Automattic – JJCD

Creating a blog on WordPress.com

Export – Signup – Import – Setup

Here’s a fun scenario, let’s say we have a blog on a self-hosted site but we want to transfer its contents to WordPress.com. How would we do that?

Export

The first step would be to export the content from our current site. Most content managers have an export tool, WordPress.org sites have many.

In your WordPress dashboard, look on the sidebar and find the Tools tab, then select Export.

On the following page you will be asked which content types you would like to export, I chose All Content, though you could export them one at a time.

When you’re ready, click Download Export File and save it to a location of your choosing.

Signup

Now, boot up WordPress.com and create a username or login. Once you’re successfully logged into your account we will go ahead and create a new site.

Follow the four step wizard. For step one I chose to use a business site, there really isn’t too much of a difference, so choose something close to what your end goal is.

Then, select a great name. This will be your free WordPress.com subdomain, i.e: mycoolsite.wordpress.com. You will have the option to add a custom domain at a later point.

On step three you will be asked to choose from three WordPress.com themes, feel free to skip this part, you can always add your theme once you’re set up and have access to the full theme showcase.

Step four will show you the different plans offered for WordPress.com. If you are just starting out, you may wish to begin with a free plan and upgrade later. The upgrades offer powerful features such as larger storage, video hosting, ad placement, and free custom domains. For this exercise, I will choose a Premium Upgrade.

You can pay with credit, debit, or Paypal. If you have a coupon code you can enter it by clicking the ‘Have a coupon code?’ option on the left. Complete the checkout process then continue on to the next page.

The next page offers a few suggestions on what to do next depending on the upgrade you choose. With the Premium Upgrade, I can choose from hundreds of premium themes, add video and audio to my posts, use the WordAds platform to monetize my site or use the $100 credit towards a Google Ads campaign.

Let’s import our content from the old site and then set up a custom domain.

Import

If you click on Back to my site or the My Sites tab in the upper left-hand corner, you should be brought to your Site Admin:

Note! You might want to set your site to Private while you set it up. You can do this by going to Settings -> General and scroll down to Privacy.

While we are on this page, scroll down a bit further to find the Import and Export settings. Click on import:

On the import page, click Start Import, then drag the .XML file you exported or locate it through the explorer by clicking on the upload area.

Importing can take a few minutes depending on how big of a file you are uploading. We can now navigate safely away from this page and work on something else while we wait. Let’s go ahead and create our custom domain. Click on the Domains tab in the left-hand menu.

Setup

From this page, you can check your Plan details, see the different Plans, set up your email preferences and manage your domains. Since I purchased an upgraded plan I received a credit for a free domain, I can use this credit by clicking Claim Free Domain.

This button will take you to the same page that Add Domain would.

Enter in any domain you like and see if it is available, if you do not have a free credit then the associated price for the domain will be displayed. If you already own a domain from a different registrar like Namecheap or GoDaddy, then you can map this domain to your WordPress.com site by clicking Already own a domain?

You may wish to add a custom email to your WordPress.com site. By default, your WordPress.com site will redirect any contact form submissions to the email associated with your account. But if you would like a fancy [email protected] or something similar, you will need to set up a third party email host. G Suite is a great option and is offered for $5/month/user, if you sign up on this screen you will get two months free. Otherwise, click no thanks and we can take a look at a free option.

On the last page, you will be offered a privacy feature for $8.00/year. If you are using your free domain credit then this option will also be included for free. I highly recommend this feature. When you register a domain your domain information is registered with ICANN. This is a standard for domain registration. The drawback is that your information becomes public and spammers will crawl ICANN for this information and then begin calling, emailing, and attempt to contact you to sell you products. If you select the privacy option you can hide this information.

Once you are finished you should land on this confirmation page. Domains will typically take 48-72 hours to fully propagate, otherwise known as finish being set up. Your domain may become active immediately but sometimes it may take a bit of time. Just keep an eye out and soon enough it should begin working as expected.

If you go back to the Domains page you should see a green Primary Domain tag next to your new custom domain, this means that we selected this domain as our domain for this blog.

If that is not the case, you can manually set your primary domain by clicking on the desired domain, then click Make Primary.

Subdomain

Now that our custom domain is setup, let’s go ahead and add a subdomain and point it towards a tumblr blog page. A subdomain allows you to create a specific section of your site that is a bit different than the regular site content i.e. tumblr.wp08012017.com. I would use wp08012017.com to talk about one topic while the tumblr portion would direct you to my tumblr page which will be separate from my WordPress blog. You often see subdomains used with e-commerce shops that are hosted on a service outside of WordPress.com such as Squarespace.

First, click on your custom domain and then scroll down to Name Servers and DNS. On the next page, select DNS Records.

From here, change the type to CNAME, then enter a subdomain such as tumblr. Then, for the alias of portion type in domains.tumblr.com. Click Add New DNS Record.

Now head on over to your Tumblr account and log in. If you do not have one, create one. Go to your desired Tumblr blog and adjust the settings on its front page like so:

Click the pencil icon next to your username and select Use a custom domain. Add your subdomain from the DNS record we just created on WordPress.com. Click Test domain and you should see a green check mark icon appear next to the subdomain. Click Save.

Now when I type in tumblr.wp08012917.com I should be brought to the public facing side of my Tumblr blog. Cool!

Email

While we are in the domain records, let’s add on a free email service called Zoho.

Go to Zoho.com. Create a profile and work through the setup wizard and choose the free plan. You will eventually reach a page that looks like:

Click on Setup yourdomain.com in Zoho. On the next page you will see a code under Name/Host/Alias/CNAME starting with zb, copy this code and go to your WordPress.com Domains tab. Click on your custom domain, then go to Nameservers and DNS records. At the bottom click on Zoho mail:

Add your zb code where it says Zoho Mail CNAME zb code: then click Set up Zoho Mail.

Heads up! If you already have a Zoho account, log in and then go to home.zoho.com/home. Scroll down to Email & Collaboration then click Mail. Click on “Add your existing domain for Email Hosting…” and Proceed.
Then, click on Add Domain:

On the next page, select WordPress from the list, then copy the zb code from here.

Back to WordPress.com, under DNS Records -> Zoho Mail we can add the zb code and click Set up Zoho Mail. You should see a green “Hooray” success notification.

The next step is to click CNAME Verification on Zoho to verify the CNAME record we just added to our WordPress blog.

This process should have automatically created your MX (Mail eXchange) records, go to DNS Records to double check. Your MX Records should look like this:

If not, go ahead and add an MX record for the following:

mx.zoho.com 10

mx2.zoho.com 20

At this point your custom email should work, go ahead and send an email from Zoho and also send an email to your new address and check your inbox on Zoho.

