WordCamp Cape Town offered a lot of insight into what is happening with WordPress in South Africa. Top WordPress experts shared their insights on topics ranging from syndicating your content, taking your website mobile, developing with WordPress and building a business around WordPress.
What the experts have to say: Their top WordPress Tips
In the interviews we conducted with the WordCamp speakers we asked them to share one WordPress tip that they felt was indispensable, and here is what they had to say:
Roy Foubister
“Rip open each plugin and see how it works, you are adding extra code to your project – know what it does!”
Joe Botha
“Use SVN to keep your blog versions current.”
David Perel
“NEVER hack it, with WordPress you can always use the core code to achieve your goal.”
Marc Perel
“If you think you need to create a custom function for something, do some Googling first. It’s most likely available in the source.”
Byron Rode
“Try not to use plugins where possible. Upgrading becomes a nightmare, and 9/10 you’ll find the reason for poor performance and hacks is due to badly developed plugins.”
Ashley Shaw
“The less plugins, the better. They are the root of all evil.”
Dan Milward
“If you’re a developer looking to get into WordPress then buy this book by Justin Tadlock“
Neil Pursey
“A basic tip is to ensure that you’ve added a .htaccess file to the root folder and rewrite the url structure to ‘custom’ and insert /%postname%/ into the field.”
Jess Green
“Learn as much as you can about SEO content. My blog posts have ranked so well and received so many comments sometimes that my business grows organically purely from that.”
Matt Geri
“Go mobile! There are many plugins you can use to turn your WordPress blog into a mobile blog and it shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes to pick and install one.”
David Mugo
“PHP 5 & MySQL 5 – Best combination, no more worry about folder permissions and so forth. Just create your database and move on with the 3 minute installation.”
Jeff Pearce
“Spend some time going through the core WordPress code. There is a goldmine of learning in there! It might be daunting at first, but I’ve learnt the most from spending time just reading the code.”
Craig Strachan
“The first thing you should do when you install WP is to change the permalink structure to be more friendly – /%postname%/”
Oluniyi Ajao
“Always make use of trackbacks, where possible. The backlinks are worth the time.”
Adii Pienaar
“Keep plugins to an absolute minimum. Mo’ plugins, mo’ problems.”
It seems that the dangers of plugins and good SEO are the top tips from our experts that everyone can agree on. The full WordCamp Speaker Spotlight Interviews and the Speaker Session videos are available on the WordCamp website and on YouTube.
Do you have an expert WordPress tip to share?
Ryan Imel who runs wpcandy and is well known in the industry as an expert as well disagrees with the plugins root of all evils concept. I disagree as well.
BAD plugins are the root of all evil as well as BAD plugin combinations.
http://wpcandy.com/thinks/active-plugin-counts-just-dont-matter
Not everyone has the luxury of time or budget to hire a developer for additional functionality and in most cases when they do the developer ends up creating nothing more than a plugin, so I find the anti-plugin movement a little hypocritical when being pushed by people developing plugins.
Also themes with tons of none wordpress code & extra functionality stuffed in end up being a nightmare themselves as well. They can produce similar problems to plugins.
I do agree with Roy’s comment, know wat the plugin does on the inside.
At the end of the day it points to the need for a more thorough plugin review process. People using plugins basically need to be assessing their plugin choices more carefully and they need help to do this from WordPress themselves.
Lastly the advice which I mentioned in my interview not listed here – Backup & Update!!
Thanks for that input. I do agree with what you are saying. Yes there are good and bad plugins out there, in my experience it is plugin combinations that cause issues.
Using plugins sparingly and wisely is essential if you want to maintain a stable infrastructure.
Dont use SVN – Git FTW!
I completely agree with you David. Git is something were are currently investigating. Thanks for the input!
Also with regards to Craig Strachan’s suggestion re: /%postname%/, a common permalink structure which many people are using by default WordPress have spotted the following warning on their permalinks documentation -
http://dougal.gunters.org/blog/2009/02/04/efficient-wordpress-permalinks/
It does however appear that this issue will be resolved somewhat in the pending 3.3 release of WordPress
http://wpcandy.com/reports/postname-performance-issues-eliminated-in-3-3
Though those using older versions should still be aware of the performance issues related to using /%postname%/