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We're making a lot of websites for multiple clients and we always had some problems figuring out what to do with "Updates". We're starting building Wordpress sites and there's almost a plugin update every week. Since our sites use WPML and Woocommerce, there's a lot of conflicts happening with unreliable WPML updates and other plugin with security flaws (revolution slider in my case).
I've just received an email from my client's hosting and he wants us to make updates from WP 3.8.1 to 4.0 but I know there's an intensive conflict job coming up. I usually use the 'Disable all wordpress updates' plugin to hide 'em all from the wp-admin.
I wish my project had enough budget to build custom sites, but that's not the case here.
I just want to know how Wordpress agency are with that. It doesn't look that professional to tell a client that updates aren't necessary.
First of all, you of course bill them for the time you spend on your clients websites. Better yet, sign some kind of support support agreement where they pay you a monthly fee for having their websites kept up to date and maybe uptime monitoring. You can also include a few hours per customer for support and small development tasks per every month(it's usually nice for the clients to have even if they don't use it every month). This is a nice way to get some steady income and fill the time gaps when you have less to do.
You should also state in the agreement when you build the website that future updates and fixes is NOT included in price. You can give the clients a short period the report errors and bugs in the website and after that you will bill them for any extra time.
Secondly, get the right tools to optimize your time. I recommend ManageWP or InfiniteWP. ManageWP is slight better in my opinion and it is a hosted solution, but has a higher price if you have many clients(per client pricing model). InfiniteWP is a free self hosted solution(you set it up on your own server), where you only have to pay for the modules you use. You will need a few modules to get the functionality you need, but it's still much cheaper than ManageWP if you have many clients.
For uptime monitoring I recommend Uptime robot(simple and free for up to 30 websites) or Pingdom a better service with a lot of nice tools, for example performance monitoring, but also a much steeper price.
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I intend to create my own website on wordpress. But i care about these things:
be able to maintain
easy to SEO, quality score
fast loading page
adding new features later
Can anyone evaluate about these things. Thanks
That's sort of a loaded question, but I'll try to answer it as thoroughly as possible.
Are websites built on WordPress easy to maintain?
That depends on what you mean by "easy to maintain". In terms of updates, the answer is as long as you don't start hacking away at themes/plugins, updates are pretty much one click and done. If you mean in terms of content updates, it's as easy as you (and whatever themes/plugins you use) make it.
Are websites built on WordPress SEO friendly?
Again, that's not super straight forward. WordPress itself doesn't really do too much in regards to SEO beyond defining permalink structure. How SEO friendly your website is depends largely on the theme you choose. Some are built to be SEO friendly, some are just built to be pretty (read: flashy). Either way you go, there are a ton of plugins available to help you optimize your SEO on a per-page/per-post basis, and even some which can actively monitor your ranking based on a given key word.
Are websites built on WordPress fast-loading?
Not to sound like a broken record, but that is in large part dependent on the theme you're using. If you're building a simple blog and have mostly textual content, it will inherently be faster than a blog that's overloaded with hundreds of under optimized images on every page. Beyond that, it's partly up to you... don't use 4K images where a 64x64 thumbnail is the only thing shown, and so on. Even more important than what you build your website on is how (and where) you host it. A major roadblock in the web world is the hardware and software that a website is sitting on. If you're running a massive site on a $5/mo shared host, it's going to be slow. If you're running a tiny site on a bare-metal server, it's going to be faster... assuming you don't screw up the server configuration.
Are websites built on WordPress easy to extend with new features?
YES!!! There are tens of thousands of plugins available in the official plugin repository (51,344 at this precise moment) for free, and probably twice that floating around the Internet in both free (and usually open source) and commercial plugins. CodeCanyon alone currently has 5,759 commercial plugins available for WordPress.