Theme

Suppose the XML file we are importing to WordPress.com is for a client and they do not know what their theme is. One easy way to find this information, also supposing we could not access their admin section, is to right click on their website and go to Inspect (if you’re in Chrome). From the Chrome Inspector, we can press Ctrl/Cmd F and search for theme. This should usually allow you to see their theme file structure and glean what the theme name is:

Now we can search for the Argent theme on WordPress.com and activate it.

When you activate a theme you will have to change a few settings in order to recreate the look and feel of the old site. Sometimes you will run into issues where images did not correctly transfer via the XML file. Other times you will notice that some custom CSS was added to make the header look a certain way. Occasionally, the theme may activate a few widgets as placeholders, these may need to be removed or changed.

A change from a WordPress.org site to WordPress.com is usually easier than transferring the data from a different CMS software. If the content is from another software, you may need to redesign the site which would require a bit more work. Look through the theme repo and try to find a theme that closely mirrors your old site’s features and style, then try to adjust as you go.

Wrap Up

This was a long post, but we managed to cover a decent amount of the WordPress.com environment. Let’s recap:

Added a new blog
Upgraded our account to Premium
Set the blog visibility to Private
Added a subdomain and pointed it to our Tumblr page
Added a Custom Domain
Created a custom email with ZoHo
And discovered/setup the Argent theme

Not bad! Feel free to post any questions in the comments.

WordPress Pt. 3

Configuration and Settings

Sharing

Now that you have great content you will probably want to share it. Sure, you could, and should, manually post your content across all of your social media platforms. But why not allow your viewers to share the content? WordPress.com has sharing buttons baked right into your website. Go to Sharing -> Connections in your Site Admin and begin connecting your social media accounts. WordPress supports many popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin, Tumblr, and Path. You can also connect your Google Account in order to load your Google Photos into your WordPress Media Library.

Once you have your accounts connected, click on Sharing Buttons at the top of the page.

From here you can modify your sharing buttons. By clicking Edit Sharing Buttons you can add or remove which social networks appear, you can also change the order they appear in.

The Button Style is how the buttons will appear such as an Icon with its associated text, official buttons, or just the icon or text only.

In the Options section you can decide which pages your sharing buttons appear on. You can also include your Twitter tag from here. Make sure to save your changes!

People

The People section is divided into three tabs, Team, Followers, and Email Followers.

In the Team section, you can view a list of all of the people who have access to your site in some compacity. You can also give and revoke permissions from this screen.

The Followers section lists all of the people who follow your site, these individuals receive notifications when you post content. You can remove these Followers and they will stop receiving notifications until they choose to follow your site again.

Plugins

The Plugins section is available to view for all users, but only Business plans can take advantage of this powerful new feature. On the Plugins page, you can view and edit your Active and Inactive plugins as well as view available updates. You can also edit all of your plugins at once by clicking Edit All.

If you click on Add you can browse the WordPress plugin repository for new plugins. There are three quick pick sections called Featured, Popular, and New.

You can also use the search field look up plugins you already know about. The Calypso UI on WordPress.com has a few draw backs at this particular time. The UI works fantastically and provides a lightning fast user experience, but a lot of plugins are set up to integrate into the old WP-Admin dashboard. For most plugins, you will need to visit your WP-Admin to make adjustments to the settings.

Domains

The Domain section also hosts the settings for your Upgrade Plan. Under My Plan you can view the details and benefits of your current plan with links to certain settings. The Plans section is a great place to discover the differences between the upgrades and make any necessary changes.

The Domains tab allows you to Add Domains and manage settings for your domains such as whether your domain is mapped from a different registrar or which domain records you choose to use.

You can also manage your domain’s nameserver and DNS from this tab as well as begin the process to transfer your domain to another registrar.

When you add a custom domain you gain access to the G Suite email extension for $5.00 per user/month. If you add G Suite you can have a custom email address with your domain address such as [email protected], gain 30gb of storage space on Google Drive, and access to all of the Google Apps.

Settings

General

The General section has three sub sections:

Site Profile – From this section, you can add an icon for your site, change the Site Title and Tagline.

Privacy – By default, your site is set to Public and is visible to everyone and search engines. If you wish for your site to not be indexed by search engines you can set it to Hidden. Note: Hidden sites are still visible to the public, they are just not indexed by search engines.

Site Tools – From here you can run a variety of importers, most specifically importing an XML file from another WordPress installation. You can also export different content from your site.

Writing

In the Writing section, you can manage many different content types associated with publishing on WordPress.com.

In a free installation, you can add and remove Categories and Tags, set your Default Post Format and Date and Time Format and choose how many posts show per page.

You can also activate the Testimonial and Portfolio Projects content types from this page and set how many instances of each appear on their respective pages.

When you upgrade to paid plans you will gain access to a number of other tools such as Infinite Scroll, Photon, and Video Hosting options.

Discussion

Default Article Settings – You can notify other blogs that you link to as well as get notified when another site links to your blog. You can also enable comments on your blog posts.

Comments – Commenting is a great feature for your blog and allows your users to leave feedback and discuss your articles. You can require the comment author to leave their name and email and be logged in to WordPress. You can also close comments on posts after x amount of days, control how deeply nested comments can go, decided how many comments appear on the page and the order the comments appear in.

E-mail me whenever – Control when WordPress notifies you of comments posts, comments held for moderation, sharing activity on my posts.

Before a comment appears – You can choose whether comments must be approved before they are posted and also whether the author of the comment has had approved comments in the past, this provides an added layer of spam security.

Comment Moderation & Blacklist – You can also adjust your conditions for spam filtering. A lot of links in a comment is characteristic of a spam comment and can be screened before posting. Additionally, you can screen for certain words, URLs, e-mails, or IPs to moderate or blacklist.

Traffic

In the Traffic section, you can enable the Related Posts module as showcased in my Jetpack review. Another feature is the Accelerated Mobile pages (AMP) module. AMP serves a slimmed down version of your site for mobile devices. If you dislike the slimmed down look you can disable AMP from this section.

If you upgrade to a Business Plan you can access the SEO Tools module and also add Google Analytics to your site for more in-depth SEO analysis.

If you wish to view your sites XMP sitemap you can do so from this section. An XML sitemap is automatically generated for your WordPress.com blog.

If you also wish to verify your site with Google, Bing, Pinterest, and Yandex, you can add in their verification code at the bottom of this page.

