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Empowered To Make A Change

[ad_1] The good part; When writing this, I am working with the top companies in the WooCommerce ecosystem, partnering with creative minds, making things happen that can make a massive difference to many users, or even an essential lifeline to their business survival due to a lockdown. As a partnership manager at YITH, I also had* the privilege of traveling worldwide and attended various WordCamps and WordPress events. I’ve co-organized WordCamps, Meetups, and with 28 WooCommerce London Meetups in 2020 alone.* We are still in a local lock down due to covid at the time of writing this. The rubbish part; Okay, nine years ago, life was not great, my daughter passed away, and I was stuck as a restaurant owner, working hard and not making much money, plus soon after, I started a court case against my landlord. Maybe this was the year I lost most of my hair, and it also caused my flare-up of UC… so hopefully, you get it, it was not a good time of my life, and I probably had every reason to find ‘the bottle’ more attractive. From The Rubbish To The Good Part When bad things happen to people, some will hide and go downhill, whereas others use this negative energy into something positive. I can’t say, I fall in either camp, but having been influenced by the right people around me, decisions I made, and by chance, I was being drawn towards the latter one. Soon after our daughter died, my wife, Nihan enrolled in the open university to finish her Computer Science degree. I have massive admiration for Nihan’s strong determination, and I wholeheartedly supported her in this decision. We managed to finance this with an adult learning grant and working as a chef in various local pubs. My wife’s coursework interested me a lot, and very soon, we started following the lectures together, plus extra course work I was practicing myself too. Then came the idea of affiliate commission earnings through blogging, which I started out using Joomla as a CMS platform. Creating websites was slowly becoming a passion for me, and in these first few years, I enjoyed every part of the steep learning curb tackling the basics to more advanced coding and designs. Diving Into The Web After reducing hours as a chef, I followed various online courses in coding and e-commerce, SEO, and online marketing. One of the training courses I signed up for was a lifetime deal for OSTraining. The lessons came in particularly useful when I applied for a job as a WordPress designer. Please note that at this time, I had heard of WordPress and used it as a blogging platform but not played with it as a designer. One of the tutors on OSTraining became my absolute savior in the next two weeks before my interview for a new WordPress job. His name is Topher, also well-known for being the founder of HeroPress. Having binge-watched various WP development topics and getting familiar with the structures, I was rather lucky to have been given the job. Still, this was only the beginning of my journey into the world of WordPress. A year later, my boss asked me whether I would consider taking over the business and clients. Together with my wife, we started a new brand and company that we then build up over the years. This path naturally leads us into a niche of working with WooCommerce in combination with Online marketing. As I often say to people, WordPress is just one of the tools in my box, just like a carpenter can’t do without a hammer. The skill in using it efficiently comes over time and even then, there are different techniques. We all look back at projects and think: “ouch, why did I do it that way?” I often hear the term ‘imposter syndrome.’ I don’t believe in this, as I think whoever progresses and explores is eager to learn and wants to improve. It is frankly in human nature to drive ourselves forward. WordPress has evolved in so many branches that require different skills, and thank goodness for that, or we’d all be in competition. Instead, there are 100’s of areas of expertise, roles, and jobs that complement WordPress to make it what it is. A big part of that is each person’s personal background complements their skillsets. Think about it, who you are and what you do is influenced by what you have done and learned. Cherishing this, adding your culture, language, and experience and you suddenly find yourself more than qualified. And often these are not skills or certificates you list on a CV as they might be good and also bad experiences. Joining A Business The next part of this chapter was my dealings with YITH. As a long-term customer and having met some of the team at WordCamp London, I got into discussions to represent them at events held in the UK. This soon went global with me attending WordCamps in 3 other countries… and this was the moment I realized I could do much more with my connections and create meaningful partnerships. Within a few weeks, I crafted my dream job and sent a proposal to Nando, the CEO of YITH. It is not easy to pitch yourself with an idea hoping that someone, I never met or spoken, understands this vision. The doubts went through my head; “do I give up my business and work for the benefit of another company? What if I don’t get on? After all, I met 2 out of a team of 40 only three years ago… What do I do with my customers? Thinking of which, they have been demanding and not paying us on time. Plus, they annoy me when I want to be on holiday, not just that, they cause arguments between my wife and me. Because what is more important, family time or a site down and a business that is not earning

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Ujwal Thapa, Co-Founder of the WordPress Nepal Community, Passes Away – WordPress Tavern