Now... there's also a downside to that. The plethora of available plugins sounds like a great thing, right? With that many plugins out there, should be no problem finding what you're looking for! Unfortunately, while you will most likely find a plugin suitable for most use cases... you'll probably find several. And, to make matters worse, MANY plugins aren't written or supported as well as they should be. It may take some trial and error to find JUST the right plugins to do what you need, but it's 100% possible to build the perfect website on WordPress.
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I am making a Adobe Air software which needs to work on Windows, Mac and Linux. One of the issues that has confused me is the registration/licensing process.
Basically, I want users to try out the full version of software for a month and then buy if they find it useful. What I am not able to figure out is how the licensing would work on all these platforms.
There are no registries in Mac and Linux where I can store the trial information.
If I somehow maintain things locally in a db, post trial, if the user simply uninstalls and re-installs the software, the trial would start again for 30 days.
Don't want to store things in filesystem as that's not even close to actual authentication.
Doing an online activation of the software is a little resource consuming and has network dependency, so that option is also out of scope.
What way should I choose? what other options do I have? Does adobe provide any support for this... any 3rd party libraries that I can use for free?
I use LimeLM (https://wyday.com/limelm) to do licensing for my Adobe Air app (Windows and Mac, no linux). Like you I have a 30 day trial, LimeLM has a trial feature which is tied to the hardware, so uninstalling/reinstalling won't give users another free trial.
LimeLM requires network activation BUT you can allow for grace periods, so someone must connect to the network, say, once in 30 days of use to activate.
I agree with the above post that EncryptedLocalStore is a good idea as well.
Unfortunately the licensing options for Adobe AIR is limited. LimeLM is functional and cheap (they don't take a cut of purchase price). I looked at NitroLM, which is very expensive (I think they take 30% of purchase price) and very complicated - I could never make sense of it. Zaqon also is out there. I didn't like the way their licensing interface looked to our users. LimeLM was the most flexible.
Have you tried EncryptedLocalStore? Data stored in ELS remains even after app uninstallation.
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What are the advantages and disadvantages of coding your own blogging engine from scratch, versus using an already existing engine (for example, but not necessarily, wordpress)?
The biggest reason for going with developed blogging applications today is
probably interoperability. Seasoned blogging applications of today include
plug-ins and fundamental development inertia that ensures that you will interface well
with things like Twitter, Flickr, and social networking sites. Only a
spectacular developer (with a lot of time) would be able to custom code a
solution for all the APIs and other bells and whistles that, in the course of a blog's lifetime, they will want to use or at least experiment with. To build a custom blogging application is to make its default state a basically isolated one. And isolation for many blogs doesn't work.
The biggest plus for using a custom blogging application anyway is that you retain a high degree of control over the application's core behavior, and, since you will likely host it on your own server, direct access to its statistical metrics. If you know well ahead of time that you will not care about interoperability beyond, say RSS, or one or 2 other channels, and have the time to invest in core development, a custom blog is a great way to maintain a look and feel that will positively startle visitors who are used to a constant WordPress or Blogspot layout. One major pitfall, it seems, is that off the shelf blogging applications require you to learn how to manipulate each of their various presentations. It's not hard if you want to simply adopt any thousands of "themes" that typically exist for them, but then, your presentation will not be unique. Sooner or later a visitor to your blog will encounter the same look and feel elsewhere, exactly. The solution there is to hire a custom developer but that of course costs $$$. Even if YOU are that developer who will wind up trading coding-for-core-functionality time, for learning and coding for presentational individuality. Expensive either way.
I am struggling with this question myself. As a proponent of "everything independent" on the web I hate the idea of giving up low level control of my blog. I've been online since the consumer web first took off and understand the ease by which a website can be created using nothing but notepad and an FTP client. To me, anything beyond these basic tools is very "AOLish", and yet, many blogging applications have now evolved into full content management frameworks that would rival the complexity of mastering that which it once took just to figure out basic HTML. I've finally taken to in-depth experimentation with some of the more popular blogging solutions (WordPress, Blogger), and am shocked to find out that after spending so much time maintaining my own solutions, how quickly (and much better) it is to compose and manage entries with them. Since most of my blogs are not profit projects, time to compose has not been a factor for me. However, this may change. If it comes down to where I need to manage and concern myself more with content than mechanics to get my messages out, I will probably swing to seasoned blogging app mode and hope I learn enough about my platform to make it truly a unique experience anyway. That would probably be the best outcome for anyone like us debating this.