Security

If you upgrade to the Business Plan you will gain access to the Security section. As noted in my Jetpack Security Review, the Jetpack Monitor, Brute Force Protection, Spam Filtering, and WordPress.com Sign In modules are essential website security upgrades. Jetpack Monitor will notify you if your website is inaccessible and for how long your site was down. Brute Force Protection prevents spammers from guessing your login, a common vector for site hacking. Spam Filtering is managed by Automattic’s Akismet service and is a great way to filter out comment and contact form spam. And WordPress.com Sign In allows you to set up two-factor authentication as a second line of defense against brute force hacking.

Wrap Up

WordPress is a powerful blogging software that has an extensive list of features that any website owner could benefit from. Depending on your budget, there is a WordPress plan for you.

Keep Reading

WordPress Part 2

Jetpack

WordPress – Pt 2

In part one we looked at how to set up a blog on WordPress.com and choose a theme, now we need to add content.

Publish Content

Now that your site is set up, looking stylish, and exudes a sense of you, it is time to add some content. Content is king. Creating great content is the most trusted way to gain traffic, so think carefully. There are a variety of different content types on WordPress.com, let’s go over a few of them.

Posts

You may see the term ‘post-type,’ try to avoid confusing this with a ‘post.’ In programming, a POST is a method of outputting data to the screen. So a ‘post-type’ is a type of data, such as a page, image or video. Confusingly, the advent of ‘posting’ stuff on the internet has created what we now commonly refer to as a ‘blog post’ or simply, a ‘post.’

Keeping that in mind, a post is typically dated, shows the author, category, any associated tags, and usually appears in reverse chronological order moving down your blog as you post new articles. Posts are browsable in the Reader where your potential fans can find them under the tags you assign to them.

Pages

Pages are a post-type that are typically reserved for more static, timeless content such as an About or Contact me page. If you plan to build out a business website you would set your homepage as a static page, instead of the default posts page which would be used as the standard blog layout.

The Editor

When you are ready to begin writing a post you can access the Editor in two ways, by going to My Sites -> Posts or My Sites -> Pages and adding a new post or page. In the editor, you can format your content in a variety of ways. Along the top of the editor are your typical editing tools such as bold, italic, alignment etc.

If you wish to insert an image you can do so by clicking the + button and selecting Add Media, alternatively, you can drag and drop an image from your desktop to the editor.

If you click Add Media you will be brought to the Media Library, once the file uploads you can click it and add the image to the page by selecting Insert. You can also edit the image details by clicking Edit. Once the image is in your post you can adjust its alignment and size.

When you’re ready to publish a post you can choose to add categories and tags to improve your content’s organization, tags will also help your posts show up in the Reader.

Pages do not use tags and categories, therefore the page editor will not have tabs for these options. Instead, you will see a section titled Page Attributes. This section lets you create parent and child pages or change the order of pages.

Along the right side of the editor in the dropdown tabs are a number of page features.

Media Library

The Media Library hosts all of your pictures, videos, documents, and audio. When you click add an upload box will appear, choose any type of media from .mp3 to .pdf and click open. Additionally, you can drag and drop media right onto the screen.

If you select a media item and click Edit you can add a title, caption, alt text, description, and copy the URL of the media item in case you want to use it elsewhere. Below that you should see file data for the selected item.

You also have the option to edit the image itself such as rotating, changing the aspect ratio (cropping), or flipping the image.

When you are in a post or page editor you can access the Media Library by clicking the plus icon then selecting media. From here you can add one, or many, items. If you select multiple images you will have a blue ‘Continue’ button instead of ‘Insert,’ selecting Continue will take you to the image gallery options.

From here you can change the layout, order and what each image will link to when clicked. This is a great way to add some style to your blog with perhaps a slideshow, carousel or tile mosaic.

Menus

Once you begin publishing pages, you may wish to create a menu to help your users navigate your site. Head to My Sites -> Customize then click the Menu section. Here you can view your theme’s menu locations, add menu items that link to a page on your site, a link to other sites, a category or tag, or one of your posts. To reorder the menu, you can simply click and drag the rows around. If you tug the row slightly to the right you can nest items within each other.

A few themes do not support menus, though this is rare. You can use the Custom Menu widget in your theme’s sidebar to display a menu. I will cover this in the next section.

For more advanced menu options you can navigate to the WP-Admin section of your site then Menus in the sidebar.

Adding Widgets

Widgets are built-in blocks of code that provide expansive features for your website. WordPress.com includes many commonly used features such as Instagram feeds, post archives, countdown clocks, audio, calendars and much more.

To begin adding widgets to your site you need to go to the theme customizer under Themes -> Customize. Scroll down the widgets tab and choose a widget area. Not all themes are created equally, some have many areas designated for widgets, others do not.

Choose the desired widget area, then click Add Widget.

Widgets can also be customized further with the Advanced CSS module found in the Premium and Business plans. You can also conditionally adjust their visibility by clicking the Visibility button at the bottom of the widget. This lets you conditionally show or hide the widget depending on certain criteria such as ‘Is this the homepage?’

Here are all the Widgets:

Akismet Widget – Display the number of spam comments Akismet has caught. (not quite sure why you would want this.)

Archives – A monthly archive of your site’s Posts.

Audio – Displays an audio player.

Authors – Display blogs authors with avatars and recent posts.

Blogs I Follow – Display linked images for the blogs you follow.

Blog Stats – Show a hit counter for your blog.

Calendar – A calendar of your site’s Posts.

Categories – A list or dropdown of categories.

Category Cloud – Your most used categories in cloud format.

Contact Info & Map – Display a map with your location, hours, and contact information.

Custom Menu – Add a custom menu to your sidebar.

Display WordPress Posts – Displays a list of recent posts from another WordPress.com or Jetpack-enabled blog.

EU Cookie Law Banner – Display a banner for compliance with the EU Cookie Law.

Facebook Page Plugin – Use the Facebook Page Plugin to connect visitors to your Facebook Page.

Flickr – Display your recent Flickr photos.

Follow Blog – Add an email signup form to allow people to follow your blog.

Follow Button – Add a WordPress.com follow button to allow people to follow your blog easier.

Gallery – Display a photo gallery or slideshow.

Goodreads – Display your books from Goodreads.

Google Translate – Automatic translation of your site content.

Gravatar – Insert a Gravatar image.

Gravatar Profile – Display a mini version of your Gravatar Profile.

Image – Displays an image.

Instagram – Display your latest Instagram photos.

Internet Defense League – Show our support for the Internet Defense League.

Links – Your blogroll.

MailChimp Subscriber Popup – Allows displaying a popup subscription form to visitors.

Milestone – Display a countdown to a certain date.

My Community – A sampling of users from your blog.

Pages – A list of your site’s Pages.

Posts I Like – A list of the posts I most recently liked.

Recent Comments – Displays your site’s most recent comments.

Recent Posts – Your site’s most recent Posts.

RSS – Entries from any RSS or Atom feed.

