WordPress Plugins in Development

We've had a good show with John, the full transcript is below:

Good evening and this is the first Press This it seems. We’re here for a lot of good shows on Word Press for the coming year or so at least. I’m planning to bring on guests whom you haven’t too much yet in the other Word Press podcasts around, bringing you some news from the Word Press community and have some fun.

If you want to send me feedback, please do. You can find my site at Yoast.com and send me feedback through the contact form there. I’m very happy to hear from you and tell me what you think of this show and what you would like to hear in it.

And without any further adieu I would like to get onto our first guest of this show. A guy who I’ve heard talk for the first time for real 4 minutes ago but whose plug ins I’ve been recommending for ages it seems to me. So with me on the show today is John Godley, welcome John.

Thank you.

John for those people listening to this who don’t know you, can you introduce yourself quickly?

I’ve been using Word Press for the past 4 years now and writing plug ins probably ever since the start of using it. Recently I’ve just started working for Automatic so I’ll be involved even more in the Word Press world.

Yeah I was quite excited about hearing you joining Automatic. It seems that Automatic is always good at finding the very best coders out there even though they’re not the most prolific bloggers per se.

Yes that’s true.

You posted about it on your blog but tell us a bit about how you got hired for Word Press. This was a quite interesting story.

Yeah early this year I think it was April I had an email from (name) who contacted me to say that we should have a talk. So we talked on Skype for a bit and he said he was interested in the things I’ve already created and if I was interested in working part time for him. Obviously I said yes and things moved on from there.

Cool so you work part time for Automatic and part time for yourself as a consultant?

I was working for some other company but yeah essentially.

You’ve written quite a few plug ins and one of the few plug in authors out there who is more prolific then me I think. People know you or at least the people who read my blog might know you for your HeadSpace plug in and your redirection plug in but you’ve written a couple more. Which one do you like most of all of them?

Which one do I like most? I don’t know because quite a few of them I spent an awful lot of time on them. So for the majority of them they’re not just small plug ins, they’re big heavyweight plug ins. So I spent an awful lot of time on more than half of them. So I suppose I like all the ones I spent most of the time on.

If I had to pick one, I don’t know but at the moment I guess my Search (5:06 – inaudible) plug in that’s the one I spent the most time on recently.

How does the process of getting a new plug in going start for you? It is always what I find interesting in plug in authors, how do you get the idea for a plug in? Is it just an itch you have in a project you’re doing?

Pretty much I see something that can help me, something in Word Press that isn’t implemented or something I can do that improves it or helps it. I start from that and then just add more and more features onto it and I plug in write documentation etc. and that’s how it starts.

And you have your own issue tracking and stuff like that because one of the things I noticed with you is that you update your plug ins an awful lot. Do you fix bugs every day in all these plug ins?

I try not to but yes I have issue tracker. I installed it because I found myself spending a lot of time supporting plug ins as opposed to creating plug ins. So the issue tracker was my attempt to try and reduce the amount of time I spent on support and concentrate it into groups of effort.

So now that you’re working for Automatic can we expect Automatic to do some improvement on issue tracking for plugins as well?

I’m sure that’s in the works they’re always trying to improve things. They’ve introduced to the new change log feature which will be a help I think towards that so that people can actually see what’s happened between each plug in version. So hopefully that will be one step towards an improvement all over.

What would you like to see Automatic do? I assume you can’t take any decisions on that just now but one of the things I’ve noticed, for instance, is more and more of the bigger plug in (7:36 – inaudible) are starting to think about using their own issue tracker because it’s hard to do. But there is an issue tracker there for Word Press plugins but nobody seems to actually use it.

Yes that’s true and I’m sure that they know this and are trying to change it. It’s hard because I think a lot of people aren’t actually aware of it. So it is more a case of telling people that this feature is there. Then people will start using it hopefully.

Yeah I hope so to just that it’s not easily accessible and that probably makes it a bit harder on people. Recently we’ve had a lot of discussion in community about premium plugins and whether people should make money at it and should be paid for the plugins and all that stuff. You ask for donations as well but you don’t charge for any of your plugins as far as I know, correct? And how many donations are you getting? A decent amount of donations, something you could be able to sustain this work on or is it just a hobby?

I’d say it’s just a hobby at the moment. The number of donations pays for my hosting; it pays for a few coffees but not enough to start a career on. I mean it is a tricky thing and I think a lot of the time because people see that plugins are free they don’t expect to pay for them. So people aren’t pushed in the direction of donations.

I recently changed a few of my own plugins and made the donation link more prominent and that had the result of increasing the number of people who donated. So a lot of the time it’s easy for a plug in author to just add a donation link without actually pushing it and then they don’t receive any donations because people aren’t aware of it.

How do you feel about premium plugins in general, the people who actually charge for their plug ins? Even though they might release them under a GPL do you think that is a good thing or would you rather see everybody really start for free?