[ad_1] “Here is my resume of professional Failures,” began his LinkedIn profile. On a site where most are apt to share success, Ujwal Thapa started with nearly a two-decade history of dreams that did not quite work out. Or, maybe they did in some ways. Much of Nepal is reeling from his death today. In the past week, he had been battling multiple health complications from Covid-19. The 44-year-old activist was the founder of the Bibeksheel Nepali political party, originally a peaceful movement that fought against political corruption and social injustice. However, many Nepali WordPress users will remember him as a co-founder of their community. The WordPress Nepal Facebook group has now grown to nearly 8,000 members. Photos shared by Ganga Kafle. In a 2015 interview with Nepal Buzz, he noted his proudest WordPress-related achievement as building this community. “That is not just creating tens and hundreds, but thousands of jobs in Nepal, and has the potential to create tens of thousands more, which basically means we are contributing to the nation by creating opportunities where there are none.” Later in the interview, he said he was a provoker, and he continued to live the remainder of his life in that belief. “I believe that the easiest way to bring change is to align all the positive people in the same direction,” he said. “So my job is to provoke and bring together people with similar interests, and align them in a similar direction, creating the change that they would never believe could come.” Thapa founded Digital Max Solutions in 2002, amidst the Nepalese Civil War. At one point, the company had as many as 35 employees. Over 30 eventually moved on to start their own IT businesses. He also created the Entrepreneurs for Nepal Facebook group, which now has over 100,000 members. From May 2013 to October 2019, he served as the Chairperson of the BibekSheel Nepali party. Many in Nepal’s WordPress community owe him a debt of gratitude for having the vision of building off the core platform. WordPress.org Themes Team representative Ganga Kafle credits at least part of his career and deep involvement with WordPress to Thapa, helping him land an initial internship with Web Experts Nepal. “Ujwal Thapa is the person who introduced WordPress to me in 2012 in a meetup,” he said. “After that, I was in close relation with him. In 2014, after my graduation, I went to Ujwal and asked him about the internship, and he took me to that office and talked with the boss and finalized for the internship. That’s how I jumped in WordPress, and now I am one of the leads of Themes Team.” “Once he said to me, ‘WordPress is giving so much things for free, why you hesitate to put Proudly Powered by WordPress?’” Kafle shared of the mentor, referencing the typical credit line in many WordPress site footers. “He was in love with WordPress.” You can view Thapa’s WordCamp presentations as a speaker and panel moderator via WordPress.tv. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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8 Excellent Text Editors for Windows, macOS, and Linux (2021)

