My Monkey Do

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Off the Shelf

WPEngine for WordPress Hosting Worth It?

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This is not so much of a review, but more of how I came to a decision on WPEngine. 

At $29/ month for the Personal plan I would not have even looked at WPEngine a year ago.  Why pay that much for hosting when you can find $5/month hosting around every corner?  Updates?  I can do that.  Caching? Backups?  check and check.  What does WPEngine have to offer?

While in the proposal stage of acquiring a new client, this client got hacked.  Luckily to fix the hack WordPress just need to be upgraded.  But instead of redesigning the site, the top priority became finding a new host that offers better security.  This client was on a reputable host, so $5/month hosting like HostGator or GoDaddy would not satisfy the client’s peace of mind.

Finding WPEngine

My favorite WordPress focused company, WooThemes, had a recommended hosts page.  Among the hosts were Pressable (previously known as ZippyKid ) and WPEngine.  Pressable was the cheaper of the two offering SSL and CDN on their cheapest plan.  As ZippyKid they also touted having great security as a selling point.  However, as Pressable, they had no info whatsoever about their security.  Not even their “malware scanning”!  So wait, how can we justify to the client that Pressable is any better than their previous host?  Crap!  (I know no host is hack-proof, but we gotta have a reason for choosing a specific host).

Enter research into WPEngine.  The first thing I did on their website was search for “security” in their blog.  What surprised me was the amount of posts on their blog about security.  Do a search on security on their site and you’ll see what I mean.  Not only do they talk about recent security issues, but how the community is dealing with security issues and details on how their security system and processes are protecting their clients.  That in itself gave me peace of mind that these guys prioritize security.  The icing on the cake was reading “WordPress Hacked? We’ll fix it free!“.

Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side

I usually have buyers remorse especially when I could have gotten something cheaper and don’t really utilize all the features I have purchased.  But last year, before I tried WPEngine, I had a client that didn’t have a website yet, needed SSL and was OK with spending some money on quality hosting.  So I went with Pressable with this previous client (especially since the Personal plan at WPEngine doesn’t support SSL).  I have since migrated this client to WPEngine.  Below are some comparisons between Pressable and WPEngine (as of this posting).

Pressable vs WPEngine

  • Backups
    • WPEngine – At the click of a button, free.  Also automatically scheduled daily for  you.
    • Pressable – Inactive by default.  Need to back up to Amazon or Rackspace.  (in other words, not exactly free).
  • Domain settings
    • WPEngine – Doesn’t handle email or any of your domain settings
    • Pressable – If you want, you can direct your nameservers to Pressable and they can adjust your domain settings (like where to point your email) for you.
  • Git Support
    • WPEngine – Deploy your website using git ( i haven’t tried this yet)
    • Pressable – None.
  • Error Logs
    • WPEngine – View your php error logs from the User Portal
    • Pressable – None.
  • Stats
    • WPEngine – Visits and Bandwidth stats for you to monitor and download.
    • Pressable – None.
  • Speed
    • WPEngine – I have tested about a dozen different websites so far and all have a load time of less than 1 second from within the US.
    • Pressable – I have tested one website on here and the load time is above 2.5 seconds.

Both Pressable and WPEngine are great, but dollar for dollar WPEngine seems much more worth it.  If you have multiple clients, the Professional Plan makes it hands down worth it since you can install SSL and use a CDN for free.  Each install breaks down to $10/month.  You may be thinking you can do caching, and backups on your own, but what if something goes wrong with those plugins?  How many times have you actually restored a backup from that plugin?  How many times have you fixed a hack or prevented one?  How much is a peaceful mind worth?  WPEngine can handle all this for you.

Pre-pay for WP ENGINE HOSTING for 1 year and GET 2 MONTHS FREE!

Happily Ever After

As you know, I didn’t go to WPEngine because of the speed, but I was curious to see what differences it could make by simply moving a site over.  I was pleasantly surprised to see the site loaded almost 40% faster.  And believe me, it’s noticeable for this particular site.

To get a more accurate reading of the speed changes you should sign up for a free account at Pingdom and monitor your website for a week or so.  Then sign up to WPEngine (60 day free trial) and again try it at pingdom.  If you’re not happy with the results you can always back out of WPEngine.

Original Site
Moved to WPEngine
Moved to WPEngine

 

Update: More on Security

After using WPEngine for about 6 months I am fully satisfied with the security on WPEngine for WordPress websites.  WPEngine stays on top of plugin vulnerabilities and they scan your installation daily.   here are some examples:

  • TimThumb script:  If you install a theme or plugin with the TimThumb script (a popular PHP script used to resize images known for having some huge vulnerabilities in the past) WPEngine will detect what version it is, and if it’s not the newest version, they will automatically update it.
  • JetPack plugin:  Jetpack recently had a vulnerability in their email sharing feature.  WPEngine was on top of it notified their customers of it while disabling that feature for them.

Also, WPEngine hosting is secure enough to be PCI compliant “as long as no payment card data is stored, hosted, or otherwise processed by WP Engine…”.   See more at WPEngine and PCI Compliance

Update:  Speed

WPEngine now offers a tool to test the speed of your website.