RSS Links – Links to your blog’s RSS feeds.

Search – A search form for your site.

Social Icons – Add social-media icons to your site.

Tag Cloud – Your most-used tags in cloud format.

Text – Arbitrary txt or html (great for adding html buttons or shortcodes).

Tlk.io Webchat – Add a tlk.io webchat. (Actually pretty awesome)

Top Posts & Pages – Shows your most viewed posts and pages.

Twitter Timeline – Display an official twitter embedded Timeline widget.

Upcoming Events – Display upcoming events from an iCalendar feed.

Video – Displays a video from YouTube, Vimeo, or another provider.

Get Connected – Become Part of the Community

Now that you have created some great content, with flashy widgets and imagery, you need to begin showing it off to the WordPress community. One important feature of WordPress are tags. As we saw during our Reader section, people can discover new topics by typing in tags that they want to read about such as Photography or Medicine. Adding tags to your content helps it show in other user’s Readers, which in turn leads to more traffic to your blog.

Like and Comment on other blogs

While you browse the Reader, make sure to like and comment on other blogs. By liking and commenting on a blog you open a dialogue which may gain you followers. You can like another post right from the Reader by clicking the ‘start’ icon, or comment icon. You can also visit the blog by clicking visit.

Connect your other social media accounts

You can use your site as a hub for posting to all your social media with just one click. By utilizing the Publicize tool you can write a post, schedule it, and post to all your connected social media accounts at once. Go to your dashboard and click Sharing. Under the Connections tab you can connect anything from Facebook to Tumblr.

Once connected, you can add a short custom message from the post editor that will be previewed when your post is posted on each social media site.

From this Sharing page you can also add Sharing Buttons to your posts which allows your users to share your content to popular social media sites, this is a great way to gain followers.

Utilize your site statistics

The Stats page can give you a look into your visitor’s behavioral patterns, use this data to tailor your content and increase your traffic.

Go to your Insights screen and look around. Try and cross compare your typically posting schedule with the average traffic spikes, can you modify your schedule to garner more traffic during your blogs busy periods?

You can also look at your blogs All Time Views and find the days where you had the most traffic, try and figure out what content caused this spike in traffic. Did your blog get shared to a notable website? Was the content exceptionally well written and topical? These insights can help you cater to trending topics in your niche.

You can also see what countries your visitors are viewing your content from, you can even narrow the content down to which pages or posts are being viewed most often.

An important feature is the Referrers section. Referrers are who is directing traffic to your site. Direct referrals are when traffic directly types in your address, otherwise sites who link to your site should be listed with the amount of traffic they help generate. Linking to sites who generate traffic for you is a great way to show appreciation.

If you really want to get into the nitty gritty of your site stats, you may wish to consider adding the Google Analytics feature to your site by upgrading to the Business plan.

Category & Tag Pages

Two lesser known features of WordPress are category and tag pages. When you tag posts or add them to categories you can also create pages that aggregate these posts by their specific category or tag. All you have to do to display these pages is go to the Customizer -> Menu section and add a new menu item.

Instead of adding a page or post, add a category or tag menu item. Once you have saved these changes, look for the category or tag in the menu. The category or tag page should list your posts like a standard blog, but filtered by the specific tag or category.

Portfolios & Testimonial Modules

You can activate the Portfolio and Testimonial modules from your Site Admin by going to Settings -> Writing and then scroll down to Content Types.

Once activated you will see two new options in your sidebar.

Portfolios

To add a portfolio project, click Add. You will be brought to the post editor but as you will notice the sidebar page attributes are a bit different. A portfolio project is part of the portfolio in the same way that a painting is just one piece of an artist’s body of work. The portfolio project can be described, have images, and is arranged by Project Type and Project Tags, these are similar to categories and tags of posts.

For example, if you are a graphic designer you would probably have a lot of website layouts, perhaps some ‘brand’ work, maybe some logos, but as is the case in each of these examples, they all fit into nice groups. These would be your project types. You could then further group them with tags like ‘Aramark Corporation,’ because your Aramark logos and website designs may be in different project types, but with this tag you could list them together.

Once you have created your portfolio project you can then view them in a number of different ways:

Portfolio Archive – http://yourgroovysite.wordpress.com/portfolio/
Single Project Page – http://yourgroovysite.wordpress.com/portfolio/project-slug/
Project Type Archive – http://yourgroovysite.wordpress.com/project-type/project-type-slug/
Project Tag Archive – http://yourgroovysite.wordpress.com/project-tag/project-tag-slug/

Source: https://en.support.wordpress.com/portfolios/

For instance, here is my portfolio set up in the four different ways seen above, click each link to view:

Portfolio Archive – http://onecooltestsite.com/portfolio/
Single Project Page – http://onecooltestsite.com/portfolio/woocommerce-review/
Project Type Archive – http://onecooltestsite.com/project-type/reviews/
Project Tag Archive – http://onecooltestsite.com/project-tag/woocommerce/

Since the /portfolio URL is reserved for your portfolio page, please do not create any pages called ‘portfolio.’ If you wish to display your portfolio on any other page or post, you can use the Portfolio Shortcode [portfolio]:

Attributes

The portfolio shortcode accepts a variety of attributes to sort your projects:

display_types: display Project Types – displayed by default. (true/false)
display_tags: display Project Tag – displayed by default. (true/false)
display_content: display project content – displayed by default. (true/false)
display_author: display project author name – hidden by default. (true/false)
include_type: display specific Project Types. Defaults to all. (comma-separated list of Project Type slugs)
include_tag: display specific Project Tags. Defaults to all. (comma-separated list of Project Tag slugs)
columns: number of columns in shortcode. Defaults to 2. (number, 1-6)
showposts: number of projects to display. Defaults to all. (number)
order: display projects in ascending or descending order. Defaults to ASC for sorting in ascending order, but you can reverse the order by using DESC to display projects in descending order instead. (ASC/DESC)
orderby: sort projects by different criteria, including author name, project title, and even rand to display in a random order. Defaults to sorting by date. (author, date, title, rand)

Here is another example of the Portfolio Shortcode but with a bit of pizazz:

[portfolio display_types=true display_tags=false include_type=reviews,featured columns=3 showposts=9 orderby=rand]

Here I am displaying a three column grid with a max of 9 projects. This grid will only display my projects by Project Type and only the types I list, in this instance, I am displaying reviews and featured project types. I could easily change this to display by project tags if I desired. Lastly, I set my portfolio to randomize the order of the projects.

Testimonials

Testimonials work in a very similar way to Portfolios. Click on the Testimonials -> Add New and fill out the editor with the name of whoever is giving a great review, their kudos, and an image of them if that is appropriate for your site design. There are no tags or categories for testimonials, but you can adjust the order they appear in from the page attributes tab.