[ad_1] When it comes to programming, nothing is arguably more heated than a debate about text editors. At times, the arguments border on fanaticism to the point that choosing the right editor almost confirms your status among your peers. While in actuality it may not be that dramatic, selecting the right option from the plethora of text editors available is important. You have to consider your needs, the project, your current ability, and much more. As such, this post is going to look at a number of different text editors. Throughout we’ll offer advice on which one may be more suitable. First, let’s talk more about why a dedicated text editor is necessary. Why You’d Need a Dedicated Text Editor In a nutshell, your choice of text editor is important enough to warrant some serious research. Among the YouTube channels and Reddit forums, you may come across some severe fanaticism for one particular editor. While most is hyperbole and dramatics, there is sound reasoning for getting your choice right: As time goes on, you get used to a particular editor and the way it works. This will speed up your work compared to a newbie to the editor. One editor may offer a different ‘feel’ that suits you over another. This is obviously going to be subjective, hence the arguments. Some editors offer functionality that can assist your workflow with a particular language or framework. As such, you’ll want to consider the makeup of your perfect text editor carefully. Getting the wrong blend of features and functionality could even set you back. What You Should Look For In a Text Editor When it comes to the exact features you should seek out, most of it is largely subjective. However, there is a list of considerations you should keep in mind: Can you export projects from one editor and import it into another? Do the keyboard bindings make sense, especially if you’re coming from an editor such as Vim, which has an idiosyncratic approach to editing? How well supported is the text editor, in case of issues? If there’s no active support, an open-source editor is going to be marginally more suitable. Is the workflow logical to you, in as much as setting up projects and working daily using the editor? There are many more considerations you can make, but these are going to help you narrow down your options. One thing’s for certain, you should choose a text editor based on your own needs, rather than go with forum opinions. 8 Excellent Text Editors for Windows, macOS, and Linux Let’s take a look at the eight text editors we’ll feature. Here’s a quick summary of each one: Vim. This text editor has a reputation for a vertical learning curve. However, it’s actually intuitive to use. Atom. An open-source functional editor that has lots of ‘hackability’. Sublime Text. The ‘old man’ of premium text editors has been around for years, yet still delivers. Notepad++. Windows users will appreciate this flexible upgrade to Notepad, that can also scale with your ability. Visual Studio Code. A Microsoft product that has captured over half of the text editing market share. Intellij IDEA. A full-fledged Integrated Development Environment (IDE). There are actually a number of spin-offs available from the developers. BBEdit. This is a great first text editor that also has a bunch of excellent premium functionality. Nova. The developers are known for their previous Mac-only editor Coda – and for the popular Untitled Goose Game cult classic! Without further ado, let’s take a look! 1. Vim First off, let’s deal with the sorcerer’s text editor. Vim comes with a reputation. It’s known as power editor, mainly because of…well, everything about it. It’s a terminal-based text editor that uses idiosyncratic key bindings to navigate and populate your files. There’s no Graphical Use Interface (GUI), and your hands practically have to stay on the keyboard for the entire time. It’s open-source and pre-packaged with macOS and Linux machines. As such, it’s become an editor of choice for sysadmins and general IT techs. Even so, it’s actually intuitive, and the built-in vimtutor takes about an hour to complete. We’d suggest that Vim isn’t necessarily suitable for a coding beginner, because you have to learn Vim as well as your language of choice. However, if you have the stomach, getting to grips with Vim is going to make you more efficient and knowledgeable in the long run. 2. Atom Next, Atom is a text editor that once got a lot of love, but has fallen out of favor with developers. However, it’s still capable and worth installing – perhaps as your primary editor. It’s based on the Electron framework, and was developed by the GitHub team prior to the Microsoft acquisition. As such, it can lag a little compared to other native text editors. Atom looks like many other text editors, although there are some nice touches throughout. There’s a built-in terminal for running programs, and GitHub integration as standard: It may be a touch slow, but Atom is a worthwhile editor for both those new to coding and long-time programmers. We haven’t even touched on its extensibility through ‘packages’, which makes Atom a text editor that can be adapted to any project or language. 3. Sublime Text You’ll likely have seen Sublime Text in the past, or even heard of it. However, you may not have used it. This is a shame because it’s a fantastic minimalist text editor that can stick with you from your very first “Hello, World!” line, to large-scale professional projects. At a base level its simply a text editor. However, it offers much more that the competition have adapted. For example, the Command Palette can be found in Atom and Jetbrains products, and the Goto Anything feature has Vim-like functionality: Overall, Sublime Text is a great text editor, and what’s more the licensing is flexible. While the trial version is unrestricted, if you stick with Sublime Text you should pay the

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B2BKing Review 2021 – A WooCommerce Wholesale and B2B Extension