People can do whatever they like to with plugins as long as it adheres to the GPL license. People can still charge for them and people can charge Word Press that’s all part of the license. So there isn’t anything stopping people from having premium plugins as long as they adhere to the license then I’m happy, everyone is happy.

Have you ever considered doing it yourself?

Yes, it’s a tricky thing because you have to…that’s the reason I went the route of donations because I thought it was easier than trying to charge people for a plug in that is essentially free anyway. I have thought about trying to do like hosted solutions and things like that which hopefully in the future I’ll have time to do that. But at the moment donations is nice and simple and it satisfies my own requirements.

We have to go pay some bills and after that we’ll talk more with John Godley.

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John, you’ve done a couple of plugins that have to do with SEO, which is why I recommend your stuff all the time. What is the single most important thing you do on blogs yourself for SEO?

I think Word Press is a pretty good start anyway. It has the fundamentals there so for myself I put proper titles on the proper places and have a title bar and I find that helps a lot. I put descriptions on pages where needed and particularly put in title descriptions on things (16:07 – tape skips) and areas like that that are sometimes are skipped.

Yeah (16:21 – tape skips) for doing stuff like that. Is that all stuff you’ve used yourself or just stuff people requested as well?

A lot of it is stuff I don’t personally use. It’s been things requested by other people. There is an awful lot squeezed into that plug in. I don’t know how many people use each of the individual parts of it but I probably use half of that and I know that quite a few other people use the other parts as well.

I know I use a fair bit of it at times, there is an awful lot of stat stuff in there that I don’t use which probably other people use. That one together with redirection I think is the first 2 plugins I recommend to people who start doing SEO in their Word Press.

Have you ever considered pushing that a bit more? Only one SEO, it’s like the most downloaded plug in out there. I think HeadSpace is trailing you a bit.

Yeah I mean I do have for instance try to reduce the complexity of HeadSpace. I think a lot of people are scared off from it because it looks initially very complicated compared to (18:02 – inaudible) SEO which is the very straight forward to use. I have plans to reduce that complexity. And Redirection I have plans there to try and I think it would be interesting to introduce some statistics into it to see where errors are coming from and plan to break it down into some meaningful numbers.

I recently added to my own Googalities plug in the feature to track for forcing Google Analytics and the one thing I find very useful about that is you track the referral and the referrer as well as the 404’s itself. So you actually know where there is a wrong link. You’ve been doing that for quite a while.

Yeah.

And I think it’s something people don’t use enough I guess. So that’s today’s tip track your 404’s and especially the referrers and fix those links because that can save a lot in SEO as well.

But Redirection tracks 404’s and does the redirection thing where other than that it’s pretty basic and has a pretty decent interface. What I find more and more is I have to simplify interfaces to keep people using stuff. With your plugins being a lot more complex than mine usually do you actually find yourself tweaking the interface a lot?

Yes I mean both of those plugins have gone through hundreds of iterations. HeadSpace started off as a very simple plug in to put key words and descriptions onto pages and it exploded into (20:05 – tape skips) and Redirection likewise started off (20:19 – tape skips) and they’ve just features have been added on, the interface has been changed time and time again. I’m sure I’ll change them in the future as well. I’m always trying to simplify them. It helps a lot with the new developments in Word Press as well. They’ve helped a lot to reduce the amount of work that plug in authors have to do particularly in terms of the interface because since I think 2.7 the interfaces have solidified a lot.

Yeah I still find I have to write my own code to, think they’re called post boxes in the back end. It would be good if they gave more API to plug in developers to really make it easy to develop back end interfaces. I find myself spending more time there then in front end doing the actually plug in coding, which is quite annoying sometimes.

They have definitely improved and with simple little functions like checked and selected and stuff like that which makes it easy to check input boxes and the register setting stuff was also a great improvement.

Yeah these are things as a plug author end up rewriting over and over again.

Yeah.

So having them in the core just helps you immensely.

Have you seen any recent changes to that in the API that could help even more for plug in authors?

I particularly you’ve already mentioned it, the settings there is a new settings API. I have not used it myself yet because unfortunately you have to support all the versions of Word Press to a certain extent.

What is your policy on that? How far back do you support stuff?

It tends to vary. I like to just support the latest version but every time I do that I get a lot of people complaining at me. So I have to go in and add extra stuff in to support it again. I generally go back to about 2.5; I don’t find that a lot of people have anything earlier than that.

No I’ve recently stopped supporting 2.5 and just asked everybody using 2.5 to upgrade. I think with the new author upgrade stuff you can actually say a certain version requires a certain version of Word Press and (23:33 – inaudible tape skips) but I’m not sure if that works yet though.

I don’t know I’ve not tried that. It sounds useful though.

Yeah it would be cool if everybody just stopped supporting 2.6 and 2.7 and maybe those people would actually upgrade. There is way too much people on 2.5 and 2.6 out there it’s incredible.

