This week I had guests Mika Epstein, a WordPress Support Specialist for DreamHost, and Ryan “”We love the clients you hate” Sullivan, the man behind wpsitecare.com. We continued the discussion on WordPress MultiSite and covered a hodgepodge of topics related to hosting and site maintenance.
What We Talked About
Hosting & Site Maintenance (Questions for Ryan)
- Ryan, how did you pick your business name?
- Ryan – do you guys partner with any freelancers who might want to outsource management tasks?
- Ryan, I run similar services at WPtroubleshooter.com do you look forward to team expansion?
- Ryan, how do you find Siteground for WordPress hosting?
- Ryan, I’m sure you guys encounter a lot of sites that are SEVERELY out of date… Do you find that it’s often a lack of knowledge on the user’s part? I come across many clients who were scared to death by a previous dev/designer/tech person and told they should never, ever update anything
- Ryan, what’s the most annoying and common you bug come across while managing client sites?
Multisite (Questions for Mika)
- Mika, what % of WP users @ Dreamhost would you estimate are using Multisite? Is it growing steadily?
- Mika – would be interested to hear your thoughts on the best times to use multisite. Lots out there about when NOT to use it but not much on the best use cases.
- Hi Mika, do you recommend a better way to set up a multi-themes demo (such as theme shop, etc), other than multisite?
- Best Sitemap plugin for multisite?
Miscellaneous
- What plugins do you use to send emails from WordPress for Gravity Forms notifications for example as wp-mail doesn’t work very well?
- What do you do it a client has chosen a theme forest theme when you want to use a Genesis child theme – how do you sell it to them?
- Does anyone co-work?
- Do you perform updates on your clients’ sites?
- Why choose a “WP’ instead a “normal” host?
- Anyone worked through this weeks’ updates from CobaltApps?
- Are w3c accessibility standards still the standard?
- What do folks use short links for?
Show Notes & Links
Fun fact – in Israel, there is a new law that EVERY site has to be accessible (per GOH viewer Nir Rosenbaum). Here’s the site explaining the law, but it’s in Hebrew, so there’s that.
Plugins
- Mandrill plugin by MailChimp – email delivery straight from WP
- SendGrid – email delivery plugin
- MultiSite User Management plugin – Automatically add users to each site in your WordPress network.
- Widget Importer & Exporter plugin
- Genesis Accessible – Accessibility plugin for Genesis Framework
Services/Tools
- ManageWP – Manage multiple WordPress installs from one dashboard
- MainWP vs ManageWP – comparison article by Andrea Whitmer
- Varnish – caching tool to speeeeed up your site
- bit.ly – link shortening service (+ metrics)
- YOURLS – Your own URL shortening service
- Bufferapp – social media manager
- WPsitecare.com – premium WordPress support (Ryan’s company)
Resources, Articles, and Things
- WP Unicorn Project – Podcast hosted by Suzette Franck and Natalie MacLees (latest episode featured Jessica Barnard, a.k.a. The Pixelista)
- Mika Epstein: Don’t Use WordPress Multisite – WordCamp San Francisco 2013 presentation
- Half-Elf Warehouse – Mika’s books. 🙂
- Accessibility and WordPress