I guess all developers want to be a part of creating something unique. I know we do and have talked  on and off about creating our own Parent Theme Framework, but never got started.

After much discussion on July 10th 2012 project Parent Theme Framework commenced. We had allocated 8 to 12 weeks of time to the project and made a start (ha ha!).

Starting Point

Like all things we started with nothing more than an idea and 4 core guiding concepts:

1. That a complete novice should be able download and install our Parent Theme Framework and create a beautiful, unique and fully mobile responsive website without ever having to look at a single line of code.

2. We wanted to build a Framework that allowed users to be able to do everything by point and click that we as advanced CSS and .php and JavaScript programmers can do with code.

3. The Parent Theme Framework had to be 100% responsive. It is a core belief with the ever rising popularity of mobile devices no new site should be built that does not break down to it’s own version in a phone or a tablet.

4. That we must be able to push out upgrades and bug fixes for the Parent Theme (and Childs) by auto updates just like we do our plugins.

Resources

With those 4 guiding concepts established the next step became clear. We needed to build a rock solid code foundation and settle on a guiding design style. Because we do this stuff everyday that was actually surprisingly easy.

The Code foundation:
Our initial intention was to build a framework from scratch but when we looked at it we realized we could save a lot of time if we could find a suitable open source framework to build on. We looked at a lot, evaluating everything on its ability to allow us to achieve our 4 guiding concepts. In the end we could not go past the WooFramework. It just ticked all the boxes – powerful, lightweight, flexible with rock solid code. In the end the choice was easy, we would build the Parent Theme Framework on the WooFramework.

Guiding Design Concept:
The Pinterest site. As a designer I just fell head over heals in love with the user interface the very first time I saw it. The masonry block style layout is perfect for responsive web design and creating a multitude of design layouts. The clever use of style, transitions and images is just inspirational.

 Stage 1.

Roll forward to the end of September when the 12 weeks allocated time was up. The Parent Theme Framework had taken shape but was obviously a long way from being finished. It was time to review and evaluate the project. Making a long story short we liked what we were seeing and decided that if we threw another 12 weeks at it we could complete it. The goal was set – push on full steam and have it ready for release by new year (ha ha again!).

Without drawing breathe we plunge into stage 2. But that is for another post.

a3rev - WordPress Plugins and Themes

Today marks a major step in the evolution of a3rev plugins and themes with the launch of the a3rev support forum. Looking back it is was just 10 short months ago that we got serious about selling Pro Licenses for the plugins that we were developing for our client work. That decision has changed our lives in ways we could not have imagined.

One thing that we did not expect when we started out was that we would actually get to know many of  the thousands of people from right across the world who have become a3rev Pro Licenses holders over the past 10 months.

Pro Licenses includes advanced plugin features, auto version updates and importantly same day priority support. Giving you outstanding support has been a priority right from the start. Have we always achieved that? No, not always.

Initially we did support via direct email which was fine when we were small, then as we started to grow we expanded that to a support forum which was created from a hack of the WordPress post comments function. We added that to a HELP tab on each plugins page.

With the rapid growth in numbers of Pro License holders both of these solutions have become unsustainable. We cannot keep up with answering support requests / questions via email, to many started to slip through the cracks. The WordPress comments hack is not a great tool for  searching for answers or allowing other users who want to to help out other a3rever’s with their issues.

Forums

Over the past 5 months we have looked at every support solution that we could find, both free and paid. We have looked at and tested help desk software, email support solutions, live chat and forums. The solution we believe best suites the way we interact with a3rever’s  is a forum. Having settled on that we have spent the last 2 months looking for a forum that would allow us to give a3rever’s the priority support that we believe they deserve.

bbPress Forums

No matter how many forums we looked at we kept coming back to bbPress because fundamentally it is almost pure WordPress. The plugin lead creator is Matt Mullenweg the founder of WordPress. The plugins brief description says it all for us.

bbPress is focused on ease of integration, ease of use, web standards, and speed. We’re keeping things as small and light as possible while still allowing for great add-on features through WordPress’s extensive plugin system. What does all that mean? bbPress is lean, mean, and ready to take on any job you throw at it.