And just like the Portfolio shortcode, there is also a testimonial shortcode: [testimonials]

This shortcode is also customizable attributes:

Attributes

display_content: display testimonial content. (full/true/false)
image: display the featured image. (true/false) Defaults to true.
columns: number of columns in shortcode. Defaults to 1. (number, 1-6)
showposts: number of testimonials to display. Defaults to all. (number)
order: display testimonials in ascending or descending chronological order. Defaults to ASC for sorting in ascending order, but you can reverse the order by using DESC to display testimonials in descending order instead. (ASC/DESC)
orderby: sort testimonials by different criteria, including author name, testimonial title, and even rand to display in a random order. Defaults to sorting by date. (author, date, title, rand)

Source: https://en.support.wordpress.com/testimonials-shortcode/

Here is an example of how to modify the testimonial shortcode:

[testimonials columns=1 showposts=10 image=false orderby=rand]

In this example your testimonials will be listed in one column, show 10 posts, no image, and in a random order.

Up Next

WordPress has a lot of great content types that can help your website look more professional and dynamic. Up next I will discuss the configuration settings for WordPress.com.

Keep Reading

WordPress Part 1

WordPress Part 3

WordPress.com – Pt. 1

Get Started – Register – Profile – Name Creation

Register

Go to WordPress.com and create a username and password

Create a web address

WordPress comes with a free web address for every blog. All free blogs follow the same naming scheme ‘yourcoolsite.wordpress.com.’ Pro tip, yourcoolsite is a subdomain of WordPress.com, the entire WordPress.com ecosystem is really just one big multi-site installation of the WordPress software, cool right?

Obviously, this isn’t the preferred naming scheme for your actually cool website! The next step is to purchase a domain name, or use one your already own, and map it to your site.

Choose a Plan

WordPress has three paid plans that offer subsequently more amazing features than the last. Every blog begins as a Free plan, but you can easily upgrade to Personal, Premium, or Business. Let’s look at the differences. Each plan has the features of the plan that comes before it.

Free
WordPress.com subdomain
Jetpack Essential Features
Community Support
Hundreds of free themes
Basic Design Customization
3GB Storage

Personal
Custom Domain Name
Email & Live Chat Support
6GB Storage
Remove WordPress.com Ads

Premium
Unlimited Premium Themes
Advanced Design Customization
13GB Storage
Monetize your site
VideoPress support

Business
Unlimited Storage
Attend live courses
SEO Tools
Install Plugins
Upload themes
Google Analytics Integration
Remove WordPress.com Branding

As you move up in tiers you progressively unlock more powerful features such as more storage, video hosting and integration, and most notably, 3^rd-party plugin and theme support. Adding third party support is an exciting, new feature which final solves a constantly asked question, “I just bought this theme or plugin, how do I use it on WordPress.com.”

Please note, when you downgrade from one plan to another you will effectively lose access to the upper tier benefits, but you will not lose data. For example, if I have 13GB of storage with the Premium plan, then downgrade to the Free plan, I will not lose any of my media library, though, I will no longer be able to add new media until I clear up enough space.

Get a Profile

Every WordPress site is apart of the WordPress community, a sort of social network of user sites and blogs. The common thread that binds them all is Gravatar, an icon based service that presents you throughout the WordPress community. You can customize your Gravatar by clicking on the round icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and then Profile. Enter your details and upload an image, now you’re good to go!

Set A Title For Your Site

By default, your username will be used as your site’s title. You can change your title to something more unique by going to My Sites -> Customize -> Site Identity to name your site and give it a descriptive tagline.

Reader and My Sites Menus

Check out the Reader

The Reader is the WordPress community hub, a simplistic blog roll of all your favorite authors throughout the WordPress ecosystem. The Reader is tailored to things you love so that every time you log in you can find something that interests you.

The three main elements of the Reader are the Discover, Followed Sites, and Post features. On the Discover tab, you will see a blog roll of what’s hot on WordPress.com, feel free to read, share, comment and follow any posts that interest you.

Fittingly titled, the Followed Sites tab lists all of the most recent posts from your favorite blogs. You can also manage what blogs appear by clicking the Manage button next to the Followed Sites tab.

And since WordPress is all about self-expression, the Pencil and Paper Write icon in the top admin bar will show you a dropdown of all of your blogs, by selecting a blog you will be brought immediately to a new post editor so when brilliance strikes you will be ready to rock.

A great way to attract readers is to interact with other blog posts, leave comments, share and promote! If you are interested in finding new material, then look to the tags tab in the Reader menu. By adding a keyword you will instantly be recommended popular posts on that topic.

My Sites Menu

The My Sites menu allows you to switch between your sites on WordPress.com and all Jetpack enabled WordPress installations. Additionally, the My Sites menu serves as the main navigation around your admin interface.

If you click Switch Site you can easily navigate between all of your WordPress.com and Jetpack enabled WordPress.org site options.

Dashboard

The dashboard is all of the content within the My Site’s tab for any given site, consider this Mission Control. From here you can Publish posts, pages, and access your media library. You can also Personalize your site from the Theme Showcase, or Customize your site from the theme customizer. Under the Configure section, you can manage your Sharing options, add, edit, or remove users from the People tab, manage Plugins if you have a Business Upgrade, purchase and manage Domains, adjust site wide settings, and access the old WP-Admin interface.

Themes

Pick a theme

A theme is how your website looks and is structured and handles a great deal of the coding for you. WordPress.com offers hundreds of free and paid themes that look great across all devices, developed by professionals. Go to My Sites -> Themes to browse through the theme repo.

Use the search area to look up a specific feature or theme name, or filter your results by free, premium or all.

If you have upgraded to a Business Plan you can upload most third party themes formerly only found on WordPress.org self-hosted sites. This new feature has really expanded the reach of WordPress.com power-users! If you do upload a theme you would start by clicking the Upload Theme button in the upper right-hand corner of this screen and following the prompts, once activated your theme would be found at the top of the Themes page under Uploaded themes.

Beneath your Uploaded themes are the WordPress.com free and paid themes.

Click the three dots on the right-hand side of the theme thumbnail then click Live Demo to see a demo of the theme. Click Try & Customize to see how your content looks in the theme. This will load all of your post and page content into the theme and let you play around in the customizer before you decide to activate the theme.

Choosing a theme can be a bit daunting at first, but remember, your theme is meant to reflect you. Some themes may require a good amount of set up, this may not be what you need. Experiment with a couple different themes and try to find one that fits, you can always change your theme at another time. The vast majority of themes found on WordPress.com are responsive, meaning they will scale with the size of the device viewport. WordPress.com makes it easy to focus on your content instead of dealing with the overhead of creating a beautiful and accessible website.

