Posts made by guyinpv

It's not about which CMS is "best". It's about picking the right tool for the job.

One gets annoyed when WP is offered for absolutely every job under the sun.
Want to make the next best Youtube with a mix of Twitter and Instagram! Probably WP is good.
Want to make the next best API for micro-services? I guess WP is the best.
Want some new emulation mini controllers for space shuttles? Probably a WP plugin for that.

The WP apostles always assume it is best for everything because "powerful".

At least decide if you want the overhead of a CMS. Do you need a database at all? Would a flat site work best and therefore a site generator? Is it a highly custom design from scratch or does your client demand a pretty page builder with drag-n-drop buttons?
Is the developer in control of the content and site or does a non-tech end user need to edit everything? Can they be exposed to HTML or a WYSIWYG or will they muck everything up?
Is the content highly structured or is every page a mix of many content pieces?
Is this actually a "blog" and needs bloggy features or are these more like landing pages?
Does the content or development features need to be source controlled?
What kind of scale do you need? Is there a focus on multi-national issues?
How important is the mobile experience, AMP, accessibility? Will the site offer APIs for various things?

Can every single concern be shoved into WP in some way? Perhaps, but why? Why do the same people who love how "powerful" it is because there are so many plugins, also say you shouldn't install any plugins, maybe one, or you're doing it wrong?

It's possible people don't like hooks and filters and PHP functions to output HTML, but would instead rather like to build out templates using Twig or Smarty or some other standard method. Or maybe they need a modern architecture with a site built on Node and React, or Vue.
Maybe they would like to use a Composer-based stack to manage the site rather than uploading files in FTP.
Maybe they need to run on a server with only command line access or some such, rather than a commodity $3.99/month cPanel host.

I, for one, am excited to see how the industry is going to evolve the CMS market, as long as people are open to change and not just cling on to their ancient tech.

@Obsolesce said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

@guyinpv said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

Second, you absolutely should change the admin URL if possible, it's a very simple and basic thing that stops a ton of bot attacks by default. But WP doesn't make it easy, so it's rarely done. And keeping core files out of web root is also a very easy security measure that most modern software do by default, only exposing the public files and index.

Moving files around also breaks things. You really are screwing up every WP site you touch. No wonder you have problems with it...

Dude, for the last time, I'm not the one doing these things, this is what is already done on sites I have to work on. This is what everybody else does, because out of 200 developers, there are 200 ways they like to do things or protect things or tweak the file system. Yes, Roots Bedrock is a thing people use to change the file system. Yes, people change the login URL, because at best there are mixed opinions about these security tweaks. There are lots of plugins which do just this, and people install them all the time.

Scott, brother, you need to stop with the hyper analyzing sentence-by-sentence, I can't respond to a dozen individual messages like this.

@scottalanmiller said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

@guyinpv said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

Creating a new WP site and not doing a full security stack of plugins would be like doing a fresh install of Windows XP and putting it on the internet with no antivirus!

Um, no. You absolutely don't use some big stack of plugins. Maybe one. Maybe not. That's it.

If you build WP sites with one plugin, you're definitely doing it wrong. WP doesn't have enough core features to run a decent site without various multiple plugins. If a site even wants to have ecommerce, they already need Woo, an import plugin, a payment plugin, some cart feature plugins, a shipper plugin, etc. Everybody runs Yoast or some other SEO plugin. A cache plugin, performance plugins, image optimizer, social networks, analytics.
I've never even seen a WP site with just one plugin. You don't even get just one on a fresh install!

@scottalanmiller said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

@guyinpv said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

On what planet is a CMS powerful or great when it takes 5.5 hours to find some text in the footer?

You actually think that there is a modern, powerful CMS that isn't like this when the designer screws up? On what planet have you used products?

That's the problem, the footer text being hard to find wasn't a screw up of the designer, it's just the way they had to do it based on WP lack of consistency and how all their plugins and theme stuff interact and there is no actual "template" anywhere.

It's ok to not try and convince me how "powerful" WP is, I'm aware of how it works, I've laid out many points already. I'm painfully aware of its problems, for 10+ years now.

