Amazing Meet Up Everyone.

I hope you enjoyed our presentations and hope we answered your questions to the best of our knowledge. Thank you to all who came out tonight. With out further to do.. here is the break down and notes from this WordPress Meeting. Side note: If you are new to this site, how the Notes section work is very simple. We break down the meeting by times and then what was discussed in that specific timeline. After the break down, we go into detail about each item that was discussed and provide links when needed. Each time frame has a number, and that number is associated with the same number if the final description of timeline below.

1. 6:45 – 7:01 pm | The group meet inside the main lobby of the Usr/Lib and we discussed topics like comments, tags, categories, sending WordPress posts to social media sites, and how to have social media sites display posts on your WordPress site using widgets. We moved into the classroom of the usr/lib.

2. 7:07 – 8:15 pm | John Hawkins discussed several topics, so bare with us on this one. First item that was brought to our attention is called Trunk. Great topic by the way. The John shows us some core features of the up and coming WordPress 3.4 update, including the new “Preview” editor section that allows you to view a theme, with out having to activate it on your live site. A question was asked about the basics of uploading pictures, also know as media. John showed us how to upload images, assign them to a gallery, create a gallery page and then display the gallery of images on the gallery page itself. Gallery. Sorry, I had to say it one more time. From here, John answered questions and address comments made from the group and also pointed out some amazing facts about plugins and updates. John also showed us how to use the settings feature of WordPress to set a fixed height and width of all media uploads. Lastly, John showed the group how to inspect the page element (using Google Chrome) to find out the width of the WordPress content area of a page. John then left the meeting and handed it to Russell Aaron.

3. 8:20pm – 10:00pm (the End Of the Meet Up) | Russell Aaron showed the group “Genesis Framework” and what “hooks” are and how to use them by using the ” Genesis Simple Hooks” plugin. Russell showed the group the different options that a user has when using hooks and where a few of the key hooks live within the Genesis Framework. From here, Russell demonstrated how to use HTML in the “Genesis Before Header”. Russell then showed the group a demonstration of WordPress Multi Site. How to use multi site and the advantages of using multi site as opposed to installing 3 or 4 copies of WordPress. Then Russell showed the group how to disable comments on a per page basis. Then we discussed how you can use the WordPress Publish Tab located in each post page to customize certain features like editing the date and time, setting up passwords per page and post, and how to set a post to be added to your site at a later date or time.

This section is the DETAILED Description of each timeline.

1. Categories, Tags and Comments.
With WordPress you have multiple options with how you can display posts and pages within your blog. Categories are a feature of blog posts that let a user divide up, organize and display posts in many different ways. For example: Lets say your website is about Cars. You can have different categories with in your blog the pertain to Cars. You can have one category that is specifically about different car manufactures, brands and models. Then you can have a category that is specifically about engine displacement. Then you can have another category that is about the different sound systems in select models of cars.

So with categories, you are basically sorting each blog post into specific sections of your site so the end user (site visitors) can read specific blog posts just about one subject, or many subjects.

Tags are just like creating categories, but they serve a different function and mentality behind how they are used in WordPress. Each post on your blog, or site, can be labeled or “TAGGED” with a key word that pertains to that specific post. Say for example we again are talking about the FORD MUSTANG, Not the Chevy Mustang!Lets say in the blog post, we are talking about the new features the 2012 mustang has vs. the features of the 2011 mustang has. If your blog post is about the type features the mustang offers, you want to tag the post with the same kind of information. For example, your tags would be something like “Stereos”, “Wheels & Rims”, “Leg Room” and so on. So your tags would you want to put in are references specific details about the post itself. From there, any other post you create or add with the same tags could be used to show all posts with in your site. Imagine if you went to a clothing store and you saw the tag on a tshirt and you really liked the shirt. You want to see all the other shirts with in the store that are just like it in some sort of way. That’s what tags were designed to do. They show your site visitors all the posts with the same basic information about “Stereos”, “Wheels & Rims”, “Leg Room” and so on.