Customizer – Set Up Your Theme

The Customizer allows you to change the layout, settings and display options of your site’s theme.

Site Identity

This section contains options to change your Site Title, Tagline, upload a Logo, add a Site Icon, and change the Footer Credit (depending on your upgrade).

Upload a custom header:

Headers, Jumbotrons, intro sliders, the introductory information of your blog goes by many names, but they all serve one purpose, to engage your reader. Most WordPress themes come with a custom header area that can be customized.

Head over to your customizer by clicking on My Sites -> Themes/Customize, then click on Header Image. Most themes will specify a specific size for the header image, so feel free to use Photoshop or a free online editor such as Pixlr to make the necessary cropping. Once you’re happy with the look, click Save & Publish.

Custom fonts and colors

If you upgrade your account to Personal, Premium, or a Business plan you will gain access to the custom font, colors, and CSS modules. Once you upgrade, go to your Customizer to begin experimenting with the new font, colors, and CSS tabs.

This upgrade will give you access to typefaces like Merriweather, Ubuntu and over 30 free Google Fonts. You can also adjust the text size for the Headings and Base fonts. Be sure to choose a more readable font for your base font and save the more whimsical fonts for headers.

You can also adjust the color palette of your theme. If you need a starting point, try using the suggested color palettes. You could also use a color palette generator like http://paletton.com/ and then submit your own colors.

Add unique content with widgets

Widgets are packaged features that can be added to predefined ‘widget areas’ which are decided by your theme. Most themes will include a sidebar, header and footer widget area. If you head over to the Widgets section in the Customizer you can see what widget areas are available. I will cover widgets a bit more in depth in Pt. 2.

Adjust the custom fonts and colors of your site

Every theme handles these options differently, but they will all host these features in the Customizer. As you look through different sections such as header, footer, and background you will see color pickers or custom font options, customize these options and then click Save & Publish.

Set up a Homepage (Static Front Page)

Setting up a standard web page with a static homepage is easy. If you combine your homepage with a few static pages and a custom menu, you will have a fully formed website.

Create the homepage

To start, go to My Sites -> Pages -> Add and call it Home. Add some placeholder text then save. Now add another page and title it something like ‘News’ or ‘Blog,’ something that will indicate a blog.

Lastly, go to My Sites -> Customize -> Static Front Page, then under Front page displays, choose Static page and select your Home page as the Front Page.

Next, add the blog page you created as the Posts page. Save everything by clicking Save & Publish. When you visit your web address you will see your Home page instead of your Posts page.

Now that you have a homepage, try adding some striking images, perhaps an image gallery, or even an image slider. You will also want to create a custom menu and add that from the customizer as your primary menu so visitors can reach your other pages. We will discuss Menus in the next section.

Wrap Up

Now that we have a static website with a dedicated blog page and a beautiful theme to structure our content, we now need to start writing and adding engaging content to build traffic.

Keep Reading

WordPress Pt 2

WooCommerce Review – Pt. 5

Settings

If you ran the quick setup wizard, a lot of these settings should already be set. Let’s take a look at the other features included in WooCommerce.

General

The General section control settings such as your location, the locations you sell and ship to, and how WooCommerce collects your customer’s location. You can also choose to enable taxes and tax calculations. Additionally, there is a setting to enable a banner notice site-wide. The section called Currency Options allows you to set your default currency, the format your currency is shown in, such as ‘$9.99’ or ‘9.99$’ and how your currency denominations are separated.

Products

The Products tab has four sections.

General

In the General section, we can set the weight and dimension units, these units are used to calculate shipping. You can also enable reviews for your products, allow only ‘verified owners’ to post reviews and have these comments labeled as such.

Display

From the Display section, we can choose how products are arranged on which specific page. We can also manage which page the default category-pages is displayed.

You can also manage the cart functionality from here. The ‘add to cart’ behavior has two options. You can choose whether your page redirects to the cart page after successfully adding an item and you can also enable AJAX add to cart buttons on archive pages.

The Product Images section lets you set the size of the product images on different pages, you can also choose to ‘hard crop’ the uploaded images to the preset size.

Inventory

As noted before, WooCommerce can manage your stock for you. In the Inventory section, we can set how long a customer can ‘reserve’ an item in stock while they browse your site. This is helpful because by setting a lower amount of time we can allow other –more eager– customers a chance to purchase the item.

You can also set low stock and out of stock parameters. Based on your set number, you can receive notifications before you run out of stock, you can also display on the front end ‘out of stock’ before you physically run out, this can be helpful to avoid back orders. Lastly, you can choose to hide out-of-stock items once they reach that point. You can choose to show how much stock you have, only how much once you reach a lower supply, or never show the amount of stock at all.

Downloadable Products

There are three ways to serve the downloadable product to your customer:

Forced Download: The safest way to send the file, this uses PHP to protect the file from being shared to anyone but the end user.

X-Accel-Redirect/X-Sendfile: Must be enabled server side, this module allows you to securely send larger files.

Redirect Only: The least secure option, a redirection link to the file will be sent to the user, this link can be used by anyone (you can password protect the page, but anyone with the password can download the product)

You can also choose to require a login to access the download and also allow access to the download before the payment has been completed, or is in the processing stage.

Tax

The tax section lets you decide whether to include the tax in your pricing, show the tax in the shop, or just in the cart, set additional tax classes, round the tax, set price display suffix, decide how to calculate the tax or even apply taxes to shipping based on shipping class.

The additional tax classes field allows you to set your own tax rates such as reduced rate or zero-rate. You will notice at the top of the page links to the different rates.

And if you click on these rates you can adjust a number of tax related fields or import/export a csv.

Shipping

WooCommerce divides shipping into zones. As they put it: “A shipping zone is a geographic region where a certain set of shipping methods are offered. WooCommerce will match a customer to a single zone using their shipping address and present the shipping methods within that zone to them.”

Once you set your zones, WooCommerce will estimate the costs based on the customer’s location. In the shipping options section you can enable/disable the shipping calculator on the cart page, choose to hide shipping costs until an address is entered, decided whether to ship to the customer’s business or shipping address and also enable debug mode, this will bypass the shipping rate cache.

You can also setup your payment options for printing shipping labels from this section.

Checkout

Checkout process

WooCommerce allows you to set coupons for your shop. From this section you can enable/disable coupons and decide whether to calculate your coupon discounts sequentially, i.e., each subsequent coupon would discount from the previous discounted price.

You can also allow for guest checkout and ensure that all checkouts are secured with SSL (HTTP), the latter requires an SSL Certificate.