The only thing that sucks about bbPress is the forum search function, but that is no surprise as WordPress search sucks. Not a problem for us as we will use the Predictive Search engine we have developed to build a bbPress Predictive Search plugin plus add any other goodies our users want via a plugin.

Please note with the forum now live we no longer do support via direct email. Click here to join us on the a3rev support forum.

a3rev - WordPress Plugins and Themes

It has taken exactly 17 full days but now all of our WooCommerce plugins, Pro and Lite (16 in total) plus our Responsi  themes are all 100% WooCommerce version 2.0 compatible. This includes full backward compatibility for those who are yet to take the plunge to upgrade to the new version.

WooCommerce V2.0 is a huge fundamental change to the plugins code. I sure hope it is worth the effort. Our plugins and themes are all coded to the WooCodex and yet there was not one that did not have compatibility issues with the new version. God help bespoke Theme developers – I guarantee that if they have not upgraded their theme code that the new Woo v2.0 will break it, same with plugin developers who operate outside of the Woo core extension developers circle.

See on the WooCommerce WordPress support forums that there has been well over 100 new support threads created in the 48 hours since release, with many more to come I’d think.

We do sincerely hope that all of this effort is worth it.  We also trust that the WooCommerce team will opt for a much more gradual, manageable and staged evolving of the plugins code in the future.

a3rev - WordPress Plugins and Themes

WooCommerce Compare Products, the one and only Product Comparison Extension for WooCommerce just got even better with the release of V2.0.6.  This Upgrade is a Major feature upgrade and is timed to co-inside with the release of WooCommerce v2.0.

The WooCommerce upgrade features the new WordPress pop-up tool PrettyPhoto. This was a problem for us as the Compare Products extension already supported 2 pop-up tools ‘Fancybox’ and lightbox’.

The Challenge was that we wanted to add a new feature to completely re-invigorate the way that users viewed the Product Comparison tables.  That feature we wanted to add was ‘Fixed Features Title Column.’  This feature enables users to easily view and compare 3 + products in the pop up window by making the First Column of Feature in the table fixed and allowing all the products to scroll under the feature titles.

We ran into a real problem here. What we found was that adding a 3rd pop-up script to the extension and trying to make all 3 pop-ups show the ‘Fixed Column Feature’ made all 3 scripts buggy and rather unstable.  The solution we came up with was to get rid of all 3 pop-up scripts and open the table in a new browser window.

That was easy enough – BUT – we then found that the only way to show the table with the ‘Fixed Column Feature’ was to show it in an inner container. That in itself was relatively easy – BUT – and an inner container has its own set of horizontal and vertical scroll bars and the window like all windows has horizontal and vertical scroll bars. Looked terrible and is confusing to users which defeated the desired result of giving the user a great Product Compare experience.

We went looking for an open source script that would support showing the table without using an inner container. In other words using the window scroll bars to control the Comparison table view. What we found that no one has ever been able to build it though plenty have tried. Eventually after 4 days we got it and it makes for a very beautiful Comparison table view. See this quick video I made that shows you what I mean.

You can try it for yourself here on the site I made the video on. The Free Lite version available from WordPress has the 3 pop-up tools without the Fixed Features Title Column feature and it works fine – it was adding that feature that caused the problems.

Using a window to show the Comparison table in the Pro Version also offers Pro version License holders these added advantages.