Social media can be used on your site, and you can send information to your sites from with in WordPress. There are plugins, (added lines of code that serve a specific function), that you can use to send the latest posts on your site to Facebook, Twitter and so on. There are also widgets that you can use, (widgets are just like plugins, but are not installed like plugins), to show the latest Facebook status update on your blog with in the sidebar and footer.

2. TRUNK
Trunk is the latest development of WordPress that developers are using to essentially fix and add to the already amazing WordPress Environment, that has not been released yet. The advantage of using trunk would be if you were a developer of themes or plugins, you can test and verify that your theme and plugin will work with the next update released. We RECOMMEND that trunk is not to be installed on a live version of your website / blog because there is the very possibility that a line of code was not finished, or written wrong, causing WordPress to function wrong or not work at all.

WordPress 3.4 New Features.
Some of the new and very cool features that WordPress 3.4 is going to include in the next update are “Theme Preview”, “Security Updates”, and Updated designs to the “Dashboard” located inside your installation of WordPress. Theme Preview is going to allow the site admin, or user who manages the site itself, to preview a theme before you activate it on your live site. You can change background colors, images, and header options to make sure that the theme is up to your standards before publishing the theme, or activating the theme. There are also basic images that you can use to show how an image of a certain size looks on a page or post.

Using the Media Upload feature to create galleries
When you use WordPress there is a feature with in the dashboard, pages and posts where you can easily add images to your site, and then add them inside the page, or post. From here, you can add a title to the image, an alternative description that puts a word in the place of where the image would be if the site doesnt load properly. Maybe I didnt say that correctly. When you use an Alternative description, there is a word, phrase or link that will appear if the image is not loaded properly on the initial loading of the page. This is a good practice to get in the habit of doing. WHY? Because you might have a visitor to your site that is blind, or visibly impaired and can not see the image but will hear the words you put as the ALT text. OK, there I said it right.

Creating Galleries with in the Media Upload section of WordPress.
John Hawkins covered a variety of ways to create a gallery with in WordPress, install the gallery to a page called gallery and then publish the page to see the gallery. Then he shows us how to add more images to the same gallery, organize the pictures using the drag and drop editor and then publishing the final version of your gallery. I am not going to break down what john said, because we covered many methods, and questions were asked during the presentation and caused the demonstration to move along different paths. Here is a simple blog post about how to add galleries in WordPress.

Setting fixed widths and heights to images in WordPress
John showed us a site that he built. The editor of the site uploaded images that were 2.5mb (megabytes ) big, and had a width of 1250px and a height of 900px. So john logged into the dashboard, went to settings, and clicked on Media in the drop down selections available in a ordered list. From with in this setting, you can tell WordPress to make every picture size a Maximum height and width. This also corresponds with the next section we are going to cover which is using the Inspect Element method in Google Chrome and Fire Fox, but not limited to.

Inspect Element of a Page or Post using Chrome and FIrefox primarily, but not limited to just these browsers. Since a vast majority of people use these web browsers, we are going to list them in our example. Chevy Mustang John! Chevy Mustang!
If you use Google Chrome or Mozilla FireFox (FireFox), you can view the page source to see the actual HTML code, or to correct an issue that you might have with your site. The issue that john had was this: His client uploaded a picture that was 1250px wide by 900px tall. The image was to large for the actual area where the user was trying to display the image. So by right clicking on the page itself, you will see a feature called “INSPECT ELEMENT”. By doing this, we were able to hover over the line of code that the content of the page was written inside of and determine the width of the container. A container is the area of a page or post where the content lives. See, you are learning something all the time with wpvegas.com.

This ends the section of what John Hawkins covered in his presentation during the meeting. It didnt seem as long as it did reading all of this did it? I know right? Am I Right? High Five!!!!

3.Genesis Framework and Genesis Simple Hooks!
Genesis is a framework that is basically the body of your site and allows you to create a child theme to edit the style or functionality of your site. So when the creators of Genesis, update and advise you to update your copy, the framework is updated and your changes to the CSS (STYLE AND IMAGES) are not over written. Updating a theme will over ride any changes you make to the theme itself, forcing you to rebuild your site all over again. So child themes are basically theme changes that you make, located in a separate folder on your same WordPress site.