[ad_1] WooCommerce is highly flexible, so flexible that you can even mold them to Wholesale business requirements. Custom coding or a myriad of plugins might let you do that.  However, there are very few reliable single solutions for business owners to rely upon. For ventures thinking to digitize their B2B and B2C sales process, B2BKing is a great solution. It is known for its comprehensive feature list and reliability.  In this B2BKing review, we will evaluate the abilities of the B2BKing Plugin and assess it as a whole for you. B2BKing Plugin – An Overview This plugin is an extension that works for WooCommerce stores. It can enable all types of online ventures with B2B and B2C capabilities from entrepreneurs to middle-sized businesses and enterprises.  Businesses can add (and control access rights of) B2B users, B2C users, and logged out users. There are abilities like conversations, offers, dynamic rules, groups, customers, etc., that allow B2B sellers to handle requests, serve resellers/customers, and run their business efficiently. The developers of the plugin have integrated 137+ (!) features and components into the B2BKing. For instance it is WPML-supported and, therefore, will work well for your multilingual store too. With more than 14,000+ installs and 5+ ratings at present, many users deem it to be very useful for their store.  But is it worth the hype or attention? Should B2B and B2C eCommerce businesses consider deploying the B2BKing Plugin for their WooCommerce stores? Let us take a look! Assessing Features of B2BKing Plugin One of the fastest-growing plugins in the Envato marketplace, B2BKing is a feature-rich wholesale solution. But are its features all beneficial for your business? In this section, we will discuss its features and their value for your B2B plus B2C e-commerce business. Article Continues Below Create Groups Highlight: Control the facilities/visibility for various B2B and non-B2B users in different ways through group creation.  In B2BKing, your store users are categorized in 3 ways through groups. You can enter into the business groups section and create various business groups.  Users can be assigned to each of these groups and given shipping, payment, and dynamic (through rule-creation) rights. Besides this, B2C users are the ones who are not added to any of the business groups, and logged-out users (guest users) are the ones who are using your store without signing in. Through B2BKing, you can control shipping and payment methods for these two types of users too. Initiate Conversations Highlight: Let your resellers (or your own business) communicate needs faster through messaging. By posting messages through Conversations features in the B2BKing plugin, your administrator(s) and B2B users can broadcast their requirements. Others can see the conversation and respond to them to improve their B2B relationships.  Negotiation, discussion, and fulfillment of urgent requests become easy this way. Offers for specific users Highlight: Special deals or offers (different pricing for a product or a product bundle) for a few business users/groups. Article Continues Below There are times when B2B ventures want to specify different prices for specific users/groups or sell product bundles to a few users/groups. This can be done through Offers if you are using the B2BKing plugin.  Administrators can create offers. As per the set visibility, business users can see them in their dashboards. Purchase Lists for demand-specification  Highlight: Create or let users create B2B shopping lists to enable one-click re-ordering/purchase. Purchase lists can be created as per demand/sales using the B2BKing plugin. For example, if your resellers repeatedly buy a few products (or a bundle), it is better to add them to the purchase lists. Even the number of lists per product can also be specified. Here is one demo purchase list: It is also possible to enable or disable your purchase lists for different B2B buyers. Items, products, and bundles can be directly added to the cart from purchase lists in one click. Users can also create purchase lists by adding their cart (current condition at that instance) as a purchase list. Bulk Ordering Highlight: Allow fast custom bulk orders in your B2B e-commerce store. B2B businesses have multiple resellers, and for the same reason, a bulk ordering facility is super-crucial for such an e-commerce store. With the B2BKing plugin, you can easily enable this functionality in your online B2B shop.  Article Continues Below Your customers will be able to fill the bulk order form, specifying product names and quantity. This will help in faster order fulfillment. Adding Visibility Restrictions for Guests Highlight: Show/hide your products, their pricing, or the whole shop for logged-out users. Using the B2BKing WooCommerce Plugin, one can easily restrict the visibility of their shop for guests. You may just hide the pricing of your products, enable login, force login, or add a ‘get a quote’ form instead of pricing. This feature can improve the prospect subscription rate without affecting your store’ssearch-engine visibility/ranking adversely. Set Dynamic Rules Highlight: Create discount, pricing, visibility, users, and tax-related rules for your store. Dynamic Rules is amongst the most powerful feature of this WooCommerce plugin.  Discounting (fixed price or percentage), free shipping, order amount limit, tax rules, hidden price, minimum order quantity, order quantity limit, and tax exemption related conditions can be created through dynamic rules. Later, you may use these custom rules for the groups, conversations, offers, and other such capabilities of B2BKing. Handling Taxes and Tax Exemption B2B and B2C e-commerce stores can display pricing of products without or with taxes (GST, VAT) to their direct/reseller buyers. Other than the above, B2BKing also let B2B and B2C businesses: Create subaccounts to allow multiple people from your organization to make purchases or purchase requests; Enable custom fields in the B2B registration forms to get extra information as per your venture’s need; Request quotes and communicate through messages to finalize deals or for negotiation; Use the customer panel to view, group, and manage; Email notifications and offline gateway enablement; Controlling the payment and shipping methods for different users; Enable manual approval for each registration or B2B registrations; Separate login

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My Journey From Freelancer To Product Maker