Sorry, not reading the hundred over-analyzing responses here. I already know WP is garbage so you're not convincing me otherwise, I've worked on too many of the things.

I've had to work on 200+ of the things and there is never one built "right". Everybody has a different idea of "right" or what makes the design/theme/development/workflow "easy". Fact is, with 200 sites, you get 200 different ways a website is built. There is very little consistency. There is no "right" way to build a site in WP.

@Obsolesce said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

@guyinpv

It seems to me that all of the "right" stuff you are doing to your WP installs are actually wrong and screwing it up.

I didn't say I was doing this. I work on other peoples' sites. This is what everybody else is doing. Every site is different.
Second, you absolutely should change the admin URL if possible, it's a very simple and basic thing that stops a ton of bot attacks by default. But WP doesn't make it easy, so it's rarely done. And keeping core files out of web root is also a very easy security measure that most modern software do by default, only exposing the public files and index. But WP definitely doesn't make that easy either.
Why would it be that only minutes after creating a brand new user, there are already bots attempting to log in with the username? How would they have found the username of a brand new user who hasn't created any content?

Creating a new WP site and not doing a full security stack of plugins would be like doing a fresh install of Windows XP and putting it on the internet with no antivirus!

I don't need to be convinced of WP greatness, it's not worth the effort. We all have our opinions of things. Imagine someone hires you because they spent 4 hours and couldn't figure out how to edit some text in the footer. So you spend another hour and half trying to track it down for them because in WP there is no actual standard place where your templates and output live. It could be anywhere, in plugin UI somewhere, or deep in a PHP template which includes another PHP which includes another PHP which overrides another which hooks another that filters another.
On what planet is a CMS powerful or great when it takes 5.5 hours to find some text in the footer?

This is like if you have a flat tire in your car so you try to find the puncture and finally discover the nail is actually under the carpet of the headliner inside the cab. hahah! That's kind of what it feels like to work on an old content-rich WP site sometimes.

I'm glad none of you build sites that way. I don't either, but it's one of the traps often found working on existing ones.

@Obsolesce said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

@guyinpv

I've used WP for a lot of production stuff and it's been nothing short of excellent with zero issues on any end.

You must be doing something seriously wrong, or have some weird prejudice or bias against WP.

I'm not doing anything "wrong". The point is you have to do a TON of "right" stuff to make WP do what it needs to do. And there is for certain a whole mess of things people can do "wrong" as well. Not updating is a HUGE problem for WP, as recent studies have found most sites using vulnerable versions, low PHP versions, long dead plugins, etc.

Do you mask or change the wp-admin URL? Do you put the WP core out of web root? Are you able to use a Git workflow or store the custom parts of the theme and plugins in a repo?

I'm not going to fight about how bad WP is, I already know it, but it's what everybody uses because it has the most plugins.

If you're a dev who builds the theme from scratch and uses no 3rd party themes, then fine, but that's not what most small agencies and freelancers do. They grab a theme on themeforest and install a 20-plugin stack of their favorite necessities. Then nobody maintains it.

I'm not mad at WP, it's a legacy system built on old techniques and has the advantage of a huge plugin store. Can't argue with that. But there is nothing much else great about it. You need a large learning curve to figure out its secret sauce. You need extra plugins just to be able to build the custom content needed for pages, or a page builder, ACF, Pods, something. Then a deep understanding of a favored theme framework, if you're into those, and all the possible hook locations. Genesis, Gantry, Thesis, Thematic, Divi, whatever your pleasure. You have to learn the hook system as well as the page builder they may or may not use.
So every WP site I come across has some new or old framework with an entirely different set of APIs and functions to figure out, because no two sites come together quite the same way. Some have custom admin UIs, some use the Customizer, some are only in the template files, some have child themes, some not. And those that don't use a child theme, you can't be sure whether the main/parent theme was customized or not, so have to be careful doing a theme update.

We would all like to believe we build WP sites perfectly in April 2019, but in 5 years it will be someone else's nightmare to figure out. Just like every site I'm given that was built 5 or 10 years ago is now my nightmare to figure out. Some were done well, to be sure, and might even have some dev docs to help out. But others you just get 2700 lines of random hook outputs piled into the functions file. You never know what you're going to get. And this isn't a praiseworthy design feature of WP.