 

Disclaimer:  I have become a WPEngine affiliate because I do believe in their product.  Links to WPEngine on this site are probably affiliate links.

Easy WordPress Localization

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If you want to localize a plugin or theme or even just change some wording around, or if you are starting from scratch the easiest thing to do is install the Codestyle Localization plugin.

If starting from scratch, just  make sure your plugin or theme loads the file using

[prettify class=”php”] <?php load_plugin_textdomain( $domain, $abs_rel_path, $plugin_rel_path ) ?> [/prettify]

Once that line of code is in the plugin or theme go to Tools->Localization and you should see your plugin or theme listed.

Find your plugin or theme and click on the Add New Language buttton.

Click Rescan.  Have it scan the files.

Click Edit

Click on generate mo-file.

Then you’re all done.

Environment Setup

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This week I had to temporarily work on a new laptop so I had to set up my dev environment from scratch.  Of course, I wanted the same tools and apps I had on my permanent environment.  I find that these tools and apps stick with you for some time so below is a list of apps that I needed to install on my new development environment.

  • Dropbox – to easily share files between computers both locally and over the web.
  • FileZilla – to upload files to the servers
  • MAMP – to test your code locally before uploading to the live servers
    • See MAMP Optimizations to start MAMP on startup without the GUI.
    • Remember to set the <Directory> override to AllowOverride All if you want your WordPress or other sites to use .htaccess.
  • SourceTree – to push/pull your code so it stays in synch with other environments you may have or other teammates.
    • Set up your SSH keys using BitBucket’s tutorial.
  • Sublime Text 2  – to edit your files.
  • WordPress – not so much a tool, but it is part of the testing environment.
  • Slack or HipChat -or whatever trending chat program.  to communicate to others
  • Virtual Box – To run those pesky versions of Internet Explorer.
    • Then head on to get free VMs from Microsoft so you can get all the lovely versions of IE.
  • ImageOptim – To optimize images, taking up less disk space and load faster.

HTML 5 Flash Fallback Video Player w/ RTMP

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There are a ton of video player that use HTML5 with flash fallback.  A few years ago I found one named JW Player.  This was a great player that was fully featured.  Keyword being “was”.  I was developing a website that would be using this player, but for the time being I used the free version of the player because I was hoping for a promo code to show up.  As I was developing the site, the company that owns JW Player upped the price from a simple $79 fee to a yearly $99 fee.  This was a big jump in price and developers complained a whole lot, including myself.  (i got the CEO to respond! woohoo!)  but no changes came of it (as of now anyway).

 

When One Door Closes…

Onto a search for a new javascript player that could do HTML5, Flash fallback, and RTMP streaming when flash is used.  A few players I found were jPlayer, videoJS, MediaElement.js, Flowplayer.  Flowplayer costed about $99(to remove the watermark) plus I wasn’t sure if I needed to purchase the flash player for flash fallback.  Confusion is not good to a potential buyer.  jPlayer was the most popular of the free ones, but I couldn’t get the RTMP to work with my video for some reason.  I got the sample to work, but not mine, weird.  videoJs scared me because I saw a post were the flash fallback used Flowplayer which means I could not use it commercially without purchasing.  Would’ve been a legal disaster if I used it and didn’t pay for it.  MediaElementJs was the only one I had no opinion.  It was actually the least popular of all the open source players.  But then I saw that it would be in WordPress core 3.6!  Case closed.  MediaElement.js would be the replacement.

 

Another one Opens

As it turns out MediaElement does not get Firefox to fallback to flash if I use a mp4 video file.  It simply errors out.  It does however, support the webm format.  The WebM format is sponsored by Google and is supposedly the next industry standard for web videos so it would be a good thing if I converted to it.  I found a free converter called Miro Video Converter to convert my mp4 to webm format.  In the end I have a video player that will be integrated into WordPress, a more standard video format, smaller footprint for HTML5 users (mp4 size: 163mb webm:78mb), and no money spent… but a whole lot of time spent looking for this… oh well, the client wins at least.

 

The Old

JW Player, mp4 format

The New

MediaElementJS (WordPress 3.6), webm format, Miro Video Converter

LemonStand eCommerce Notes

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Lemonstand is an eCommerce solution that lets you try before you buy.  It is very simple to use and virtually no learning curve to develop for.  It uses PHP and mySQL.  Check it out for yourself here.

Below are just a bunch of notes I jotted down while using and developing for Lemonstand.

Docs are located here:  http://lemonstandapp.com/docs/api_function_and_class_reference/
http://lemonstandapp.com/docs/developer_s_guide/

Editor buttons are editable in:

System/Settings/HTML Editor Settings

 

Enabling file-based tempaltes

  1. create an empty directory on the server – not web accessible, php writable
  2. Enable file-based templates on the System/Settings/CMS Settings page.

@font-face

If you need extra file extensions for fonts to be accessible, you need to edit the .htaccess file.
http://forum.lemonstandapp.com/topic/760-font-face/page__p__3768__hl__fonts__fromsearch__1#entry3768

 

Global Content

http://forum.lemonstandapp.com/topic/2392-global-editable-region-how-to/page__p__11010__hl__%2Bpartial+%2Bcontent_block__fromsearch__1#entry11010