[ad_1] Like many others in our industry, my WordPress journey started a while ago. I built my first website using GeoCities when I was 14 years old, 21 years ago (boy am I getting old). At the time I was obsessed with skateboarding, the website was for friends I used to hang out and ride around with from school. I remember how excited I felt when I could see that my website was online and I would literally show it to everyone I could, even though looking back at it now it was extremely brightly coloured and scrappy! Back then, with my family’s 56k connection, whenever I connected to the internet it would take over the landline, so I was only allowed to go online for an hour per day. So I spent the days fiddling with Front Page, just waiting for my 1 hour to upload the code and share the updates with my MIRC friends (kinda like a Stone Age version of Slack). That’s about the time I also picked up a guitar for the first time…. Music, business and websites To start I borrowed a super cheap electric guitar from a friend to learn how to play, and impress a girl I liked. After playing all evening, I felt so inspired that the guitar ended up next to me while I slept in bed. It was love at first chord. Because I was so obsessed, I couldn’t stop practicing and quickly I became pretty good (for a kid). So much so that I formed a band with some friends and started performing wherever we could. For the next decade, I focused on becoming the best rock musician I could. I didn’t want to just play the guitar in a band that was performing at local events and school, I wanted us to go places and started treating it as a business. I began studying business by reading every book I could, which led me to take courses and become a certified business and digital consultant. During my studies, I learned WordPress and the entire Adobe suite. This was my first introduction to WordPress and it made me love designing and developing websites even more than I already did. I had fun during this time, but they were some tough years and despite all of my efforts, my band wasn’t doing very well. After everything I had put into it, I thought I’d have my own episode on MTV Cribs already! We decided the band needed a change. We rebranded, wrote new stuff, this time in English to maximise our reach, and did an online launch using everything I learned. Within a month of the launch, my local band from a small town in Israel was signed to release an album worldwide through a British label. We were stoked! We decided to drop everything, come to the UK and start touring Europe. And so we did! Starting from scratch, we began building our audience at small venues and pubs, while really pumping things up online, using WordPress to build our website and promote! We went from playing to sometimes less than 10 people to hundreds, then thousands. Playing with some of the artists we grew up listening to. It was pretty amazing, but I was still broke surprisingly! Luckily though, from my efforts in promoting the band using our website and designs on social media, my work began to get noticed and I started to attract clients. With little to no money in my bank account, I started freelancing out the back of our tour van and built clients websites while touring Europe. Free McDonalds WiFi became my best friend and no matter where we went, there was always one nearby. While I drew in more clients and started generating revenue for myself, unfortunately my band ended up splitting up. It was unavoidable and in the end, it was the best thing that could have happened to me (even though it was devastating at the time). I then thought, “you know what, I’m going to start taking this freelancing thing seriously.” I started building my own business, using my rediscovered passion for the web and WordPress in particular. As I got deeper into building websites, I began to insert myself more into the WordPress community, which filled the void of being “the band guy”. As my time now wasn’t being taken up by touring, I employed my first designer and this is where my agency took off. We managed to pull in 6 figures within the first year, and we kept growing! Within a few years, my agency grew to 12 employees. As I acquired more clients, I realized there was something holding me back. From Agency To Product Maker As we began dealing with more and more clients day-to-day, it became blindingly apparent that we simply did not have the correct tools to deal with the volume efficiently. So, I went on the hunt for a platform or tool that could help organize and deal with client requests quickly and easily. We already had a ticketing system in place, while using emails, phone calls and face to face meetings, but it was just all a mess. There are solutions to the problems of project management BUT I struggled to find a purely dedicated platform that was for a web design agency. I arranged a meeting with my team and we decided, let’s just build our own solution. We had the designers and developers to make it happen, so…we did! We developed a simple WordPress plugin that we could use to take requests from our clients across all of their websites, and after it was implemented, it worked like a dream. Being the person I am though, I didn’t stop there. I thought, “other people should be using this” and that’s where my product, Atarim, was born. I reached out to the WordPress community wherever I could and got a bunch of beta testers to try it