Dave
I just set up my own blog and I had to answer this same question myself. Here are the main reasons I went with BlogEngine.Net
Coding the entire thing myself would have taken a long time
I saw that there were a lot of themes available (and that making/modifying themes is easy)
Why reinvent the wheel? (would you write something that the public engines don't already do?)
Advantages of writing your own
It's fun
You might learn new programming tricks or techniques
Using a software you wrote is more satisfying than using someone else's
It will be exactly as you want it
Disadvantages
It takes time
Security risks. A high profile open source engine such as Wordpress is less likely to have security vulnerabilities than your own, especially if you don't have experience in web development. (However there are many high profile programs full of vulnerabilities, such as the widely used Internet Explorer), so take this with a grain of salt.
Features. Wordpress/others will probably have more features (even though some people don't like software with too many features)
You must keep improving your engine over time. If you stop but decide to keep blogging, you will probably want to move to Wordpress, especially if some features you really want aren't implemented yet in yours. This can be problematic, especially if you didn't plan export features.
Actually I went through this path.
For fun and learning reasons I coded my own little content-management system which I used for rudimentary blogging. It had quite static content (no comments were allowed) but it was enough for me. One year later I decided to switch to wordpress and am really happy with it.
Today I would change my approach and would go for wordpress instantly.
Reasons from product perspective:
You won't be able to feature-compete with wordpress (including plugins)
You won't be able to have such a stable and secure app as wordpress
Responsive community (both documentation and patches)
Continous releases
Reasons from learning perspective:
You learn a lot by understanding and reading other's source code.
You can make the product better instead of reinventing the wheel (by providing own plugins or bug-fixes).
It is a far more realistic job-setup: You hardly build apps from scratch but rather extend, integrate and maintain them. Also you work in a team.
Nowadays I would start to build 'from-scatch' software only if:
There is no software which can suit you or you can't extend to your needs.
You need a custom software for business reasons (e.g. you are a startup with fresh ideas)
Building a new software is cheaper as maintaining/extending existing one
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Does anyone know of inexpensive "origin pull" CDN service providers.
The only provider that I've found that provides this are SimpleCDN and Akamai. Akamai is crazy expensive and SimpleCDN seems to change their business model daily, so I'm concerned with using them.
We use PantherExpress in "pull mode" (not sure they do anything else, really) and it's great. Also very competitively priced. They're now owned by CDNetworks; I haven't talked to their sales people at all so I don't know how much changed.
LimeLight were also much better priced than I expected when we were getting quotes; but they had this stupid "oh, a little more for this feature and extra for that feature" pricing where PE just gave me a simple price including all their features.
When we were evaluating EdgeCast was missing some of the features we needed, but I think they've caught up now.
We use 10-20Mbit/sec on the CDN to give you a ballpark.
Few other CDNs:
Edgecast
Highwind
Reflected Network
Afaik most of pay-as-go CDN providers, as CDN77.com or Maxcdn, has this feature as the simpliest and standard one. You can find more about Origin Pull providers also in discussion CDN: "Origin pull" service providers?.
As I'm using CDN77 I can confirm you that they are providing this without any problem, with 14 day free trial version, on about 50 or 60 PoPs.
I've used LimeLight with an origin pull model and it works quite well. The only issue is their edge network is constantly expanding so if you want to employ any kind of security for your content on the origin (i.e. firewall ACL's) it becomes a constant maintenance PITA. OTOH, if your content if wide open to the public then I would highly recommend them.
I don't know how cheap they are for a new customer. I guess it depends on how much traffic you are expecting (and ultimately how much money you will give them). My company does a fair amount of CDN business so we got really nice pricing, but YMMV.