Hooks & Genesis Simple Hooks Plugin
Now that you know what a child theme is hopefully, we can discuss hooks. A hook is a piece of code written into a theme, that allows you to attach content to the theme itself. In other words, it provides the ability to extend functionality by way of inserting (or hooking) code. Lets say that right above the main header section ( The top of your site where your logo, site title and catch phrase live), you want to add in your links to all of your social media sites and icons of the popular site. With Genesis Simple Hooks, there is a section where you can specifically put your line or lines of code (HTML, PHP ETC…) into the text area and then save your changes. Now when you visit your site again, your links and images are populated above the header section across your entire site, regardless of what page or post you are on. You an read more about hooks inside of Genesis Here.

Multi Site (MU)
Multi-site is one installation of WordPress that allows you to add another WordPress site within the dashboard. Its simply explained like this:
A multisite network can be very similar to your own personal version of WordPress.com. End users of your network can create their own sites on demand, just like end users of WordPress.com can create blogs on demand. If you do not have any need to allow end users to create their own sites on demand, you can create a multisite network in which only you, the administrator, can add new sites.

A multisite network is a collection of sites that all share the same WordPress installation. They can also share plugins and themes. The individual sites in the network are virtual sites in the sense that they do not have their own directories on your server, although they do have separate directories for media uploads within the shared installation, and they do have separate tables in the database.
With Multisite, you can have one site about cats, one site about dogs and one site about dogs and cats, all managed from within one copy of WordPress.

This ends our meeting and the notes for the May Meet Up.
If You need anything else, add us on facebook, leave a comment or come to the next meet up and ask us there!!!! STAY GOLD AND KEEP USING WORDPRESS.

People like to be right. They also like to get the last word in. So when you allow comments on your posts or pages, you are allowing people to do so. You are also getting more help then you imagined. Granted, if you are posting about your life, or things that might only matter to you, this blog post does not apply. I am talking about tutorials and WordPress related snippets. I read this pretty popular blog every day and learn something new all the time. Someday’s I’ll break out the localhost and start a new site just to see how things work to a plain theme like twenty twelve.

Well the other day I was learning how to compress with gzip. If you do not know what this does, allow me to give you a short run down. Gzip takes your sites files, images and everything in between and zips it up. Then when your users (readers) request a page on your site, their browser has to ask your server to get the page, and display it to the browser window. Your browser also asks the server to return with a zipped copy if it is possible. This makes it very easy for the browser to load the content with in milliseconds, so your users can move at a faster pace. Well to do that there is a specific method to that madness. I am not going to post about how to do it, you can read about it here. What I will talk about is the fact that after I read that tutorial, some of the code did not work. After I fiddled around with the code for a few half hours, I went back to the tutorial thinking that I might have missed something. I checked out the snippet that I copied and it matched word for word, character for character.

Ok so then what is missing? Wait, maybe there is an invalid line of code or character forcing the code to not work. But how do you verify this information with out bugging someone, like John Hawkins, 13 times a day. Well one option is to actually learn the language that you are working with. The second option is to scroll down to the comments and read what people have to say. It turns out that there was a piece of code that had two characters switched up. So after trying the suggested code from the person who left the comment, I found that it worked with out ease.

Reading the comments of a blog post is the equivalent to reading the articles in a adult magazine that we all know about. It does come in handy though, I must say. The comments I mean, not the articles in the zine.

So back to the topic of making your website load faster and faster. So let’s dive into this.. Ready?

Lets say that you are in fact using Google Chrome. You don’t have to be using this browser, but it would help. So lets go to your site you are using. I hope you are using WordPress on your site. Let’s right click and inspect the element. Now let’s run a page speed test. If you are not sure you have page speed installed or how to use it, you can read my previous article here. When you run the page speed test you will get your results. If you are getting a tab in the page speed test results called “MINIFY Javascript, that is what this article is basically going to be covering.