Checkout pages

If you went through the setup wizard then this section will be mostly completed, otherwise, you can choose which pages handle your cart, checkout and terms & conditions functions. If you define a terms page the customer will be asked if they accept them.

Checkout endpoints

Endpoints are appended to your page URLs to handle specific actions during the checkout process. Keep these unique! These will ultimately be used by WooCommerce to handle moving the user through the checkout process, the setup wizard should predefine these for you.

Payment gateways

The next few sections will describe each payment gateway, these are the primary methods of payment your customers can use. This section just gives you an overview of which gateways are currently enabled.

BACS

Bankers’ Automated Clearing Services, or BACS, is a direct bank transfer/wire service in the UK, you can enable the service and enter your account information directly in order to receive payments.

Check payments

A strange gateway, why would you want to accept checks via the internet? WooCommerce agrees, but they suggest using this gateway to test purchases in order to test order emails and success pages.

Cash on delivery

This is an interesting option, Cash on Delivery allows your customer to pay for goods at the time of delivery. This could be useful for customers who do not have access to credit or debit options.

Paypal

One of the leading credit payment processors, Paypal allows you to collect credit payments by just adding your Paypal API credentials. You can also create a Paypal sandbox in order to test payments.

Accounts

The Accounts section allows you to choose the ‘endpoints’ used by WooCommerce to handle your account creation process. It also allows you to choose when and on what pages your customers are asked to register and/or login.

Email

The Email section lets you set your notification emails that are sent to your customers are certain points in the checkout and shipping process.

WooCommerce Review – Pt. 4

Manually enter items

Now that we have completed the Setup Wizard, we should have the foundation of a basic e-commerce system. The next step is to populate the Store page with products. You can either upload a CSV of products or manually enter them in via the Product tab. Let’s look at the latter.

On the Products tab, go to Add New.

Here you can set up your product with some pretty self-explanatory fields. Item name, description, categories & tags, images and image galleries and SEO data.

First we will title the item ‘baked apple,’ add a description, add a category and then provide a few tags.

More importantly, let’s scroll down to the Product Data section.

Product Data

This section is a bit extensive but essentially outlines what your product is. The first step is to select a product type, there are four main types:

Simple Product – this is a single physical or digital product, can also be Virtual or Downloadable, or both!

a website subscription would be virtual but not downloadable
a service would be virtual but not downloadable
an e-book would be both virtual and downloadable

Grouped Product – A collection of products with separate SKUs that are grouped into one ‘parent’ product to be purchased together.

Consider a clothing store, sometimes there may be suggested outfits, the ‘outfit’ would be the ‘parent’ product, while the pieces of the outfit would be the individual items with their own SKUs.

External/Affiliate Products – products that you promote on your website but are actually fulfilled through an external service.

Consider stores where they sell items found on Amazon when the user clicks on the item your site will redirect them to Amazon to complete the purchase, then Amazon will compensate you through their affiliate program.

Variable Product – A product that comes in a variety of variations

A t-shirt can come in a variety of colors, this would be a great option to sell the type of shirt but also offer a variety of colors.

Let’s begin selling some Zelda Breath of the Wild foods. This is all imaginary since I do not actually plan to sell any food, especially shipping food.

Heads up! You can actually create a store-wide banner stating just that! This is a good idea for store mock ups where you do not intend on fulfilling any orders.

General

The first step for our Baked Apple is to select the type, in this instance we wiill choose a Simple Product, since this is just a simple, solitary ‘Baked Apple.’ I am setting the regular price to $3, the sale price to $2, scheduling a sale (optional) and using the standard tax methods for my given location.

Inventory

On the Inventory tab we want to set the SKU or ‘stock keeping unit,’ I chose 001, you can choose any number. I want WooCommerce to keep track of my stock. WooCommerce has inventory management built in, so I can say ‘I have 500 Baked Apples.’ When I sell 500 Bakes Apples I can also tell WooCommerce to back order any additional orders and notify the customer that their purchases will be back ordered. Once I receive more stock I can ship out to the back ordered requests. I can also sell items individually.

Shipping

On the shipping tab I can set the weight of the item, the dimensions of the item (once boxed) any the shipping class. The shipping class will be defined at a later point. All of this information is used by WooCommerce to estimate the shipping cost for the customer when they are in the checkout process. Note: When Virtual is checked the Shipping tab disappears because you cannot ship a virtual product.

Linked Products

Linked products are products you associate with the item the customer is interested in, such as accessories for a laptop that they wish to purchase.

Upsells: Upsells are items that are more profitable or better quality than the item chosen.

Cross-sells: Cross-sells are items commonly bought with the desired item.

Attributes

A product’s attributes are the different variables the product is offered as. You can set custom attributes such as Size or Color, anything variable you want.

Advanced

Lastly, the Advanced tab. Here you can set a custom note that will be sent to the customer after the purchase. You can also set the order of your item within the context of the other items. You can even enable reviews for your product!

Product Short Description

You will also notice an area to create a short description for your product, this will appear as an excerpt and should be as descriptive as possible so your customer knows what they are looking at before clicking.

Up Next

Creating a product is a pretty straight forward process with a lot of powerful options such as Upsells and Product Attributes. Next, we will take a closer look at the Settings for WooCommerce in order to fine tune our e-commerce experience a bit further.

Keep Reading

WooCommerce Part 3

WooCommerce Part 5

WooCommerce Review – Pt. 3

The Wizard

The Wizard will walk you through creating your essential pages such as Shop, Cart, Checkout, and My Account:

Store Location

The second step requires you to choose your location, currency and how you choose to collect sales tax, you can include the tax in the price, exclude it, or not collect any at all. WooCommerce will then bring up your state’s sales tax, though it is up to you to verify what taxes you need to collect which can be updated from the tax settings page later.

Shipping

Next, you can opt in or out of the WooCommerce Shipping option which enables you to print labels and get discounted USPS shipping rates. You will also choose your shipping weight unit and dimension unit.

Payments

You can also set up your payment gateways with just a few simple clicks and a couple steps depending on the gateway.

Theme

Lastly, you can choose to activate the WooCommerce theme Storefront, otherwise, you can choose to skip this step and keep your current theme. WooCommerce integrates correctly with the majority of themes, but Storefront and its extensions are guaranteed to work flawlessly.

Your store is now setup and ready to be populated, you have two options, manually enter in items or upload a CSV file.

Up Next

In Part 4 we will create a product and run through the main settings.

Keep Reading

WooCommerce Part 2

WooCommerce Part 4

WooCommerce Review – Pt. 2

Installing and Using on WordPress.com

WordPress.com has added some cool features, such as the ability to use practically any plugin or theme from the WordPress.org ecosystem. If you upgrade to the Business plan, you will be able to add plugins from the plugins tab and also upload themes in the Themes tab.