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Chrome Canary Adds Flag for Disabling FLoC Testing – WordPress Tavern

[ad_1] Google’s controversial Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) experiment now has a feature flag within Chrome Canary (the nightly build of Chrome for developers) that allows users to opt out. In January 2020, Google announced its plans to discontinue support for third-party cookies in Chrome within two years. The first bits and pieces of the company’s Privacy Sandbox initiative started landing in Chrome in December 2020 with an initial flag to disable it. FLoC, Google’s proposed replacement for third-party cookies, began testing as a developer origin trial in Chrome at the end of March 2021. In Canary, users can navigate to chrome://flags/#privacy-sandbox-settings-2 to find the Privacy Sandbox Settings 2 flag. Relaunch Canary to save the changes. This will unlock the box that allows users to either reset their FLoC group or opt out of FLoC entirely. The new setting is available under chrome://settings/privacySandbox: If the setting remains enabled, which is the default, Chrome will group users into cohorts based on recent browsing activity and then advertisers select ads for the entire group. Browsing activity for the individual is “kept private on your device,” but Chrome certainly has access that information by way of mediating the cohorts. Google notes that the trial is currently only active in some regions. Users can also opt out of Privacy Sandbox trials on the same page. Current trials include the following: Advertisers and publishers can use FLoC Advertisers and publishers can study the effectiveness of ads in a way that does not track you across sites Google has not specified how users would opt out of FLoC if the experiment is successful and moves forward. Organizations and site owners who are currently on the fence about it may go either way depending on how easy it is for Chrome users to opt out themselves. “Instead of comparing FLoC to its predecessor, third party cookies, I feel it’s actually more like the Facebook Pixel – mostly in the sense that it’s controlled by a single surveillance capital company,” WordPress core contributor Roy Tanck commented on the trac ticket for the discussion. “FLoC may not be quite as nefarious, but I feel it should be something website owners consciously opt into. “WordPress has always advocated for a free and open web, and FLoC appears to actively harm that goal. I think WordPress should take a stand against this, and do it now.” A few others have chimed in on the ticket recently as other open source projects have started blocking FLoC by default. Plugin developer David McCan’s comment referenced analytics data published in early May suggesting that US users choose to opt out of tracking 96 percent of the time following the changes in iOS 14.5. “There is no doubt that coming down on the side of user privacy vs user tracking is the right thing to do,” McCan said. “Which headline would we rather see? ‘By default millions of WordPress websites are allowing users to be tracked’ or ‘WordPress takes steps to block user tracking making millions of websites around the world safe to visit?’ “We already have a policy that opt-in by default tracking’ is not allowed in plugins hosted by WordPress. This is because we recognize the responsibility and benefit of protecting user privacy.” During a live marketing event Google hosted at the end of last week, Jerry Dischler, vice president and general manager of Ads, addressed the recent privacy concerns surrounding FLoC. “We’ll be using these [Privacy Sandbox] APIs for our own ads and measurement products just like everyone else, and we will not build any backdoors for ourselves,” Dischler said. Dischler also reaffirmed Google’s commitment to moving away from third-party cookies. “Third-party cookies and other proposed identifiers that some in the industry are advocating for do not meet the rising expectations consumers have when it comes to privacy,” he said. “They will not stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions; they simply cannot be relied on in the long term.” Google bears the burden of reassuring advertisers that effective advertising is still possible as the company moves beyond tracking cookies. It is aiming to future-proof advertisers’ measurement of campaign performance with what it claims are “privacy-safe solutions.” The company is pushing hard for advertisers to adopt these new techniques, promising more actionable first-party conversion data. Although consumer expectations have changed, FLoC may not be the answer to the need for a privacy-preserving advertising model. So far it looks like Google will have an uphill battle to gain more broad support from browsers, advertisers, and consumers. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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InMotion Hosting Review 2021: Is This a Good Host for WordPress?