When you are Minifying a JavaScript file, you are basically removing all of the dead space, or “white space” between lines of code. But why do developers use white space? A few reasons, I’ll explain. When developers write code, we like to space things out to make it easier to read for us and others who might use the script. Making things easier to read really helps everyone involved. You might even see CSS files that look like they were written in one long run on sentence. That is not the case. The smaller a file is, the faster it loads. Think of it this way. You have a file that has 1100 lines of code. You have another file that only has 300 lines. Which would load faster? If you said the 300 lines, you are correct.

Now that we covered why it is important to remove dead space. Let’s look at some examples. Example One is a SUPERFISH Javascript file inside one of my themes that I am working on. You can see that there is a lot of white space between the lines of code. If you look at the code closer, there are comments. Anything inside of these “Comment Tags” (/* */) means that these lines are not part of the file. They are just explanations of what the below lines of code do. Now this is not to be confused with a CSS file. The Comment tags at the top of your styles.css sheet are actually needed for WordPress to identify the name of the theme.

If I were to update this file, and write this code in a more efficient or “optimized” way, I would be saving 49% of the work load on any browser loading my page. Now imagine if you were to minify all of your scripts. How much faster would your site load? Google Chrome Inspect Element says that if I were to optimize every suggested script, I would save 34%.

So you can see that just by using the Google Page Speed tool you can make your site load faster, rank a bit higher and work a little bit faster. I hope this helped you.

7:00pm – 7:30pm – Introductions and Hello’s from the Group Admins (John and Russ, But Mostly John).
7:30pm – 9:30pm – The Group Admin’s Answered questions from all who attended the meet up, Mostly about Multiple Site or MU.
9:30pm – End – Russ showed the group a few simple plugins from the Repository to use with any local (your own WordPress site) copy of WordPress.

WordPress is a Powerful Tool. By now, our group of WordPress users should know that. We try to make this message as clear as possible for anyone who does attend the meet up. So let’s dive into it, Shall We?

Multi-Site, or MU, is a function or install of WordPress that takes on “Installation” of WordPress and makes it easily accessible for an Admin or any user of a MU site for that matter to create more installations of WordPress within the same Site. Think of it as creating 3 or 4 WordPress Sites inside one domain, or .com but not limited to, without having to create a new Database or installing another copy of WordPress where a user would have to create another login and password. With in MU, a “Super Admin” can create a site using WordPress like wpvegas.com. Then with in a Network Tab, you can make another site called “dev.wpvegas.com” or “wpvegas.com/dev”. From here, a Super Admin can assign other users to become a Administrator to manage that specific WordPress site and others. Now that we understand what MU can do, lets look at some more things MU is capable of doing.

Installing MU is fairly easy once you have read the codex a few times. The Codex will help you step by step with just about any WordPress Questions you might have. Once you have installed Multi-Site you can begin managing your “Network”. Your network is basically a series of sites you might want to create that correspond to your actual domain. Take SmashingMagazine.com for example. This site is broken down into simple categories. Each category is using using a different WordPress install within “ONE” copy of WordPress. This allows a user to post an article about WordPress one minute and then post an article about Coding on the next minute. This is a very effective way to do things when you have a team of writers and developers who not only know what they are talking about, but can walk you through step by step.

So lets get to talking more about the inside of MU. There are basically two types of ways to do everything inside Mu. One is by using the Network Admin side of things to install Plugins and Themes, add users and update their roles in the network. The other side of things would be for a Admin of each installation of WordPress MU to activate individual plugins needed to run the site and manage comments etc.

