Q: When do you set up W3 Total Cache?

A: After you have finished setting up your site. Note that correctly configuring Total Cache can take an hour per site. Super Cache and Quick Cache are easier to use but not quite as sophisticated.

To find out what’s slowing down your site:

Plugin Performance Profiler

YSlow

Suffusion Theme Demo by Eve Lurie

See Eve’s slides for more details.

Visit Eve’s site.

Some points mentioned in the  demo:

Suffusion Markup and Hook Reference

Out of the box it looks gray and boring, but boy are there a lot of settings, and you can export your options, which is handy when you are migrating sites.

There’s a sidebar layout diagram; Eve recommends printing it out and referring back to it. There’s also a custom layout option using widgets (similar to StudioPress home pages).

You can hide and show headers and sidebars on a per-page basis. There’s a featured slider option for the header.

Google Fonts are built in.

Suffusion now has child theme support, and the developer has a child theme pack, which is also free

Weaver II Theme Demo by Pieter Hartsook

Weaver Theme Demo List post on the Hartsook Letter

10 Reasons to Switch to Weaver

Some points mentioned in the demo:

Weaver started as a child theme of Twenty Ten and became its own theme. There’s only one developer, who actively supports and updates the theme.

Two-column layout with widget.
Special video embed shortcode to style your YouTube videos to match the theme.
Per post styling features that also show up in excerpts.
You can insert custom widget areas wherever you want with Advanced Options.

There’s an active support forum to which Pieter contributes sometimes; the  developer responds to questions promptly.

18 pages of documentation

Slider Options for header, etc (including one with a menu; that will also go into the sidebar) using Meteor Slides. You  can set per-post header images.

The developer license is a one-time $50 fee

There’s a font CSS statement builder interface

There’s a long list of per-page options, including “allow raw HTML” for using iframes and other tricky code that WordPress sometimes messes with.

Weaver is responsive even when not in mobile mode. There’s a mobile emulator for smartphone, small tablet, large tablet. The menu converts to drop down in the mobile emulator.

 PageLines Demo by Kyle Stewart

PageLines Free in WordPress Theme Repository

Info about PageLines Framework

Developer license is $397, but if you contact Kyle he’ll provide a discount code for those who were at the Meetup. (Ask Sallie if you didn’t get his e-mail address.)

PageLines tagline: Drag & Drop Done Right

PageLines is “a design framework built on a development ecosystem.” They take the granularity out of the options–the small tweaks are left in CSS. The best way to do small tweaks to a site is through CSS. Their aim is to provide easy ways to update the way content appears on the site. You can drag to resize sidebars. So far only two sidebars are supported.

Yes, PageLines is responsive.

Sliders are AJAX. PageLines supports jQuery.

They’ve made color controls simpler and integrated LESS CSS.

Supersizing images (to use as page background) can be an issue in terms of mobile bandwidth–the display will look okay, but the load time might be a problem.

You can set up per-page backgrounds.

Takes design time down to 2-5 hours from 15-20. Of course, the CSS still takes up quite a bit of time; the idea is to speed up the first 90% of site design.

PageLines supports widgets and shortcodes. They have not taken away any core WP functions.

There’s a PageLines store which sells add-on sections, child themes, and plugins.

Eve Lurie demonstrates the features of the Suffusion Theme during our “Configurable WordPress Themes for Non-Developers” meeting in April 2012.

Here are some links relating to that discussion.

Structured Content

• Semantic Web
• Microdata (Schema.org)
• Microformats
• RDFa
• Rich Snippets

The rel=author problem in WordPress

• Joost de Valk’s August 2011 article: rel=”author” and rel=”me” in WP and other platforms
• Plugin: Google authorship for multiple writers
• Plugin: Allow rel= and HTML in author bios

Note that whether this works for you and how long it takes is entirely up to Google. It took 7 months before Dave started getting credit for his posts.

WordPress plugins tagged “microformat(s)”

More Custom Post Type Stuff

• WordPress Codex: Custom Post Types
• WordPress Codex: register_post_type
• WordPress plugins for creating and managing custom post types
• Sallie’s custom post type bookmarks
• Feeds for Custom Content Types (via Stephanie Leary)

Multi-site Hosting

Q: Where do you host your WordPress Multi-site installation?

Sallie: I use WPWebHost for a Multi-site installation with about a dozen sub-sites, none of which get a ton of traffic. Cost for the plan I’m on (an older plan which isn’t offered anymore) is $152 per year, including CDN. It’s a shared host but a server with fewer customers. They’re based in Singapore, which is a drawback, but e-mail service is quick to respond and helpful, even if their English isn’t perfect. If you need something like a php.ini memory upgrade, you’ll get it.

Another possibility is pSek’s WPMU hosting, starting at $15/month.

Anca has been using ZippyKid from RackSpace.

Customizing WordPress Search

Q: Is there a tool to search by custom fields?

You could try the Query Multiple Taxonomies widget, which lets you create taxonomy drill-down widgets to help people find items that are in several taxonomies at once. There’s also a Custom Field List Widget plugin (no personal experience of that).

Responsive Images

Q: Is there a way to make background images responsive?

There are two great articles about this by Chris Coyier. The first is How To: Resizeable Background Image from 2008, and the second is Perfect Full-Page Background Image from 2010. (Thanks to Anca for those references.) To make regular images responsive, see Making WordPress Images Responsive on the Blissful Interfaces blog.

Cost of WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com

Q: If I switch to WordPress.org (self-hosted WordPress), how much will that cost?

About $7/month for shared hosting and about $10/year for a domain name. The WordPress software itself is free. Most web hosts will install it for you (possibly with dozens of themes and plugins you don’t want) or you can download it from WordPress.org.

WordPress as a Newsletter

Q: Does  anyone know of a plugin or e-mail service that will exactly duplicate your WordPress theme in a newsletter?

Nope. There are ways to create similar designs with tools like MailChimp, aWeber, Constant Contact, etc, but none simply imports your theme design, sidebars and all. Most of the meetup members thought the client was a bit daffy for wanting this, since almost nobody sends newsletters that exactly duplicate websites. The general conclusion was that the most workable thing to do would be design the e-mail template and then build the WP site to match. Not an enviable task.

Recommendation for a WP newsletter plugin: Wysijia Newsletters

Wysija Newsletter Editor

1. Manually, via phpMyAdmin and FTP and through your hosting control panel
2. Using the BackupBuddy plugin from iThemes, presented by Sallie Goetsch.
   Why you’d use it: scheduling, offsite backups, comprehensive, easy site migration, easy restore, server scan and new malware scan feature.
3. Using the VaultPress service from Automattic, presented by Anca Mosoiu.
   Why you’d use it: from the makers of WordPress, allowed by Page.ly and managed hosting services, up-to-the-minute backups, easy DB restore, security scans, lots of stats.
4. Using the free BackWPup plugin by Daniel Husen, presented by Pieter Hartsook.
   Why you’d use it: free, more offsite backup locations than BackupBuddy, good scheduling options, easy DB restore.

There are many other WordPress backup plugins that we did not have time to cover.

For some features I missed in the slideshow, see Aaron Brazell’s post, 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 3.3.