[ad_1] At first glance, InMotion Hosting has everything you’d expect from one of the leading web hosting companies on the market. There are entry-level plans, there are WordPress-specific plans (more on those later), and there are also highly scalable setups that can grow with you over time. In this InMotion Hosting review, we look at how good those hosting solutions really are and whether you should use them for your next WordPress website. Here’s what we’re going to cover: What is InMotion Hosting and what type of hosting it offers? InMotion Hosting is a US-based hosting company that started as a small project back in 2001. This means that it’s been in the hosting business for a whole 20 years. What’s even more impressive is that it’s an entirely employee-owned company. This is a breath of fresh air compared to the corpo-structured hosting giants that we’re all used to. The company is headquartered in Virginia Beach, VA, offers US-based customer service, a really generous 90-day money-back guarantee, and secure data centers in the US. What’s also worth pointing out is that the company is making moves to commit to an eco-friendly and sustainable operations model. They’re the first-ever green data center in Los Angeles, reducing their overall carbon output by more than 2,000 tons per year. Let’s look at the different types of web hosting that InMotion Hosting offers: Shared hosting This is InMotion Hosting’s entry-level offering for web hosting. It’s a good choice for users who need a reliable hosting platform for a small website (or a handful of websites). To make the setup easier, InMotion Hosting gives you access to one-click installers for over 400 web applications and website engines (such as WordPress, Joomla). There’s also unmetered bandwidth and enough SSD disk space for a standard website. Those of us who enjoy getting stuff for free – which we all do(!) – will be happy to know that InMotion Hosting throws in a free SSL, free email address, and even a free domain name (on the second-to-cheapest plan). 👉 Go to InMotion Hosting’s shared hosting plans. WordPress hosting WordPress hosting has been getting more and more popular, so no wonder InMotion Hosting has an offering like that in their portfolio as well. Structure-wise, it’s a similar setup to their entry-level hosting, but it’s more optimized to run WordPress, plus it also offers a couple of WordPress-specific features and helpers. For starters, it is what’s called a “managed hosting” setup, which means that some of the everyday hosting maintenance tasks are handled by the InMotion Hosting platform itself. The server hardware/software stack has been put together to better cater to the WordPress platform. It runs on NGINX, PHP8, has WP-CLI, Imagemagick, and a free CDN included. The server is configured with regular security scans for malware and other potential issues. InMotion Hosting will also handle automatic security patches for you, plus you can set all updates to happen automatically. More on WordPress hosting later in this InMotion Hosting review. 👉 Go to InMotion Hosting’s WordPress hosting plans. Advanced hosting InMotion Hosting offers a couple of hosting setups that can be called “advanced hosting” – even though InMotion Hosting doesn’t use this label themselves. These are all hosting plans that are above the entry level and are commonly used by more seasoned users. Such users know what the specific server requirements of their project are and how to then set that server up. This is: VPS hosting. InMotion Hosting offers both managed VPS hosting and unmanaged cloud VPS. The former runs on Linux, it’s powered by UltraStack, and lets you launch and scale your project easily. The latter works as a cluster of self-managed cloud servers. Dedicated server hosting. Here, again, InMotion Hosting has both managed dedicated servers in the catalog as well as unmanaged setups (called “bare metal,” which does sound cool, I give them that). As you’d expect, the managed setups handle a lot of the everyday server work for you. The bare metal setups are exactly what it says on the tin – you get the bare metal server computer. But wait, there’s more! InMotion Hosting also offers specialized WordPress setups: WordPress VPS hosting and managed dedicated WordPress hosting. Most new websites won’t need this level of power, but it’s nice to see that InMotion Hosting is ready for any scale of website. Which one is right for you? As you can see, InMotion Hosting offers a lot when it comes to their hosting portfolio. There’s something here for everybody and every scale of web project. But how to choose which one you need? It’s quite simple actually: If your project calls for an advanced hosting setup, then you probably already know that it’s the case. If you consider yourself a casual WordPress user, get one of their WordPress hosting plans. If you want to launch a new website that won’t be running on WordPress, get one of their shared hosting plans. 🌱 Okay, that’s all fine, but are those hosting setups any good? Let’s find out next: Features and pricing ⚠️ For the purpose of this InMotion Hosting review, we’re looking into the WordPress hosting plans offered by InMotion. Chances are that if you’re planning to launch a new website, you’ll run it on WordPress. First things first, here’s the current snapshot of the pricing page: A couple of things that we need to point out right out the gate: The per-month prices you’re looking at are on a three-year contract. Meaning, you’ll get them if you buy your hosting setup for three years upfront. As you can see in the screenshot above, InMotion Hosting also has two-year and one-year contracts as well as month-to-month plans. Here’s a breakdown of the prices based on contract length: One more thing that’s not immediately apparent with any web host is the renewal prices. Long story short, the prices you see above are InMotion Hosting’s “welcome offer.” This means that you get that price when you first sign