The Network Admin allows anything to be used inside the entire network. This would be Themes, Plugins, API Keys with no limitations. WordPress did an amazing job with allowing these methods to be distributed at the Network Admins discretion. This is important to MU because like any business, you have the main person of the site making the final decisions regardless of debate while allowing them to focus on their tasks while others act as managers of a sub WordPress site in the network. The network admin can basically make changes to code with in a theme, functions.php file, or plugin file. Allowing one person to only have this level of admin rights is smart for many reasons. I’ll give you the biggest one, it’s called not letting to many hands dip into the cookie jar. Say right now, as I am writing this post. I am not an admin of the site. I am simply an author that writes content for the site. I cant publish a article until I get a final approval by a Super Admin. Now this is possible to do inside of a single install of WordPress, but on a more global level. Instead of a Super Admin logging in and out of different WordPress sites, they can simply jump into each site with in the network, approve and move on.

The “Managers”, or Admins of a sub WordPress site handle the daily function of the site. Updating articles that might be written in a way less productive, approving/denying comments and activating/deactivating plugins for that specific sub site. They do not have the admin rights to uninstall anything like a Theme or Plugin. All one could do is switch out themes/plugins. They can also make changes to the appearance of the site. This would be like updating the Navigation, or Menu, in the appearances tab, settings tab and media tab. This makes it super easy to delegate tasks and keep sites running smoothly. Just like a store would have it’s Managers, Shift Managers and Supervisors, keeping them responsible for just their store.

So now that we know what MU is capable of doing, lets talk more about moving around within MU. When you have a single installation of WordPress, you are only able to see inside that specific install. With MU, you can jump around to each SUB PAGE inside the Network. This makes life and any business so much easier to manage.

With in WordPress you have categories assigned to each post called Parent Categories. You can also have other categories inside the Parent Categories called Children. With MU, you can have Parent Installation’s of WordPress and Children Installation’s of that parent. Using Smashing Magazine as our example, You have the Parent site, SmashingMagazine.com. Then you have the children of the site called wp.smashingmagazine.com or smashingmagazine.com/wp. Either way will work and is accepted. Then inside each child install, you can assign Parent and Child Categories of posts and pages. So hopefully by now you can see what we are doing with MU. We are taking a site, breaking it down into smaller portions of WordPress and only talking about specifics topics related to the Sub Site. It is to my knowledge that you can not make Grand Child install’s of MU. Frankly, I wouldnt see the point to do so.

This covers the topic of MU that was discussed tonight in the meet up. If you have further questions, feel free to ask myself or John Hawkins.

Below is a list of most of the sites we visited and discussed in this months meet up.

http://wp.tutsplus.com/

http://www.studiopress.com/responsive/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

http://designmodo.com/

http://trailsherpadesign.com/2012/01/18/responsive-web-design-for-outdoor-bloggers/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-rotator/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flex-slider-for-wp-rotator/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cycle/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/genesis-slider/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/genesis-responsive-slider/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gd-taxonomies-tools/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facepress-ii/

So How can you test your site to see what your “Page Speed” is? It’s actually quite simple once you install a plugin to your browser. This is a fairly easy task if you are able to follow a simple set of instructions. For the sake of this article I am going to be using Page Speed in Google Chrome. After installing Page Speed and restarting the browser you can visit any site you would like. Simply “right click” like you are going to view the page source and all the way at the bottom of the drop down list you will see “Inspect Element”. When you select that option you will see the page split in half horizontally. (See image). Now you can simply click on the Page Speed Tab and Run a Page Speed Test. This might refresh the page and it will obviously run through every line of code written on every single page associated with the site including Java Script Pages and anything else in the “head” tags. Once the test is done it will return a score like 35/100 to 87/100 depending on how well the site scored.

After you do this a few times on your favorite sites ( I encourage you to do so ) It’s time you to look at your own page and do the same thing. This time we are going to look at the results a little bit deeper. I am going to look at one of the site I currently run. Valley West Mortgage. When I run the page speed test right now (8:54 pm on Friday, March 16th 2012) I get the result of 81/100. Not bad. Now let me Refresh the page a few times and run the test again. 81/100 again. So it’s safe to say that even if the page is not 100% accurate (nothing in life ever is) I am some where in the neck of the woods of a B- rating. That’s great. Lets Try one more time for the fun of it. 81/100 again. If you look to the right of the score you will see a little orb, or colored ball reflecting a traffic signal. Green being good and so on. Now I am running the latest version of WordPress which is 3.3.1. So I can not take all, even half of the credit for my site ranking so well because I in fact did not write anything used in WordPress.

