Honey Bee Buzz Marketing Blog

I’m the Imelda Marcos of WordPress Plugins

I just realized that I collect WordPress plugins the way some women collect shoes or purses.

Does that mean I’m a Geek? Dang, I think it’s official. I’ve been skirting this issue for a long time. I like shoes and purses, too! Well, not so much purses, but now that I have a fabulous Omnia cell phone, that I loooove, but which is too More »

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.8.1 Release Candidate 1

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.8.1 Release Candidate 1.  It’s coming, people, it’s coming!  Hold tight until it comes out, and check in here before you willy-nilly go following the dashboard instructions on your WordPress site and upgrade.  Over the course of the past 3 years, WordPress has consistently had better upgrades during the x.x.1 phase.  Hold tight.

Wait on Your WordPress Upgrade

We love WordPress.  Totally.  And really believe in the structure and benefits of Open Source programming.  But like any complex undertaking, WordPress upgrades usually need some tweaking, even after hundreds (thousands?) of beta testers have run through a version.  Beta Testers are usually advanced users who really know what they’re doing and have the time, ability, and desire to play around with software, looking for problems and suggesting ways to fix them.  The upside is that they usually know more about how to do this than the regular user.  The downside is that the regular user has neither the time nor patience nor ability nor resources to recover from glitches that power users automatically avoid by using the very best procedures (which regular users generally don’t even know exist), and power users are able to quickly diagnose and recover from pitfalls, should they not have seen them coming.

And come they do.

Glitches occur with almost every WordPress upgrade.  They’re par for the course.  And for the average user, they’re easy to avoid.

Just don’t do any 2.x upgrades.  Wait until they come out with More »

The Market Theme – Tour

Here’s a paid alternative to WordPress eCommerce.  Sounds like

some of the speed bumps people hit with WPeC are addressed, including good support.  We have not checked it ourselves. Looks

like more of an out-of-the-box ecommerce solution.  Themes (the look and feel of a WordPress blog site) are included/built in, in addition to the shopping cart system.

Any Market Theme users out there?  What do you think of it?

The Market Theme – Tour.

eShop for WordPress

Create an ecommerce site quickly and relatively easily on WordPress with the eShop plugin by Rich Pedley at Quirm.net.  This is a viable competitor to Instinct’s WP eCommerce, but it does not have a donation setting/capability.  This is too bad, because it’s an otherwise great plugin, and a great way to get one’s online store up and running.  The benefit to having a donation setting is that people can pay for your services online, as you can with this blog.  Anybody who’s already doing business online or likes eBay probably already has a PayPal account, and making it super easy for them to pay you in a secure, reliable, and familiar environment.  For instance, one of our HoneyBeeBuzz Marketing clients is using our online shop to buy a banner ad we are designing for them.

Rich at eShop provides excellent support, which you can find in his WordPress plugins support forum.  This is in great contrast to the WPeC support forum which is full of frustrated people whose questions can languish unanswered for months.  Also in contrast, Rich seems to have a very positive, mature and constructive attitude.  WPeC is steadily getting better and better, however, both in terms of response time and style and the features are hard to beat.

eShop has the support of a number of key and highly respected WordPress players, including Mike Cherim.

Here are some sample eShops:

http://greenmethods.com/site/shop/

http://thecabinetofcuriosities.co.uk/shop/

Here are some sample WPeC shops:

HoneyBeeBuzz Marketing Services and Products

GreenBuyDesign Store

Do you have an online store already?  What shopping cart system are you using?  What types of products or services do you  sell?