Here is a full list of features added in version 2.0.6

* Feature: All plugin code updated to be 100% compatible with WooCommerce version 2.0 and backwards.
* Feature: Removed Compare pop-up fly out powered by Fancybox and Lightbox tools and replaced with Product Comparisons opening in a new browser window. WooCommerce Version 2.0 uses the new WordPress PrettyPhoto as the pop-up tool and in testing we found supporting 3 pop-up scripts, PrettyPhoto, Fancybox and Lightbox was very buggy and troublesome. So we have removed all 3 pop-up scripts and replaced with open in browser window. The result is around 4,000 less lines of code in the plugin and a beautifully robust comaparison result presentation.
* Feature: Added 2 show Comparison in new widow options. Option 1. Show the product Comparison in an on-screen pop-up window or Option 2. Show Comparisons in a new window.
* Feature: Added Fixed Features Title column. This means when more than 3 products are being compared in the pop up window or on-page comparison the products scroll left under the Features Title column – this means the user always can see what product features are being compared, beacuse the are fixed while the products and each feature values scroll under them.
* Feature: Added Comparison Table scrolls horizontal and vertical via the window scrollers and not by scrollers on an inner container. This is a great UI enhancement as it does away with inner containers – no more having to use the window scrollers to get to the inner container scroll bars which was confusing and messy.
* Feature: Completely reworked the Print Product Comparison function. The Print function now works beautifully with added print style. Prints the entire tall of 3 products Comparison columns regardless of the tall of the columns.

Very big upgrade but a huge step forward for the extension.

a3rev - WordPress Plugins and Themes

WooCommerce Predictive Search is already our number 1 selling plugin. Version 2.0 is a major feature upgrade to the plugin the we are pretty excited about and it is almost her.

The WooCommerce Predictive Search plugin currently does a good job of searching by Product Names, Product SKU, Product Category and Product tags as well WordPress posts and pages.

Over the last 4 months we have had many request from pro version users for even more search features. Theses are just some of them.

You name, someone wants WooCommerce Predictive Search to search for it.

Looking at all these requests it struck us that  what people really want to do is to be able to customize their site search in any way that they believe their customers search for products on their site.

In thinking about how to satisfy that we have developed what I think is a good solution for all. Predictive Search ‘Focus Keywords’ just like the SEO plugins ‘Focus Keywords’ except it is for site search not Google search. We have built it, tested it and it works really well. It is ready for release in our next major version update version 2.0. Here is the changelog entry

*Feature: Optimize your entire site search with WooCommerce Predictive Search ‘Focus Keywords’ – This feature allows users to optimize their ‘site search’ by adding a ‘Focus Keywords’ function to any product page, post, wp- page just like an SEO plugin except it is for site search not external search engines. This includes a new Predictive Search meta section on each product page, post and page.

How it works is if for example you have a product called ABC Widget and the product is SKU AP2401 but the public knows it as ‘black cat widget’ – you put that in the ‘Focus keywords’ and the product will show in the results when a user types ‘black cat’.

We then got to thinking – What about users who using an SEO plugin had already added ‘Focus Keywords’ for each product, page or post. Why couldn’t we make Predictive Search assign those SEO keywords to the site search. The difficulty in doing this was that Predictive Search has to be able to find and read the meta of each plugin. So what we did was looked at the 2 most popular SEO plugins – Yoast’s WordPress SEO and All in One SEO. We have built that feature and it will be in the version 2.0 release. Here is the changelog entry

* Feature: Configure the plugin to use Focus Keywords that are set in SEO plugins. Added the ability for to include any ‘Focus Keywords’ that users may have set while optimizing their site for search engines using either of these 2 leading SEO plugins. * Yoasts WordPress SEO * All in One SEO.

Version 2.0 is a massive upgrade – here are the other new features already built into the new version

Feature: ‘Pretty URL’s’ to replace the All Search results pages parameter driven URLS
Feature: Added the ability to add text content that shows inside the Search box. Added as a Global setting or can be individually set on Widgets, Shortcode or the Search Function.
Feature:Major UI upgrade. We have completely rewritten the plugins admin panel and the Predictive Search tab on the WooCommerce settings now has its own nav bar just like the WooCommerce Payment gateways. The tabs are …. Settings | All Results Search Pages | Exclude Content | | Search Function | Styling
Feature: Added a new styling lib for dropdowns and Options – this was important because it now uses the same lib as WooCommerce uses – makes excluding content a very easy thing to do for each search category.
Feature:Added Exclude content from any product page, post or page from the new Predictive Search meta box.