Now lets have a little more fun now shall we? If I log in to the Dashboard of WordPress, I will once again run the page speed test because it is still a live page on my site. I hope that was easy for the readers to assume. I get a 66/100 resulting in a yellow score. Not bad, but it’s not the 81/100 I was expecting. So as you can see each page you run will be different. Let’s run the page speed test inside my Plugins Tab. I am running 30 Plugins with this site. I get the same score of 66/100 again. For the fun of it, I am going to run the Page Speed Test one more time, this time inside the Setting Tab, again 66/100. So it is safe to say that all of my pages will more than likely be receiving the same score.

So you can see that by using WordPress, you are actually increasing your website or blog’s chances of Google Rewarding you in many different ways. And that is why almost any BLOG you come across in a search engine is running on WordPress.

Dont forget that our WordPress Meet up is this Monday, the 19th of March inside the Usr/Lib. See you all there.

This is not a rant or rave about the fact that most people have no idea that HTML is an abbreviation for something more technical, php is in fact a scripting language that can communicate with a database – not a drug, and so on. This is a “blog post” about understanding the right questions to ask a client who might be willing to admit they know nothing about website besides that they have 400 friends on facebook and typing in “:)” will make a smiley face in a chat window. See what I did there? I used “blog post” to describe exactly what this is you are reading, Ha. OK back to reality.

The other day I was meeting with a client who wanted to blog about her words she makes up on her way to work. “Because I mean that every one on facebook likes my words so much that my site should probably get like a million hits a month, maybe more if I am good.” Her exact words. So I skipped over the sarcasm that I really wanted to say and dove into the core features of her project. “Can you name me a site that gets a million hits a month?” I say to her. “You mean like Google?” she replies. Right there, was a give away that she in fact had no clue what she was about to get into. “Have you ever had a blog or wrote something that is more than a paragraph in length, on facebook, about something that you or your inner circle of friends might understand is a sarcastic joke?” “Well in high school I use to write a lot of short stories” she tells me. At this point I am literally searching my brain to keep up in this conversation.

I find that most “Clients” think they have a really good idea for a website. They were drinking with some friends or sat at home on a Friday night and decided that writing a blog couldn’t be that hard. With that being said, You have to have a solid plan of attack when it comes to interviewing your clients. Every developer that I know has some kind of question sheet or word document that, if answered honestly, will help them to build a website for their new client. In this case, I had to forget what I have previously done for clients in the past and start from scratch.

I begin with the basics: Do you know what you are going to write about? Do you have a name for your site? Have you started to write your idea’s down on paper or actually wrote something you think is worth reading to your sites viewers? Have you done any research to see if there are already successful site like yours? My guess is that “NO” will be the answer to every one of these questions besides the name of the site. If that is the case, you might want to realize this project should not take up a lot of time or should be placed on hold until the client realizes that they are not cut out for this or that they had a great idea and will never follow through on anything. Including payment.After these questions I feel comfortable enough to ask some more in depth questions.

Are you willing to put money up in advance to help get this project up and going? Are you wanting to pay on a monthly period or pay all debts owed upon completion of this project? Are you hoping that this blog will be so successful that you can quit your job and just blog all day everyday?

Asking these kinds of questions get old really fast. I have found out that asking questions based on money kind of gets the ball rolling in your clients head making them realize that you are for real and plan on making a great site for them. If you are dealing with a client that probably has worked in a sales position once in their life, they should know that any talk of money is a flat out approach to finding out how serious you are as a developer and how serious they are a “blogger”. When you get any kind of response that starts out with the phrase “when I was in” usually means that someone in their past was being supportive of this persons passions in life. So lets talk about asking questions that will in fact get the ball rolling with out you seeming like a money driven company.

