WordPress Questions & Answers

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. Today, we answer questions from Post Status community members, who asked us all sorts of stuff on the Post Status Ask page. If you'd like to ask a question, be sure to go there and we'll see if we can answer it on a future show. Questions & Links We answered the following questions: Why WordPress? In a survey I did before my PressNomics talk, the top answer for what's important to people in regards to the WordPress world was the quality of the community. WordPress' ubiquity -- powering 26% of the web -- helps too. What is the biggest mistake you made learning WordPress? (Or, what would you do differently?) Joe and I each shared what we tend to do wrong when learning new things. We are fully on opposite ends of the spectrum. Recommended link: Just Build Websites. Also, my post on learning WordPress holds up pretty well, considering I wrote it in 2014. Why did a lot of web and WordPress people get upset about the Mandrill pricing changes, when we want people to value the work we're doing ourselves? We discuss what made Mandrill's pricing changes controversial, and why we think some level of "outcry" is understandable here. Basically, Mandrill isn't differentiated enough to warrant the new pricing, in our opinions. However, it's obviously their right to change their pricing and structure, and the questioner has a valid point in how we value other services versus our own. Why isn't the WordPress importer being worked on more intensively? Good question! We talk about the state of the importer, some other options like WP Migrate DB Pro, WP All Import, and WP CLI. We also discuss how to get involved with open source development. Should taxonomies have the same feature capabilities as posts in the future? There's been a lot of interesting work on taxonomies in the last several releases, and you can read more about some of that and find links going back from my release post for WordPress 4.4. However, we think taxonomies and posts should be different. With the introduction of term meta, it is more important to consider architectural choices well in advance. Finally, the Fields API will be interesting in how it affects customizing term edit screens. How should I use my own domains with Multisite? This turned interesting! Fortunately, Multisite component maintainer Jeremy Felt came through while we were on the show to point us to tickets that were merged in WordPress 3.9 for enabling simpler domain mapping, and in 4.3, when a better UI was introduced. So, today, it's much easier to use a custom domain in a network -- within the existing WordPress Multisite options interface -- versus using a tool like Mercator. In addition to these questions, we also banter on about some other things and answer a few less serious questions we go from funny listeners. And at the end, I make a pretty big announcement... Today’s podcast is sponsored by Design Palette Pro. Design Palette Pro makes it easy to customize pretty much any Genesis theme, without touching code. It’s perfect for when you’re helping a friend with a website, but they don’t have a full service budget and you don’t have time to custom code every element. Get a great website in no time, with Design Palette Pro. Go to GenesisDesignPro.com for more information. Thank you to the team at Reaktiv Studios, who builds Design Palette Pro, for being a Post Status partner.