that I know of to get in on this. I know Schuler Jason Sheeler of Press 75. I know the headway guys and all those people are trying to work with it. So, you know, hopefully it'll be pretty soon that it will have those capabilities across the board. I would like for something like this to be a standard inside of WordPress, where I could just dynamically control that, you know, by default why they don't give me that power. I don't I don't know. Um, you know, that's up for the WordPress core team to design right question from Laurie Washington. Another sort of clarification with the frameworks and child seems so once you've purchased the framework. Could you then then could you purchase other child themes? Yeah. You can have to be a child team for that specific framework, though you can't go out and buy Genesis and then by a builder child seem to go on top of it. You have to buy Genesis child teams. If you own Genesis, you have to buy builder child themes of your own building. So that's the shortened skinny. Yeah, child things. Then. Is it easier to switch themes? Because ultimately it's on the same builder. Or do you risk losing? Is it just like changing your clothes that easy or Okay, so if I change my clothes, I won't lose my arm, Right? Absolutely. Yeah. Question from cookies. Cookies asked. I see a bunch of photographers using people like flow sites. Is there a reason advantage to this. Using flow slides, flow sites? I'm not I'm not sure what that is, huh? Okay, So this is like a service for photographers. I get it. So basically, you sign up for this, and they build your your site for you. I've never seen it. I've never used it, but, uh um, this is maybe a little bit peripheral, but you just mentioned, um, featured images or no featured link now featured posts. That's right. So that what I'm gathering is that they're in. In the WordPress environment, there is just something called a featured post or featured image. And when you tag things with that, they get used in certain ways by the theme. Is that correct? They're in WordPress itself. There is something called a feature, an image known as the thumbnail like thumbnail support we talked about yesterday. Most authors call a certain area like the featured post area. There is no featured posts in WordPress. You what you're doing, actually, is just doing a query for a certain category or a certain range of posts that the author has determined as being a featured area. OK, so that's not really a WordPress thing. You know, something would be like when I created Div, and I call it something. Okay, exactly. Now I get it. Thank you, No problem. So question that keeps coming up. We have probably talked about it in the last couple days, but well dug around again. Chaos to K. Are there special steps that we need to do to upgrade to the new WordPress when it's released? Or do we just do the auto update number one before you ever updated WordPress back up your stuff, whether it's just, you know, that export thing I showed you earlier. Or if you do a full backup with vault press or backup buddy or whatever, it might be backup your stuff because you just never know. I've run into the issue where on update has failed. I've run into the issue where an update has gotten stuck in the middle, and then I had to be locked out of my account and blah, blah, blah. If you have a backup, you can always restore the backup. The updates inside of WordPress are relatively easy to do. So. Know what you did one last night? Yeah, So if you go into the dashboard, there's an update section here. It'll tell you if you have back up buddy installed. Remember to back up your science before upgrading. I love that little thing. Okay, it'll tell you when it was last checked, whether or not you're running the latest version. If there's an update available, it'll say update. Now, if you click update now, your site will be taken into a temporary maintenance mode when your site is in that temporary maintenance mode. Theoretically, people cannot access your site. Okay, when the update is complete, which should be just a few seconds. But when the update is complete, your site should be fully functioning again. There are times when the update gets stuck or that there is a file that does not automatically remove itself. And that file is called dot maintenance OK dot maintenance. So if after an update you try to access your site and it says this site is temporarily unavailable or whatever the maintenance screen is supposed to say, you need to go into an FTP program or the code editor application of choice and you need to make sure you're looking at invisible files first of all, so you gotta like to view show invisible files encode A are in Dreamweaver. You can turn that on as well, and so you can go in there and find the dot maintenance file and delete it. And once you delete that dot maintenance file, your WORDPRESS site will be active again. You will be able to access it now, whether or not something is broken after the fact you know remains to be seen, it just depends on if the update actually completed and the maintenance file just didn't get deleted. Or if the update failed and you're kind of in this limbo area, that's why you back up your site before you get started. So always back it up, then do your update and you're good to go. If you happen to be running a WordPress multi site installation, update your core WordPress installation first, the overall installation. When you do that, it will say thank you for updating WordPress. You can now update your entire network. My suggestion would be to go through and create backups of everyone of their sites individually and then hit the update button because once you get the update button, it goes out to all sites.