Are you willing to start writing three paragraphs everyday that no one in fact reads? Can you name off three key features of your website that no one has done yet? Are you able to deal with the fact that some, if not most, readers will leave stupid comments about your blog post criticizing your work?

Asking personal questions helps your client realize that there is a lot of work that needs to go into this site and could possibly result in a place for bored people to write stupid comments about work you feel is helpful to society and your potential readers. My favorite question at this current moment is this: ” When you write, do you have a plan or are you basically flying by the seat of your pants?” Why do I ask this question? Because it is important to know that after all of your hard work and dedication, this site might be taken down in less than 3 months after going live. Every site I build for a client goes into my personal portfolio and I want to be proud of it. Not that I care about the content basically. I want to show others that I can help anyone take a radical idea and make it a reality.

So when you are dealing with your next client, think about the questions you want to ask. But more importantly, try to guess the answers you are going to get and plan for the worst.

Here is a short list of the Blacklist of WordPress Plugins from the Ben Metcalfe talk.

Take a look at the list, and there is another post on the blacklist page that explains in quite a bit of detail why these plugins are removed off their servers.

Timeline of events

7:00 pm – 7:30 pm | Introduction by John Hawkins and Russell Aaron. The intro was basically explaining what the group is gathered up for, explaining ways to get more involved with the group and HOW TO SUBMIT IDEAS FOR THE NEXT MEET UP!

7:30 pm – 8:30 pm | Russell Aaron Talked about security inside the core WordPress Files and simple ways of “How to recognize a site is using WordPress”.

8:30 pm – 9:15 pm | John Hawkins Talked about “how to install WordPress on your local machine and what the pros and cons are. The discussion progressed to John talking about what exactly is a child theme and how to set one up. Opening up our favorite text editor “NET BEANS“, John showed the group how he took a friends site and made some custom post types for the site and customized the rest of the site in under an hour and a half.

9:15 pm – End | Questions and Answer Time. Then the group split up into two groups. One group was ran by Russ and the other John.

Detailed Descriptions of Timeline Events

Russell Aaron talked to the group, as well as opened up the meeting, about security inside the core files of WordPress. The core files, or files you download straight from WordPress.org, live inside where ever you install WordPress on your site, ( mysite.com | blog.mysite.com | mysite.com/blog ). When you download the WordPress files, you are given a zipped file that you need to unzip and place inside the root folder of your site. WordPress installs using 4 main and specific features. The 4 features are A Database, A User Name, A Password, and a Host. All of this information is placed inside the wp-config.php file or wp-sample-config.php file depending on how you installed WordPress and your skill level.

When you are creating the Database, you need to name it something. 99% of WordPress involves naming. From naming the title of your blog post to renaming files. Everything has a name. Russ than discussed with the group that re-naming a file, username or passsword with anything that has to do with your site could be a security risk. WHY? Well the key reason is it gives a potential hacker a base idea of where to start when hacking a site. If you know enough about WordPress and want to do some kind of “hacking”, the best place to start is going to the sites URL (www.mysite.com) and the typing in ” /wp-login.php “. This takes anyone to the main login page of the WordPress site. John Hawkins explained to the group that in the earlier versions of WordPress, the default user name was usually “ADMIN, admin or Admin”. You would know that if you installed a few WordPress Sites. If you didn’t, congrats you just learned something for FREE! Why this was brought up is because Russ described to the group several ways a hacker could guess their way into your site using the wp-login.php method.

HERE IS A GREAT PLUGIN TO STOP THAT METHOD AND ADD ANOTHER LAYER OF SECURITY TO YOUR SITE. LOGIN LOCKDOWN. HERE IS A GREAT ARTICLE THAT EXPLAINS SEVERAL WAYS A HACKER CAN GET INTO YOUR SITE AND HOW YOU CAN HELP PREVENT AN ATTACK. SECURING YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE.

John Hawkins will be providing myself with the notes he took about the subjects he talked about later.

Thank you to everyone who came out tonight, please go join the WordPress Meet Up Group on Facebook.