We are currently working on these new features

* Feature: Search box and search box drop down custom WYSIWYG styling options.
* Feature: Option to either add a default image for ‘Tag’ results or only show tag results as the tag title -> no image.
* Feature: Add Tabs for the All Results Search pages instead of the Page title links. Use the custom style of the themes WooCommerce product page tabs.

The last thing we have to do is then test it all for WooCommerce v2.0 backward compatibility.We are hoping to release WooCommerce Predictive Search by the end of this week if all goes well.

WooCommerce Predictive Search Version 2.0 upgrade will see a substantial lift in the plugins License pricing to reflect the new features and useability of the plugin. So it you have been thinking of upgrading your license I’d suggest you do so before the release.

a3rev - WordPress Plugins and Themes

WooCommerce and WP e-Commerce users SHOULD NOT update to the WordPress version 3.5 ‘Elvin’ released today. There are known issues with both plugins and you should wait for the upgrade from WooCommerce and WP e-Commerce before upgrading.

Our WooCommerce and WP e-Commerce plugins are child plugins of those 2 e-Commerce plugins and therefore we cannot release our 3.5 compatible updates until we are able to test them with the 3.5 compatible versions of those 2 parent plugins.

If you do update before the release of the updates – make sure you do a full site backup, because you are going to want to restore.

We have tested all of our plugins with the WordPress 3.5 Candidate R2 and R3 and made the necessary updates – but we cannot release until we can test with the3.5 compatible version of the respective parent e-Commerce plugin.

So please – just chill and wait for the WooCommerce and WP e-Commerce updates before you update WordPress to 3.5 ‘Elvin’.

a3rev - WordPress Plugins and Themes

On Thursday of this week we passed another bit of a milestone with A3 Rev Plugins passing 50,000 downloads on wordpress.org. Currently an A3 plugin is downloaded from WordPress about every 3 and a half minutes – 24 hours a day 7 days a week. That is getting to be almost good.

Over the past 2 months the Dynamic Gallery plugins (WooCommerce and WP e-Commerce versions) have emerged as our most popular plugins, with both of those plugins looking like they will hit 10,000 downloads each in the next week or so.

In the post announcing 30,000 downloads on the 14th October I wrote:

“Currently on track to release 2 more ‘Lite’ version on WordPress this month and are aiming at releasing 1-2 new plugins each month.”

As you can see from the table below that has not happened.  We released 1 new plugin in November – WooCommerce Widget Product Slideshow. That is not to say we have not been developing new products – we have and you’ll see them come online over the next four weeks. Below is a list of plugins that are finished but won’t be released until after WP v3.5  is released into the wild.

• WP e-Commerce Widget Product Slideshow (Pro and Lite).
• Rooms and Bookings (Pro and Lite)
• People Showcase (Pro and Lite)
• Clients and Sponsors Showcase. (Pro and Lite)
• Projects Showcase. (Pro and Lite)
• WooCommerce Email Inquiry and Cart Options (Lite Version)
• WP Posts and Page Views (pro and Lite)
• A3 Image Slideshow (Pro Version only)

We have also invested a lot of time over the last 8 weeks in upgrading the features of our existing plugins.

Below is a bit of a time line for the A3 Free ‘Lite’ version plugins.  They are listed in order of release date, number of downloads as at 14th October and as of today.

There is a number of other plugins and also a huge project in the pipeline – but you’ll hear more about that as we get closer.

a3rev - WordPress Plugins and Themes

To Rus Foster,

Hello Rus Foster (pictured). I just want to take a few minutes to explain from a customers point of view how appalling your VPS user interface and customer service is. Three hours after trying to create a new VPS to add to my account I have no VPS, have accrued a USD$97.56 bill with VPS and am completely frustrated and bewildered.

To explain.

I have been a client of vps.net for the past 2 years. During that time I have paid an average of USD $170-$180 a month for the one 10 node VPS instance I have in the USA.

This afternoon I decided that I wanted to create a second VPS to host this site based on the recommendation of Yoast whose site is hosted there. Simple no doubt.