I wouldn't tell anybody to not use it if they want, I would simply say there are other options out there, people trying to improve the CMS space and do things better.

If WP is your only tool, everything looks like a sloppy plugin-riddled nightmare

@scottalanmiller said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

@guyinpv said in Top 10 Advantages of Using Wordpress for Website Development:

WP itself is pretty garbage, non-intuitive for end users,

All platforms are bad for end users. Windows is hard for end users. It's not an end user platform, it's a CMS.

WP is designed for end users, it's supposed to be a blog platform for non-devs to quickly grab a free theme and start writing posts.

WP is definitely not trim or fast or any of those things. Not without optimizing and plugins. It doesn't even have built-in caching no optimizes any of the output.

@scottalanmiller said in Does Anyone Actually Use Conversation View Intentionally for Email:

@guyinpv said in Does Anyone Actually Use Conversation View Intentionally for Email:

CV works pretty well in Zoho.

Because... Zoho

Ya their email is pretty nice, but CV is not without issues.

Sometimes, for example, when looking at an email, I want to delete it. It's hard to know what the delete is actually doing. Sometimes it will only delete the one email in the chain that I'm looking at. Other times it appears to delete the entire chain so the whole thing disappears. It seems inconsistent. Sometimes I want to delete the whole chain since it's not needed for anything, but I don't think Zoho is actually deleting all the received and sent emails in the chain, it might just be deleting the one I'm looking at, and then hiding the rest? I don't know really know how that works to be honest.

@scottalanmiller said in Does Anyone Actually Use Conversation View Intentionally for Email:

@guyinpv said in Does Anyone Actually Use Conversation View Intentionally for Email:

I like it because it just that easy to read the last one or two emails to remember what's going on.

Those are normally in the email already, though, so I never run into that problem.

Very true, but then it's the same difference, you're just getting a view of previous emails under the current one.

None of those except #1 and #2 are core WP, the rest basically rely on what theme you choose, and various plugins.

WP itself is pretty garbage, non-intuitive for end users, and not easy at all to start from scratch should you want to build your own theme and not rely on a huge plugin stack. There is a lot of magic going on, like meta-data being stored in the CSS file, what?!? And a huge theme waterfall hierarchy, and a billion PHP functions for the API. There is no real theme framework or template system built-in, an incredibly basic and poor custom field manager. They expect you to build themes by using dozens of PHP hook functions and echoing out bits of HTML here and there, making it very difficult to ever track down exactly where a piece of output is coming from. Was it a menu, a widget, a custom field, the page content, a header/footer file, an override template, the functions file, a plugin, WHERE!!

I could go on and on for days about the many frustrations of WP. But that doesn't matter, because most people only use WP so they can install a huge stack of plugins to actually make it work and do something useful, if you're ok with the huge amount of code bloat you get with it.

And don't even try to write any custom CSS, because you'll find it nearly impossible to override all the other CSS spit out by the theme and plugin stack, unless you get very hacky to try and force your custom CSS file to be output last after every other style.

Then when all this is over, you have a basic site with an 18MB size home page, 160 assets being downloaded, 18 stylesheets, 12 Javascript files including three versions of jQuery, etc. So then you have to install some more plugins to try and optimize things, combine files, minimize, compress, and cache things, only to find that the combined JS doesn't work, and the site suddenly looks bad because CSS combined in the wrong order and the cascade isn't working right any more.

Hey, I work mostly on WP, lol, because everybody uses it, but it's far from praise-worthy, especially for a developer who wants complete control over the site. Or who wants a proper template system. Or who wants to highly optimize their output, or use a proper toolchain for development, staging, and production, etc.

Use it if you want, but it requires constant maintenance and updates, testing, and review to make sure nothing breaks when your plugins update every 4 days.

CV works pretty well in Zoho.

I can toll the whole chain into any folder or archive it or whatever. Even delete one of the middle emails in the chain, no problem. When a new email shows up, the entire chain basically goes to the top of the inbox again.

I like it because it just that easy to read the last one or two emails to remember what's going on.