If you have attended any of our Las Vegas WordPress Meet Ups inside the Usr/Lib, you know that John Hawkins and the entire team (WPVEGAS.COM) that puts the meet ups together, are huge fans of the Genesis Framework. For many reasons besides the obvious, it’s amazing! It’s taken over as a top framework to use, much like WordPress has become the standard in website content management systems.

What you might not know is that 80% of themes built for WP use a very basic framework like Hybrid. Then they are edited beyond belief to make an amazing/dynamic theme for anyone to purchase and use. Every designer or programmer has their own reasons for using one, maybe two, specific frameworks. So in this article, we are going to talk about why you should experiment with many frameworks before deciding which to use in your theme.

Frameworks allow designers to edit a framework using a child theme system for the most part. There are themes from WooThemes that allow you to edit the original css sheet and update the framework with out having to reconfigure. Why should you use a child theme based off of a framework? Using the framework allows you to add a style sheet to load, and several other options as well, before the rest of the theme is displayed. This way, when the framework is updated in your dashboard or downloaded from the authors site to be uploaded into your themes root folder (wp-content/theme), your site does not have to then be reconfigured to make your site look the same as before. Anyone who has done that will tell you it is not fun and is very time consuming, myself included.

See a lot of themes contain their own tab in the dashboard sidebar that allows you to modify your theme. Then a new release of the theme comes out and is installed by the admin of the site, only to find out that you must make the same changes over and over again. In the current world of fast moving technology we currently live in, an update could be released weekly, if not monthly. So by using a framework, you are eliminating that extra work all together. So now that our readers know why it’s important to use a framework, lets talk about the benefits you get by taking this step.

Using another person(s) framework is not admitting that the end user or designer couldn’t develop their own framework. It simply states that what others are doing fits into your criteria for the site you are building. Then you make your changes using custom post types, maybe adding in short codes every now and again, and even meta boxes resulting in a finished product that the designer and client both agree on. You can even toss in the argument that using a framework “as is” solves more problems than using a theme from a third party site like Themeforest could ever accomplish. I’d agree to that, but that’s personally my opinion. My argument is that using a third party theme allows you to grow as a designer/developer in many aspects. When a person uses those types of themes, you are allowing yourself to learn what others are doing out in the world, making that person more adaptable to change over time.

Before Genesis was released to the world, only a few, maybe less than 15 frameworks were in existence. That is why we have seen many changes over the last year and a half in the way that WordPress sites look and function. Here is a short list of frameworks that most of the older themes are based off. My personal favorite is Hybrid Core. I like this framework because of the drop down box located at the very top that is used as a place to put your sign up or login forms inside of and a place for social media buttons to live in that allow your footer or header files to be less cluttered or more organized.

Many times I refer new users of WordPress to check out the list of frameworks to get an understanding of what WP was actually intended for. They get an understanding that WordPress was basically a stream of posts put together in a way that makes up your blog. It was not until mid 2009 (roughly) that many developers started building themes that mimic a newspaper design, magazine theme or portfolio style using custom categories to be displayed in a different section on the main page, instead of using the stream approach that only displayed each new post on top of older entries. Each display usually only shows the most recent post in a specific category. That way it looks like your site is pulling information into the main page from the blog, to get people to head over to that section of your site. That is basically what a newspaper’s website does. They display the most recent stories, or top stories on the main page. When you click on a story and read the article you will usually find a feed at the bottom of “Similar Postings” that are recommended to readers allowing them to stay on a specific topic. The framework is the glue that holds all of this together.

So in closing, using many different frameworks from many different designers will allow anyone who is building a WordPress site to expand their imagination and create new and exciting lines of code to share with the world. It’s ok to know more than one or two sets of frameworks. Some frameworks only give you a certain amount of options before you have to cut in your own lines of code. Some frameworks provide more than enough options or lines of code to give your site more functionality than you could ever imagine. Some frameworks allow you to have an amazing site and work well with the SEO PLUGINS you might be using.