Also, if you are a Rackspace customer you might be able to leverage their pricing - they use LL exclusively for their own content and for their cloud offerings (http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/files).
Good Luck!
You might want to give VPS.net CDN a try:
https://www.vps.net/cdn-signup
According to their wiki they support "Origin Pull".
I don't work for them
I haven't used their service
but their pricing looks very competitive.
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Recently a friend of mine had gone from a high level NOC position to a developer. Before that he was just doing the help desk stuff. He has no degree, only the usual MIS/networking certifications and as far as I know only tinkers with code on the weekends. I can see where in some scenarios having a good understanding of configurations, packets, users, OU's, etc would be extremely beneficial to a developer.
My question is this, how many full time developers started off this way? Even how many people dual wield the responsibility of developer/systems administrator/network administration?
I'm sure that this is a fairly common scenario. I've spent 12 years in I.T. and I find that as time goes on, the real income comes from being a specialist (DBA, coder, etc.) as opposed to a generalist (network admin, helpdesk).
It's actually the path that my career is taking. I'm not quite a full-time DBA or developer but that's where I'm heading.
I'm also willing to bet that the people skills I've picked up along the way (helpdesk support, network admin, systems analyst) will help me in my DBA/Developer career. Skills I don't feel I would have gotten had I jumped right in to a coding career.
Indeed. I think developers should know the platform they are building software for. If a dev has worked as sysadmin before, he will know how to integreate his software well. Some Windows-Desktop-App related "integration smells" that come to my mind:
App does not run unter normal-user privileges (run on properly secured enterprise desktops? oops!)
App requires write permissions to all kind of system folders (security? oops!)
App stores user settings in 'nonstandard' locations like %programfiles% (backup? permissions? oops!)
App does not provide silent-installable setups (deployment? oops!)
Etc..
A real sysadmin would never write software that has one of the above integration smells. Really.
It's quite common in small companies. I did that for some time - developing the software we sold to customers, keeping the network going, and adding features to the database as needed for a manufacturing company of fewer than 20 people.
You wear many hats in a small business.
But I started off programming microcontrollers in high school, so I can't claim this is where I started.
It is very helpful to have a working knowledge of all these systems as a developer.
-Adam
The overlap of developers and admins happens quite a bit. Our last admin developed on the side just so he'd have a better understanding of what he was helping support. When he left I became the admin just because I tinkered with admin stuff on the side to know how my software was being supported.
A broad understanding with a few focuses is what I'd say is best for any technical professional. Then with a bit of study you can change to meet whatever need may arise.
I've seen it more the other way where a programmer also "admins" the servers and sometimes network. I've definitely been in that position.
I would think it can easily go the other way as well where an admin can start programming systems, but from my experience it's not as common. Whenever I ask a server admin or network person "do you program too?" most of the time the answer is "no".
I think it might be easier for programmers to cross the line because when you are programming a system unless you always have an admin available you need to be able to set up your own environment and that usually includes setting up a server.
I started off as a NOC operator, eventually working my way up to a senior network engineer position. During the last 2-3 years of my tenure at my previous company, I picked up a fondness for programming and started teaching myself everything I could on my own time. Around 2005, I left said company for a small startup and still work there today as as the admin and primary developer.
The one challenge I impose upon myself is to not make admin changes at the drop of a hat to satisfy programming challenges. I must force myself to code in a way that any application I make can be redeployed elsewhere with minimal privileges, despite the fact that I can do pretty much anything I want with our own servers. It's a fine line between performing both duties well and performing one duty badly due to the needs of the other.
I'm here.
Although I've been tinkering with code since I was a child, my first full-time job was being a system administrator, a DBA and other related roles.
Afterwards I worked full time job as a developer, and now I'm both a developer and a security researcher.
Also, I managed to complete M.Sc in CS.
I believe that such transitions are possible, and very beneficial, as you get a wider view on your field of work.