In Thunderbird, even when not using CV, I would very often right-click the email and open the full chain to do just that, see them all in order of send/receive, it's quite handy.

I do oldest first in Thunderbird, I like it that way. Since I worked in commerce for a decade, it's always first-come, first-serve. I like to take care of emails from oldest to newest. So the "top" of my list is the old stuff and I work down, and try to keep inbox 0 at least in my main inbox.
For folder which are more like email archives for dumping stuff in, I might switch to newest first since I'm not actively reading through those folders.

And, I kind of like conversation view. I use it in Zoho and it's great because I deal with so many clients, I often need to see the previous one or two emails in the chain to remember what's going on.

One thing I've always wished for with email is the ability to edit the headers and content. If there was a way to have my client allow me to change or append the subject line or add some meta-data somewhere to help find this email later, that would be fantastic. And I know some clients let you have tags, but I want a standard, something that permanently gets fixed to the email so any given client could read the extra data.
There was a plugin for Thunderbird that allowed me to edit subject lines, but email needs a standard for adding metadata to emails for archival purposes or just to help with searching and categorizing.

I think the perfect project management tool would be a combination of these.

Calendar is easiest as it just has to do what calendars do, and sync up to Google calendar and Zoho or any others for convenience.

Project management would let me separate things by client and their projects, and ultimately into todos.

Todos would not just have a "due date", but rather have a type of due "range". Or even separate dates for "get started" and "due". If I set a get started date 10 days before due date, the app would give me a working range.
If todos had time estimates, and ultimately the project had a time estimate, that would also help align starting and due dates, which would all be represented on the calendar.

Finally I could do time tracking but not in the usual sense. I might find it useful to track time on each todo, or on the project as a whole. But I actually track time by day. So each day of work I'm logging the tasks I do and taking notes on that.
At 9am to 10:30am I'm working on client X across two projects A and B.
Then from 10:45am to 12:00pm I worked on client Z on project C.

What this looks like is basically a chronological log. Like this:
Client Acme (a OneNote file)
-- Project X (A particular page)
4/19/2019 - (2:00) - (BILLED)
... notes ....
4/21/2019 - (1:30) - (BILLED)
... notes ...
4/22/2019 - (3:00) - (UNBILLED)
... notes ...

Within the concept of a daily log, I could work on any number of tasks or todos, doesn't really matter, as long as I have the total time spent and tracked in the daily log notes.

Then when I go to invoice Acme (every two weeks), I can add up the time on all their projects dating back to the last time entry that was billed.

I know todo apps or project management apps often have time tracking, but I feel like this is not a smooth experience, and the data is scattered around. I track time with a separate app Toggl which has a list of clients and projects to track against. This makes all my time entries feel together and easy to see at a glance. I can start a new timer in a few seconds and bounce between clients and projects and end up with 15 different entries through the day and easy to see them all. I don't find that simplicity within project management apps.

My ideal project management app would find a way to have that simplicity in its time tracking.

And the app doesn't need to try and become my billing tool, I have professional tools for billing. I don't know why every tool today wants to be your invoicing app too, it's annoying!

@Pete-S said in Do you put TODOs on your calendar?:

The todo list should be organized after the type of activity/location you can do it in and not project or client.

Can you expound on this a little? This is pretty much exactly NOT how I do it, lol.
Each client has a folder in the project app, so each client has their own set of tasks.

The odd thing here is that each client has the same todos, for example perform some monthly task on their site. It's the same todo list, but applied to a bunch of different clients. They don't have precise due dates, but more of a general maintenance window, say between 20th and 25th monthly.

@Pete-S said in Do you put TODOs on your calendar?:

Todo's never goes in the notes. N e v e r .

This one is also interesting. My notes pretty much always are an extension of a todo. If the task is "run site X through the scanner", all the notes about that task are in my notes, not in the todo app. Notes about when it was performed, how long it took, what was turned up, what I did, what needs to be done or could be improved, etc.
When done, the todo is marked complete, but the notes become the history for time tracking, billing, and info I'll email to the client later or put on a report.

In fact, the notes are far more useful to me than an archived list of checked-off todos. I think the todo list is really just a personal way of reminding me of little things to pay attention to and start working on. The notes are where the bulk of my work gets recorded or becomes meaningful.