VPS provide a nice admin interface to create the new VPS – but that is where it stops. In my opinion VPS could not make the process any more difficult, frustrating even if they tried to design an absolutely impossible interface. It is mind numbingly stupid.

The create a new VPS format lets you go through the whole process – and upon creation you get an error message at the end. ‘Can’t create nodes on the fly.’ and something about needing a credit because I make the hideous crime of paying my monthly bill via Paypal.

I might add at no stage at this point was there any sort of decent explanation of why VPS would not allow the creation of the new VPS – I mean they created the goobly gook that says ‘can’t create nodes on the fly’ why not go to that bit of extra trouble to explain to the customer in the pop up why and how to remedy the situation. I mean really how hard is that – Its actually called customer service.

So fair enough I think – I’ll create a credit – but do you think you can find where to do that – no.

So I try to create the VPS again – same result.

By now I have 2 emails from VPS telling me

Dear Steve

Thank you for being a VPS.NET client! This e-mail is to inform you that invoice (# 8797-501136) has been generated on (Dec/04/2012).

INVOICE DETAILS
—————————————————————–
Your Client ID: ####
Inv. Due Date: Dec/08/2012
Amount Due: $ 32.52

On Dec/08/2012 we will attempt to charge your credit card on file for the full amount. If you would like to make
alternative payment arrangements please login to your VPS.NET account at https://control.vps.net/login to edit your billing details.

Easy enough I think Rus Foster – I’ll just go to my dashboard > Invoices and pay the invoice and all will be sweet.

You guessed it – no sign of any invoice.

So then I resort to the the instant chat function on the front of your website where I encounter Dane S. who less than helpfully informs me that I need to contact the Billing department. When I explain to him that all I’m trying to do is buy another VPS off VPS.NET and pay for it he then tells me I need to use a credit card and hangs up on me.

Rus Foster I did say that the system was incredibly stupid and not at all user friendly but I did not swear and was not abusive – and do not believe I should have been ‘hung up on’ – for god sake I’m a long standing client who is frustrated because I can’t do more business with your company.

So I go back to VPS.NET and add a credit card and go through the process again.

This time I get the incredibly unhelpful message – ‘An error occurred processing you credit card‘ and just a few minutes later another email from VPS (the third)

Dear Steve

Thank you for being a VPS.NET client! This e-mail is to inform you that invoice (# 8797-501136) has been generated on (Dec/04/2012).

INVOICE DETAILS
—————————————————————–
Your Client ID:
Inv. Due Date: Dec/08/2012
Amount Due: $ 32.52

Oh great – I now have USD $97.56 worth of invoices that VPS is planning to debit my credit card for on the 8th of December and no new VPS.

So I go back to my account and attempt to delete the credit card info – VPS are to smart for that – no way to delete your credit card.

So I change my preferred payment method to PayPal and what do you know – VPS.NET has no record of that payment method even though I’ve used it to pay them every month for over 2 years. VPS requires me to validate the email address again – in fact they lock me out of my account with a great big “Access Denied” like I’m some undesirable.

So I go back to the live chat to friendly old Dane S. The first thing I ask him is not to be so rude as to hang up on me again. I tell him what has happened and guess what Rus – he hangs up.

To Dane S credit he did validate my IP address and give me access to my account again.

So here I sit 3 hours of my life wasted on trying to give VPS more money each month – in that time I’ve accrued a US$97 debt with VPS and have nothing to show for it except.

• Getting ‘hung up’ on twice
• Getting locked out of my VPS account.
• Have a USD $97.56 debt with VPS.NET
• Have no new VPS

Seriously Rus Foster is that anyway to treat a long standing client? I have to be perfectly straight with you – its completely unacceptable and its not the first time but we won’t go into that.

I am currently looking for another hosting company in the USA to give my money to each month. I have a terrific company here in Australia where we have our Australian clients hosted on the cloud we built with them,  just wished they were in the USA. But they are not and I need to find a company who actually makes life easy for their clients – not a company like VPS who makes everything just as humanly difficult as possible.

Anyone have suggestions?