I know you for your plugins but I was looking through your site and saw you recently released your theme as well, the one you’re using on UrbanGiraffe.com, your blog.

Yes.

You’ve released that theme?

Yeah that was a 2 year work in progress. That was a lot of effort to reach that stage.

What is it called because I can’t pronounce it?

It’s called Guangzhou, it’s a city in China where I was living for the past 2 years.

Okay how did you end up there?

I was just traveling around the world. Before that I was living in Prague for a year and then I moved to China. So while I was there I created that theme and named it after the city where I was living.

Cool and now you’ll be ranking for the city’s name in no time. How was that experience because I never released themes myself before? Is that something that gets a lot of downloads? Is it different from doing plug ins?

It is yes. I find themes a lot harder because I’m not a graphic designer. I can design interfaces but the graphics I find takes a long time. I released a theme previously to that called Giraffe that was probably one of the first things I’ve ever released and that brought an awful lot of traffic to my site particularly from a link on that theme as well.

So I thought I would try the same with my new theme and….

You’re actually giving me inspiration again to release my previous theme. It’s still out there and I should probably release that as well. Have you ever looked at theme framework, stuff like Thesis and what the I-Themes guys are building and what we’re building with StudioPress?

No I haven’t. When I started the theme for myself that was before these frameworks were out. Now that I’ve got my theme it will probably stay like that until the next time I feel like having a website spring cleaning, then I’ll start again possibly with a framework of some kind. There are a few as well there is the Sandbox framework which seems to be sort of a pretty clean theme to start from as the basis.

Yes and there are a few derivatives of that as well already I think I saw and there are a couple more. It’s really funny to see them because also they all develop a new kind of API for theme developers. So I go into a new learning curve which is always something I hate.

It will be interesting to see themes that aren’t based upon the default theme. I think 90% of the Word Press themes are probably based upon the default theme which means they often look the same or have similar pages, similar page structure. So it will be interesting to see themes that are based upon something else.

Have you done any stuff like that; build larger Word Press sites that don’t look like Word Press?

Yeah I mean I’ve created a few websites that you probably would not be able to tell that they were based upon Word Press, mainly because the theme is specific to that site.

John it’s been great talking to you. I’m going to answer one question from the chat room and maybe you can help as well. We’re chatting on ISC.webmasterradio.fm and Derrick just asked what he should do to SEO, a new install versus using a Thesis install which he mentioned in his case?

The funny thing is most of these frameworks seem to focus a lot on SEO as well even though I think Word Press mostly doesn’t need that much work.

Yes.

My advice Derrick is the first thing you do is go to John’s site or actually you type in the back end HeadSpace 2 and use that , configure that correctly for all the pages. Set up Redirection so you can do any redirections and I think Word Press does it by default now right if you move a post from the old one to the new one?

Yes it will do that.

He asks what else should I do. Well the other stuff people should do is get a good host structure and it’s usually done with some bread crumbs and other stuff. What else do you do SEO wise John? Any additions to that?

I guess I write a lot of content and I think at the end of the day content is king. So if you have useful information on your site, if you structure it properly Word Press helps a lot with the structuring anyway. But if people can find your content then that’s half the battle.

Yeah and there are a lot of small things you can do and we’re definitely going to talk about those a lot more in the coming shows. But in the end it all boils down in writing decent content which is something a lot of people don’t like because that actually takes a lot of time.

Yes it does.

But that is what it’s all about. I know myself the Word Press SEO article I’ve written last year that is probably the most extensive article I’ve ever written and it’s still my number one traffic driver to my site.

What is your main traffic driver? I’m curious because your blog has a log of different stuff about it.

I think up until pretty recently I was number one on the internet for the word giraffe of all things, which isn’t the most useful thing to have as a traffic driver but everything helps.

Unless you’re a zoo.

Yes.

But that was your major key word?

Yes. Strangely one of the big drivers on my sites is I have a plug in I created about 3 years ago called Ajax and it’s a calendar. It was just a simple toy but that is still one of the number one pages on my site.

Does it actually mean the plug in gets downloaded a lot as well or just because it’s what people are searching for?

I think it’s because of the particular key phrase Ajax Calendar. I think a lot of people are searching for that in general and they find my site and probably because a lot of people are linking to it. So I seem to be highly ranked for Ajax Calendar and giraffes. But otherwise HeadSpace provides a lot as well and HeadSpace and Redirection.

And those are the 2 main ones?

I wrote some theme guides about 3 years ago and they still receive an awful lot of traffic.

You wrote a great guide on localizing stuff as well.

Yes and it’s like you say some of the articles you write that take a lot of effort they become the ones that run the most and get the most traffic even if they’re a few years old. I still find them being one of the top 10 pages on my site.

Yeah same here. We’re going to end it right here. Thanks John and I hope to have you on in another show in the future when we’ve got some other cool stuff you’ve built for Automatic to share and talk about.

Okay thanks a lot.

And good luck in your plug in endeavors and hope to talk soon again.