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The Best Service Marketplace Theme In 2021?

[ad_1] Want to build a task marketplace like TaskRabbit, Airtasker, or Thumbtack?  Great idea! In just a decade since its inception, TaskRabbit has empowered 148,000 individuals to grow their income and skills. Airtasker creates over 1.4 million tasks each year. And Thumbtack is doing its own thing to help local professionals find work. ExpertHive is a clean, modern WordPress theme that wants to make it easy for you to launch your own on-demand task marketplace – one that offers a similar experience and functionality as these task sites.  The theme’s developers claim that it’s already packed with all the features needed to build an on-demand services marketplace, so you won’t have to buy anything else to get your site going. This made us curious to try it out ourselves. Is ExpertHive as complete as its creators say? Does it deliver a marketplace with all the necessary bells and whistles? Can it really help me build a site like TaskRabbit?   We’ll be answering these questions and more in this comprehensive ExpertHive Review. ExpertHive On-Demand Services Marketplace Theme Review ExpertHive is a lightweight yet feature-rich WordPress theme for building a two-sided services marketplace. It allows you to create a site where buyers can post their job requests and sellers can list their services. The theme is powered by HivePress, the multipurpose directory plugin that’s already used by 3,000+ active WordPress sites.  Key features include: Requests & Offers to facilitate customers in posting their requests and enabling experts to list services they offer. Commissions & Payouts for setting up a default commission rate and a payout threshold for taskers and experts.  Messages & Reviews to help customers communicate with taskers and leave reviews about their services. Custom Fields & Categories that make it easy to customize the marketplace to your liking. WooCommerce integration to help you process payments.  And more. Besides, you can use any of the premium or free add-ons available for HivePress to expand your marketplace’s functionality.  Article Continues Below Unlike other themes, ExpertHive saves you the need to download expensive third-party extensions or plugins. You can combine different HivePress extensions to create a niche marketplace with unique functionality.  ExpertHive costs $79 for a lifetime single-site license. The purchase also includes 12 months of premium support, automatic updates, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. For the sake of this review, we purchased ExpertHive so that we can give you a full scope of what it’s capable of.Easy Installation and Handy Plugins  ExpertHive installs the same way as any other premium WordPress theme. You simply go to your WordPress dashboard, select Appearance > Themes, click Add New > Upload Theme, and then select the ZIP file. Once installed and activated, ExpertHive will suggest installing some plugins, such as HivePress Blocks and HivePress Messages. We installed all of them, as they’re meant to complement the site-building process.  And to further simplify things, ExpertHive developers have recorded a screencast about how to import its demo content. Although it’s possible to start designing your marketplace from scratch, we actually recommend using pre-made content so that your site starts off looking exactly like the live ExpertHive demo. ExpertHive suggests using the free one-click demo import plugin for importing demo data. After installing it, navigate to Appearance > Import Demo Data and then click the Import Demo Data button, as seen in the screenshot below. Site Customizations Being a modern theme, ExpertHive is fully compatible with the WordPress block editor and customizer. Know what that means? It means you can tweak everything using drag-and-drop and the familiar WordPress blocks. Also, whatever you edit will reflect on the front-end of the site.  With the WordPress customizer, you can switch fonts, change the main colors, background images, customize menus, and so on. Additionally, ExpertHive allows you to build your own layouts depending on the page functionality and purpose. You can do this by adding a new page from your WordPress backend. The theme offers the following blocks by default: Article Continues Below Listings Listing categories User registration form Vendors Vendor search form Requests Requests search form Listing tags Reviews ExpertHive also offers shortcodes for those using the Classic TinyMCE editor. These give you more control over your site’s design. If you’re a more advanced user, you can customize ExpertHive directly from the CSS. Marketplace Features Although ExpertHive’s site customization features are great, it’s the marketplace features and monetization capabilities that make it truly stand out. For example, ExpertHive and HivePress plugins combine to offer you: Listings Allow any registered users to list their services and feature specific listings on your homepage, as well as add, edit, or remove the existing listing categories. Paid Listings With the Paid Listings extension, you can create and sell various listing packages with different options so experts can pick the best option for listing their services. Vendors Manage individual expert profiles, including adding new custom fields and search filters (such as location). Requests Allow customers to create their own requests with extra details like budget, due date, and time range. It’s also possible to add custom fields and search filters in the same way as for listings or vendors. Messages Let buyers and experts communicate with each other. Tags Allow experts to create category-based tags to make it easier for buyers to find relevant listings. Favorites Enable customers to compile a list of their favorite listings so that they’re encouraged to come back and order services from the same taskers Article Continues Below Testimonials Display testimonials from experts to grow trust in your marketplace. WooCommerce ExpertHive is integrated with WooCommerce for processing payments and managing orders, so you can use any of the payment gateways available for WooCommerce. There are also more free and premium ExpertHive extensions, but these nine should be enough for incorporating key marketplace functionalities into your website. Commissions & Payouts One of ExpertHive’s best features is that it allows you to apply a default commission rate. You can set one overall commission rate for all experts or offer a slightly higher commission to taskers

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Accessible-Colors.com • WPShout

[ad_1] At a recent (virtual) Fort Collins WordPress meetup, someone shared this little site which I’ve never encountered before: Accessible-Colors.com. As you might guess from the name, it’s a simple little site/tool to tell you if the contrast between two colors you’re using in a design is in line with the WCAG 2.0 standard for contrast. If you color’s don’t quite work, it’ll give you a way to make them work by modifying one or the other of them. In that way, it’s just flexible enough. It doesn’t do more than two colors, and it doesn’t give more than two recommendations. But that’s really all I think it needs to. I’m sure there are lots of other ways to tell if colors conform to WCAG standards, but I love how simple and quick this one is. Definitely worth a bookmark 🤓 Visit accessible-colors.com → [ad_2] Source link

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Hallway Chats Joins The HeroPress Family

[ad_1] As any parent or pet owner knows, quiet doesn’t always equal inactivity. And the same is true here at HeroPress. Investing in a sustainable framework While we haven’t said much over the last few months, we’ve been working with the initial feedback we received to expand HeroPress in the most manageable and sustainable way. Because really, if it’s not manageable and sustainable, what’s even the point? This quest prompted a lot of additional research and active listening, all of which lead the fine folks behind the Hallway Chats podcast to start a conversation with us. Hallway Chats found us We were considering a podcast, but had moved it down the build list. Tara Claeys and Liam Dempsey, while loving the work they’ve done with Hallway Chats, found life was moving then in different directions, as it does for us all. And as Hallway Chats approached its 150th episode, the decision was made to pass the torch, or microphone as it were. We’re thrilled to be able to build on their legacy and continue to grow Hallway Chats through out the community, and we’re grateful to Tara and Liam that they’ve entrusted it into our care. Embrace opportunities that are the right fit A few shifts and changes are inevitable, but the spirit of Hallway Chats will always stand. After all, why change something that so ideally meshes with our own goals? Listen to the 150th Episode of Hallway Chats where Tara, Liam, Topher, and I talk even more about the direction we’re all heading. Related [ad_2] Source link

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