Let’s go ahead and add WooCommerce to our WordPress.com site. Click on ‘Add’ next to Plugins

Next, search for WooCommerce or look for it in the featured section.

Click on the icon then click install, it should say installing, then after a few moments the plugin will be active:

Considering that as of this writing the WordPress.com Calypso dashboard does not support WooCommerce integration, or for that matter a wide variety of third party plugin UIs, you will need to go to the older WP-Admin. There are three ways to get there.

From the WooCommerce Plugin page where we installed the plugin, click on Settings

Go to your address bar and add /Wp-Admin to your domain, i.e ‘http://www.onecoolsite.com/wp-admin’
- From here search for WooCommerce in the left-hand sidebar
Scroll to the bottom of your WordPress.com dashboard’s sidebar and click on WP Admin

Once you arrive at the WooCommerce plugin page you will be presented with a few options. Along the top are the different settings tabs for your WooCommerce account such as General, Products, Shipping etc. There should also be a Setup Wizard option, this is useful for setting up your most important information and I advise going ahead and doing so.

Up Next

In Part 3 we will look through the many settings in WooCommerce to fully set up your e-commerce experience.

Keep Reading

WooCommerce Part 1

WooCommerce Part 3

WooCommerce Review – Pt. 1

In the beginning….there was commerce.

Building out an ecommerce store used to be a very involved process requiring a skilled programmer, and it still is! But luckily we now have access to plugins that essentially create an entire ecommerce experience for you with little to no coding experience required. WooCommerce is arguably one of the most extensive and well supported plugins, and is now maintained by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.

WooCommerce is built for WordPress and integrates seamlessly with the WordPress ecosystem reducing many conflicts right out of the box. The plugin is built to be mobile friendly and designed so your products look good on any device, you can even turn your existing mobile store into a mobile app with no custom coding by utilizing a few third-party tools.

Since WooCommerce is managed by Automattic, you know the code is reliable, scalable and secure. Because WooCommerce is an open source product, you own your data. Unlike private services like Shopify or PayPal Stores, WooCommerce is owned by you. When you create a store on a private software you technically never receive the rights to the store, so if the server suddenly shuts down, changes policies, or changes hands, your data may become compromised. With WooCommerce, you own the data.

The WordPress community is known for creating incredible amounts of documentation on virtually everything. WooCommerce is no exception. With more than 350 contributors and 7 million downloads, WooCommerce is one of the fastest growing open source communities out there. There is also a large extension marketplace with over 300 free and paid extensions, making adding functionality to your ecommerce store very simple.

WooCommerce Core + Extensions

WooCommerce is separated into two categories, Core and Extensions. The core software is the basic features baked into every free copy of WooCommerce. Set up a store in just a few hours and begin selling your wares online. Extensions are custom plugins, both free and paid, that extend the functionality of your basic WooCommerce store and provide a lot of cool features. Let’s look at both.

The Core Features:

WooCommerce comes with many great features included in the free version. A lot of free counterparts to expensive ‘pro’ plugins are usually just a taste of the pro content, leaving a lot to be desired. But the free version of WooCommerce is a complete product, and the paid content only adds extensibility to the Core software.

A benefit of the Core components is that they are made to look beautiful. WooCommerce is made to seamlessly integrate with the trends of default WordPress themes, providing synergy between your theme and store. The backend is just as well thought out, with a thoughtful UI design that works well on hand-held devices allowing you to update your store on the go.

WooCommerce comes with five preinstalled payment gateways including Direct Bank Transfer, Cheque Payment, Cash on Delivery, Credit card payment with PayPal or Simplify Commerce (available for US only) which supports Hosted Payments (a PCI Compliant hosted payment platform).

You can also enable and disable guest checkout and force secure all checkout processes. Only operating in the US? No problem, you can specify which countries you want to sell to from the admin panel, not to mention set specific page urls to handle specific actions during checkout.

Set the default currency from a range of options.

Geo-location support allows your store to auto-detect the customer’s address making shipping and tax calculations a breeze, also, product pricing store wide will adjust to reflect the customer’s local tax markups.

You can also choose for the page to redirect to the shopping cart after an item is added by the customer. Alternatively, WooCommerce uses AJAX on ‘add to cart’ buttons which means your store won’t reload each time a customer adds a product or edits the cart. Magic.

Some Exciting Extensions:

WooCommerce has an enormous extensions library that makes adding unique features seamless and pain free. Products like Sensei can be linked with WooCommerce to create online courses. WooCommerce also has prominent membership, subscription and booking extensions that are easy to use and create beautiful functionality.

Developer Friendly

WooCommerce is built for the WordPress platform, so WordPress and PHP developers should have no problem customizing WooCommerce, building extensions, and utilizing countless actions and filters unique to the WordPress environment.

It is easy to migrate existing e-commerce data to WooCommerce using a variety of migration tools which facilitate a painfree experience.

WooCommerce also utilizes a REST API that ‘works on a key system to control access linked to WordPress users on your website.’ Pretty cool!

WooCommerce also allows you to setup custom AJAX endpoints which can do powerful things like speed up adding items to your cart. AJAX also allows your users to continue shopping without being redirected every time they add and item.

Additionally, the API has a UI for the Webhook system which makes it easier for 3rd party apps to integrate their services with your WooCommerce shopping experience.

Up Next

Let’s dive into the plugin on WordPress.com and take a look at the different features and settings.

Keep Reading

Jetpack

WooCommerce Part 2

Jetpack Review – Pt. 4

Engage Your Visitors

Subscriptions

It may take a lot of work to garner traffic, with the ubiquity of blogging these days. Having an opt-in subscription form can often times help you target more interested visitors. Keeping in touch is as easy as embedding a subscription form into your posts, pages and sidebars with no coding involved. Jetpack will send an email to your subscribers with post content, media and links to the post on your site.

Comment Form for WordPress Sites

Comments are a great way to let your users get involved, but the standard WordPress comment section can leave a bit to be desired. Jetpack allows you to replace the standard section with an enhanced comment section that offers social media logins, comment ‘like’ buttons, and email notifications so users can keep up with the discussion.

Contact Forms

Effortlessly add a contact form to your site without any coding. You can add, edit, and reorder contact form fields using a drag and drop editor. You can specify an email address for all responses to be forwarded to, view the responses from your WordPress Dashboard, submit all responses through a spam filtering service, and add as many unique contact forms as you desire.

Wrap Up

Great content should be talked about, Jetpack does a lot to allow you to receive feedback from your readers. If you enjoyed this review of Jetpack, perhaps checkout another great Automattic product, WooCommerce.

Keep Reading

Jetpack Pt. 3

WooCommerce