The calendar is a wild-card. I rarely have things like scheduled meetings, and even if I do, it's rarely the calendar that reminds, but rather a Slack message or an email or something.
If I have a scheduled event like a video conference meeting, and I set it up as a todo with a due date, this works as I can mark the todo high priority or whatever, and it shows up on today's task list.

I'd say the most important for me is the notes, to be fair. Everything revolves around my notes. What I've done, somewhat what I need to do, time tracking, billing, account access, other client meta data, sites, projects, lots of stuff.
Currently using OneNote in my O365 subscription.
It actually works well enough but I think the search indexing sucks. Also I tend to keep each client in their own note file, so indexing across all clients is impossible when the notes are scattered in many OneNote files.
I've been experimenting with both https://www.notion.so/ and https://coda.io/welcome but haven't made up my mind on those.

The least important is the calendar really. I like to use it for things like when a big bill is coming up, and to schedule literally physical meetings and appointments.
When I say I was putting todos on the calendar, what I mean is like, say a client wants to cancel a service or something, but that's 3-4 weeks away or more, 2 months out, etc. I do want to schedule myself a calendar event to being the process of removing them. A calendar felt like a good fit since I can see that event coming from far off, whereas a due date on a todo app usually means the todo item pops into existence that same day, making it harder to remember it's coming up.

The project app is middle importance. I use it both for current todos, but also to track proposals. Things I'm asking the client if they want to do, but have to wait for approval. There there are a lot of "cold" todos to track. It feels better putting these in the todo app than potentially buried in the notes app. I don't want proposal projects and todos to be in my current list of items though. I just want them recorded somewhere.

Anyway, I could go on forever about the incredible inefficiencies of trying to run a business on all these tools. I think half my day is updating tools and notes and billing and time tracking and management tools and comms, the other half is actually getting work done.

This is something that is annoying me lately.

I love the idea of a calendar telling me when things are coming up that I need to do, regarding payments or bills coming in or even tasks I need to perform for business.

The problem with a calendar is that a calendar is not a project management tool, nor a todo list. I keep running into these situations where I see an event that is now a few days old, and have already forgotten whether I did it or not, so I have to go log in some place and check. There is no way to mark a calendar entry "done" as if it were a task.

Of course, task management and todo apps can have due dates and thus often have calendaring functions, but those tend to be isolated to just the calendar within the app, and not connected to my general use calendar like from Google or Zoho.

Things get even more complicated if multiple people are able to respond to calendar events on a general work/task calendar, in regards to knowing whether the thing was done, and what the notes are.

All this creates a situation where we have multiple calendars mixed with todo app mixed with notes app, and people lose their place not knowing what needs done or if someone else did it.

I'm also annoying by the fact that todo apps make for poor note-taking apps. Typically a todo is simply marked complete and then disappears. Very little attention seems to be given to the fact that I might need to record notes about this task and refer to it some time in the future, make a time entry, and track whether it was billed. This means I have to duplicate my todos into some other note-taking app so I have a history of work done with billing and time information.

So we have task apps that make for poor calendars and note-taking apps. A note-taking app that makes a poor calendar and task manager. A calendar that makes a poor task and note app, etc. I have to duplicate the functionality of each into each other app, which takes too much time. And on top of that they often make for poor time and billing tracking.

To top it all off, some companies try to be everything, but just end up doing everything mediocre. A dedicated note app is best at notes. A dedicated calendar is best at that, and dedicated project management tools are best at that. And naturally I have a dedicated billing app which is not a note, todo, or calendar app.

I wish there was a better balance of these primary tools, and that they worked very well not only for an individual, but for a team.

In general, I want to avoid Google, just don't like them, even if other people think gapps are great.

For right now though, I think I'm going to stop putting things that are "todo" on my calendar, even though it seems a good fit for them, because calendars make poor todo apps.

And don't get me started on notification systems, priority levels, data management, customer communications. Ugh. A billion apps out there and nobody can get it right yet.

Happy to report my last day is next week!

