A frustrating marketing tale

Last week I linked my piece on marketing channels, and the importance of testing new channels to see what works. This is a great write-up of a marketing channel experiment – YouTube sponsorships – and how it really didn’t work.

The side-effect is it’s also a great example of how even if you try something that doesn’t work (ie the YouTube sponsorships), if you’re creative you can still get some results out of it (ie this blog post!). The most interesting stat was this one: “On a CPM basis this [YouTube] was actually ten times more expensive than advertising on prime-time TV.”

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

This article from Pascal Birchler about text domain in plugins got into some territory I’d not considered. I shouldn’t be surprised, Pascal is very smart, a regular contributor to WordPress itself.

Discussing it in light of a new WP-CLI command that he’s working on to make plugin translation easier, Pascal highlights the idea that a plugin should have a single text domain slug, like my-plugin, and that you should use that everywhere in the code. That’s relatively common knowledge among people who both consider themselves developers and know that i18n is short for “internationalization.”

What’s I’d not considered is what you should do when your WordPress plugin either extends an existing plugin, or pulls in some external code automagically for you. That’s where I found Pascal most interesting:

A similar situation [that you want to always use your plugin’s text domain] arises when adding customized WooCommerce shop templates to your WordPress theme. Usually you don’t need to add these to your theme unless you really need to change the markup.

Since these templates are coming from the WooCommerce plugin, all localizable strings use the woocommerce text domain. And when you don’t change any of these strings you might consider just keeping the text domain so WordPress will still translate these.

However, not changing the WooCommerce text domain is a bad idea. The reasons are simple:

1. Strings with a different text domain than your theme’s might not be extracted in the future.
2. It’s unreliable.
   When WooCommerce changes its templates in a new version, your strings might suddenly not be localized anymore.
3. You take control away from users.
   Users and translators have no way to translate your customized shop templates.
4. Context might change.
   When you heavily customize the WooCommerce templates, some of the strings in them might not be 100% accurate anymore. At this point you have to rephrase and use your own text domain anyway.

For the same reasons you shouldn’t use WordPress core strings, without your project’s text domain, in your plugin or theme either.

My take on this broader topic of internationalization in WordPress is called “Making Plugins and Themes Translation Ready,” by the way. 🤓

A member from the WPShout Facebook Group blew my mind last week with this set of instructions for either resetting WordPress user passwords or adding new users using only an FTP connection. This was in response to our Quick Guide that describes how to do the same thing inside phpMyAdmin, which requires cPanel (or similar) access. For many situations, I believe this FTP route is quite a bit simpler and requires requesting less complete access from your clients.

These FTP password reset tools seem obvious in retrospect—they’re based on PHP functions I’ve known WordPress has—but they had simply never occurred to me. Enjoy!

Alex on his marketing philosophy.

My day job is doing marketing for WordPress businesses, and I wrote this to explain how I approach marketing strategy, and how this offers an extremely good way of thinking about and running your marketing.

The thesis is as follows: marketing channels are categories of marketing activities, and these range from content marketing to TV ads. You want to identify which channels work for you (even just one is fine!) and then extract as much value as possible from them before adding any more channels.

You try and have as few channels as possible, and this forces you to focus on what works, and lets you easily filter new opportunities. This is so useful because it’s so simple, but it works at any scale – all the way from the newest WordPress plugins to the biggest in the industry. The post gets into more detail: if you run a WordPress business, check it out!

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

Over at WPTavern, Sarah wrote up an important issue as Gutenberg speeds toward delivery. (For those who haven’t followed, sometime about a month ago, it was announced that WordPress 5.0–the Gutenberg includer–would try to launch before American Thanksgiving, on November 19.)

Leaving aside my personal feelings about the Gutenberg release process–punchline: I think the whole thing needed more communication and collaboration–I think that these accessibility issues are a hard situation for the project to find itself in. On the one hand, making Gutenberg certain (even in a rushed or sub-optimal way) has provided clarity and heightened the seriousness of the discussion. On the other, some features should be treated as show-stoppers, and this has the clearest moral case of any.

One could spread blame around for the current accessibility failings of Gutenberg, or put them all at a the feet of a few people. As an outsider looking in, I’m going to avoid adding my uniformed opinions to the conversation. But I do think that this must be considered seriously as Sarah says (and props to her for doing it despite her employer being Matt Mullenweg himself). I’ll leave the last word to her:

The mistake of not having consulted accessibility experts in the design phase cannot be easily rectified at this point, but the Classic Editor is still available for those who need to preserve their same workflow. The conflict lies in whether WordPress should ship a new editor that those with accessibility needs cannot immediately use. It is a somewhat painful and frustrating outcome for those users when the entire ecosystem is rapidly moving towards Gutenberg as the standard.

Either the accessibility and usability issues the team identified are not as bad as they purport or this document is a last-minute clarion call that could prevent WordPress from shipping an editor that excludes users who rely on assistive technology. Due to the gravity of their claims, the accessibility team’s statement on Gutenberg demands an official response.

I’ve always had pretty mixed feelings about the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. I still do.

But I do love the construction of this headline from Iain Poulson (“Advanced Custom Fields: The Hero WordPress Needs Right Now, but Not the One It Deserves “) and think that he highlights well both the continued importance of ACF, and the way that their latest announcement about Gutenberg support is impressive.

I’ve not yet tried the ACF blocks stuff, but if it really competently allows a developer to make a Guten-block without having to learn or even master the slightest bit of JavaScript, that’s an impressive and worthy feat.

This tool is incredible. It gives you beautiful, readable data visualizations of people’s real search queries for any phrase you type in, from “wordpress hooks” to “meaning of life.”

If you ever want to know exactly what people wish they knew on any given topic, Answer the Public should be your first stop. Amazing for SEO, content generation, understanding your target market—you name it.

Make something you’re proud of.

I enjoyed this post from Justin Jackson, who’s been exploring the various methods of “bootstrapping” recently. Specifically, there’s a lot of assumptions wrapped up in the term, and Justin challenges readers to work through those assumptions and in this instance, focus on their “mission”.

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

There are lots of people who can help you understand Git. Some of them are quite exhaustive, like Dan Gitcodeschooldude (who I covered here). His free video tutorials are great. But they’re also unequivocally not a cheat sheet. They’re essentially in-depth tutorials that will give you incredibly deeper understanding but require sustained focus.

Oh Shit Git (whose punctuation is unclear to me, and ultimately doesn’t matter) is the opposite. It’s a single-page guide to some of the most common and frustrating problems that a Git user is likely to face on a day-to-day week-to-week basis.

And it’s just really well named. Once you know that Oh Shit Git exists, you’ll always remember it. And when you need what it does, you’ll think to pull it up. Just like I always do with wphierarchy.com.

Great reporting and case studies from the Tavern.

This is a great good-news Gutenberg piece, and some great reporting from Sarah at WP Tavern: Sarah looks at some of the newest Gutenberg innovations, and how they’re coming from theme shops who, having typically diversified into plugins in recent years, are perfectly placed to mix design and functionality with new Gutenberg blocks.

We will see a really dominant go-to “extra Gutenberg block plugin” in the near future, and it’s exciting to see all the various offerings come about as various groups try various things. Watch this space!

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.

Toni Morrison on doing your best creative work

I really enjoyed this short interview with author Toni Morrison on her daily routine. None of this is overcomplicated, as is often the fashion; instead, it’s what allows her to do her best work:

“I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?”

This link was shamelessly borrowed from Jocelyn K. Glei’s beautiful newsletter. 

This post first appeared in MasterWP, a weekly newsletter for WordPress professionals.