The Vancouver WordPress Meetup is a lively group of nerds who meet downtown at The Network Hub at least once a month to talk WordPress. The meetup is co-organized by Flynn O’Connor, Gwyn Pritchett, and Vanessa Chu, but is most often led by Morten of lynda.com fame.
These meetups usually feature speakers and on any given month there will be a general meetup for everyone. Or they’ll have a specific meetup for developers or users. Last July, I had the pleasure of presenting Getting the Most from Yoast: SEO The Easy Way to a users group, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
At the November 20th Vancouver WordPress Meetup, Morten facilitated a General Meetup: November Roundtable as a general discussion to “open the floor for anyone to ask any question about WordPress and for anyone to answer that question.”
It was a “roundtable” with 30+ people sitting around a rectangle coffee table solving the problems of the WordPress world.
What I like about the Vancouver WordPress Meetup is that the geekiness is always comfortably offset by accessibility. A lot of stuff goes over my head while some things are on the tip of my tongue.
Some of the questions were too technical to relay here, but most were practical inquiries that provided concrete information and plugin suggestions.
From a pile of questions scribbled on cards as well as submitted on the Meetup page, Morten read the top queries.
1 – What’s the best full-width slider with text, button and Call to Action on top of images?
A discussion about how sliders are going out of style ensued, but if you must have a slider, suggestions were:
Layer Slider – the best one!
Owl Graphic – good with mobile with horizontal and vertical swipe, has lazy load
Revolution Slider – included in lots of themes
2 – What is the difference between sliders and carousels?
Carousel shows the image you last saw as well as the next one coming. And the first image follows the last.
Slider images dissolve before you see the next image, but it racks backward to the first picture.
One reason sliders are not web friendly is because they load up the images ready to display that sit waiting in the browser. Unless it has a lazy load function.
Most people won’t look at the page long enough to see all the images on a slider, they’re done by the 3rd or 4th slide.
3 – What’s the best way to import data to a database?
The more work you make WordPress do, the more success you’ll have a with data.
Use a WordPress plugin, like CSV Importer.
4 – Why do permissions get screwed up? Plugins are not installing, upgrading – failing.
Try deactivating plugins, it might be a memory issue.
Call the host, that’s what you pay them for. They might have moved you to a different server.
Auto updating WordPress might have messed something up.
Replace WP to allow a bad file sector to correct itself.
Check your ht.access file.
5 – What’s the best way to set up a site with public or private pages for members only
Follow Chris Lema’s suggestions. He suggests: Exchange from iThemes, MemberPress, or Restrict Content Pro.
There’s S2 Member, (although the person who suggested that said she doesn’t recommend it.)
Use Email Users plugin to email members thru WordPress.
Paid Memberships Pro.
Members plugin.
6 – How to add a ecommerce feature to a paid membership site without paying $199 for a WooCommerce solution?
The fellow is having a conflict between the subscription and ecommerce code, which he says would be solved by a $199 solution. This led to a discussion about how we pay money for much stuff, why not spend on a system that makes you money? How much of the whole project is $199? And, why do WordPress people expect everything for free?
Pay $199 now to avoid having someone work for three days to cobble together a system.
Consider that a Magento site would cost $20k.
Use Shopify, and let them manage the ecommerce side.
7 – What do you do if you’ve been hacked?
Don’t rely on a firewall.
Employ the services of Sucuri.
Revert to the backup you make every day.
Hire someone to find and kill the bugs.
Make your host fix the problem, which could be propagating among their servers.
8 – What are your favourite Canadian-based web hosts?
Furthering the Vancouver WordPress Meetup
The evening concluded with Morten’s call for increased involvement from the 1400+ members of Vancouver WordPress Meetup to help organize events and make presentations.
The goal is to present three events each month in 2015. He asked that we send proposals and ideas to the Vancouver WordPress Meetup page.
Let me think of something. Any ideas?