I did set them up on a small retainer to help answer any email questions the new guy has. But I put lots of stipulations in the agreement. Cancel any time at will, only X type of stuff will be done, no expectations or promises about turnaround time or response time, etc etc. Just a small token for maintaining email contact essentially.
f they need me after that, they will pay contract rates.

You all are really great. I think I just have most notifications off so I do pop in sometimes at random.

Scott's Youtube vid was really helpful, if anything just to put into different words the ideas already swarming in my head that something just isn't right here.

Anyway, my hours have been cut more for the last few weeks, just training the new guy a couple times a week now.

I think I'll turn in a one week notice this week. One week means 2 days, 2 weeks notice would be 4 days, etc.

I can give them 2 or 4 more days.

They hired some IT service provider for like $600+ a month to do random stuff we don't even need, but mostly be an IT backup phone if ever needed by the new guy. The dollar bills in my eyes are kinda saying, screw paying them $600, just pay me $600 retainer and I'll answer emails from the new guy and maybe do a few more advanced things like web dev. But that is contract rates, they would only get about 20-30 minutes of my time a day, max. Is that worth a retainer? Just for a few months or something? I suppose they can contract me just like any other client who comes calling. So I'm trying to decide whether I completely cut ties, or let them keep paying me to aid the new inexperienced person.
I know even if I try to cut ties, I will not escape the occasional communication, I just know it.

Unfortunately, Scott's video did bring up another point about whether I'm quitting or they are firing. I've set myself for basically having to quit, rather than be let go, which probably doesn't work in my favor. Oh well. At this point it can't be framed as them letting me go.

I hope the next time I enter this thread, it will be to declare I am finally gone. Then I can wipe all my past threads away and start fresh with a new journey! lol

This is one of those totally random, intermittent problems.

We have one Win10 desktop with data in a shared folder.
Then another Win10 desktop with a mapped drive to that shared folder. They are both using same workgroup, it's not an AD setup.

Both systems use the same program, but slave computer just has to connect over the mapped drive.

So once or twice a month, for no apparent reason, the slave computer mapped drive just quits. It has a red x over the icon, can't connect to the drive when double-clicking it, and the master computer is on and fine.

Only way to get it back to life is restart the slave computer, then Windows reconnects the mapped drive just fine.

So what might cause Windows to break the mapped drive and be unable to reconnect until a restart?
And second, is there some more robust way to create the mapped drive? I could go to static IPs on the workstation and use an IP instead of computer name or something to connect it? It's so annoying!

@DustinB3403 said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:

@guyinpv said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:

And all I wanted to do was open up a conversation so they could start looking for a replacement. I wasn't expecting a circus.

What were you realistically expecting?

To begin a detailed, thought-out, plan of finding a competent replacement. Start looking at quality job boards, map out job requirements, etc. Be reasonable, efficient, mindful.

Instead they panicked that I was going to walk out and leave in a couple days. They rushed to find anybody with basic knowledge of a computer from the local staffing agency and threw them onto my lap with little consideration. Now I'm trying to train a person with no experience and fairly rudimentary knowledge. Plus they dumped all these demands for an encyclopedia worth of how-tos, procedures, vendor notes, troubleshooting guides, etc.

It's funny but also sad. One day the new person was there and I was at home, sick or something. A shared network connection in Windows got disconnected which made an app pop up an error. New person tried to troubleshoot the app, perhaps not knowing the shared network drive existed. So boss asks if I've already written a specific procedure for this specific app when having this specific error caused by this specific problem.

I'm just like, no, I can't write a procedure detailing every conceivable error that can happen on every one of 50+ vendors we deal with, lol.

The IT person is supposed to know how to troubleshoot issues, not just read from a procedure book encyclopedia written by the previous IT person!

I'm still grandfathered in to the free service with 25 users and IMAP.

Now also using their ticketing system, some CRM, and Docs. Still all free.

However, if I want to start jumping into all their one-by-one pro plans for each little service, it will start to add up pretty fast.

Now they have like, I don't know, 50 various business services, each with their own pricing, it's a bit out of hand to me.

Their docs and spreadsheets have some very interesting features I'm getting in to.

Ya, it's been helpful to allow me to mentally disconnect from here.