By the way the photo of Rus Foster came from this website Daily Host News

a3rev - WordPress Plugins and Themes

This week we flew past 30,000 plugin downloads and things were so hectic we did not even notice. Sunday provides a chance to catch up and look back on the week and see … yes wow, we’ve hit that milestone during the week.

We started plugin development in January of 2011 which lead to the launch of the WP User Reviews plugin. We launched the plugin in May of 2011 and tried to market it off a purpose built site via ‘Clickbank’ and from the A3 Rev site. To be frank that marketing strategy was a disaster realizing about 2 sales a month on average.

We did no plugin development work at all in the second half of 2011, but early this year we thought when had found a plugin worth developing. Looking at the Magento e-Commerce platform one of the most popular features was and is the Compare Products feature. We had a look around and found that there was no Compare Products plugin for WP e-Commerce or WooCommerce and so spent all of January and a good part of the next few months building Compare Products for both platforms.

This time our marketing strategy was to release a Free ‘Lite’ version of the plugin on WordPress with a ‘Pro’ Version upgrade available. To be frank that has been a wonderful success. Today we have 9 ‘Lite’ version plugins available on WordPress and as a result of the exposure we sell ‘Pro’ version plugins to clients right across the world.

Below is a bit of a time line of ‘Lite’ version plugins. These are available for free download on wordpress.org. They are listed in order of release date and number of downloads is at the time of writing this.

Currently on track to release 2 more ‘Lite’ version on WordPress this month and are aiming at releasing 1-2 new plugins each month.

a3rev - WordPress Plugins and Themes

Cloudfare CDN Review.

Apologies to all for being blocked from the a3rev site as spammers over the past 4 days. We have been trying to implement a CDN  solution on the site and had installed the Pro version of CloudFlare.

What is a CDN

CDN is a caching service. It is a network of servers that stores web pages. When a visitor accesses one of your web pages, the CDN directs the request to a server that’s nearest to the location of the visitor.

Sounds simple – nope.

Cloudflare has built in security which blocks all suspicious visitors and you can set your security level. I’d set the a3rev sites security at ‘Moderate’. What we discovered is that progressively since installing CloudFlare it has decided that everyone in the world except those that reside in North America are spammers and should be blocked.

As a result anyone outside of the USA or Canada who tried to purchase software or post to the help forums was being blocked as a spammer. When I contacted CloudFlare support about this they responded very quickly to their credit. The advice I got to fix the situation was not in my mind satisfactory. It was basically:

1. Set the security to Low

2. Go through and manually mark each country in the world as a trusted source of traffic. This has to be done one country at a time.

3. Load each IP that has been blocked as a ‘trusted’ IP. (How would I know the IP of people who have been blocked.)

I had previously used CloudFlare and found these ‘trusted’ settings as unreliable. We would mark a specific IP address as ‘trusted’ and CloudFlare would still block it. They may have fixed this but I was not prepared to try it.

Cloudflare CDN Review Recommendation:

Whilst CloudFlare is a great concept and cutting edge technology and offer free accounts my recommendation is that if you want people from around the world to be able to access your site – do not use it.

You could be more patient than me and go through and manually add each of the 196 countries in the world (or the countries you trust) to the ‘trusted’ menu. How offensive to not trust the entire population of a country. You could also add IP ranges and individual IP’s to the ‘trusted’ list. As I said I’m not convinced that this feature actually works – it may – but it didn’t in the past.

My Cloudflare CDN review recommendation is from our experience, if you run an e-commerce store or a forum – DO NOT use it. We estimate that using CloudFlare for just 4 days has cost us around USD $400 in lost sales from our online store, let alone all of those existing clients who have been blocked from posting support requests – rejected as spammers.

Not to mention blocked traffic.

The other concerning thing is that with CloudFlare installed our website traffic for yesterday – Monday was 50% down on the lowest number of Monday traffic recorded over the last 6 Mondays – just a coincidence, maybe?

I suggested to CloudFlare support that they should have a BIG WARNING notice about this on their sign up page.

a3rev - WordPress Plugins and Themes