WPCandy

Alex King, who is most well known for his popular WordPress plugins and more recently, his Carrington theme framework, made a big announcement the other day regarding a project that his company Crowd Favorite has partnered with called the WordPress HelpCenter.

Intro

The HelpCenter is not aimed at replacing forums, email, comment forms, or other means of support. Instead, you’ll be able to pick up the phone Mon-Fri between the hours of 9am-7pm Pacific time and give them a call to answer any WordPress questions you might have instead of waiting around on a forum for someone to reply. In fact, any phone call under 3 minutes is free.

The Prices

The pricing scheme for the types of support queries most commonly asked is as follows:

• The pricing scheme for the types of support queries most commonly asked is as follows:
• Phone Call under 3 minutes is Free
• Phone Call 3-25 minutes Includes making changes to resolve most problems. $19.99
• WordPress Installation $19.99
• WordPress Upgrade $14.99
• Basic Plugin or Theme InstallationIncludes most plugins and themes. $9.99
• Advanced Plugin or Theme InstallationExample: WP Super Cache, etc. - when additional configuration, permissions changes, etc. are required. $19.99
• Theme TweaksChange colors, fonts, change a header image, etc. $19.99
• WordPress BackupYour database and all files (including themes and plugins). $19.99

Plugin or Theme Customization: Priced Per Request

Judging by the pricing scheme, it looks like most phone calls will cost about $20.00. While reviewing the pricing scheme, I had to chuckle regarding the $19.99 charge to be told how to upgrade WordPress. If you’re using WordPress 2.7, you now have the ability to upgrade the software with the click of a button, granted your webhost has to play nice with WordPress for it to work, but it should work in most cases. Of course, not everyone is running 2.7 so I can easily see how they could receive a few phone calls wanting to know how to upgrade.

Testing The Waters

I decided to give the help center a call around 2PM EDT to see what the experience was like. First thing I noticed is that you can clearly understand the female recording which reads off a number of options and describes what the HelpCenter can do. She lets me know that I can schedule a call back by sending an email to the WordPress help center. She also tells me that in order to receive help, I need to agree to the HelpCenter TOS located on their website which by the way, is one of the simplest terms of service pages I have ever seen. I figured what the heck and pressed 1. I then had the chance to listen to some funky hold music for a few minutes. After listening to the music, I was patched in to one of the support reps. Unfortunately for me, he was not at his desk and I had to leave him a message. Not exactly what I was expecting.

So, hoping I would be patched through to someone else, I hung up and redialed. This time, Chris was at his desk. I described to Chris how I did not want my blog to be crawled by the search engines while still being viewable by human beings. Chris told me to login to my WordPress administration panel, click on the Settings link on the left hand side and then click on Privacy. He then explains the difference between the two options and that I needed to select the second one which would do precisely what I needed. Chris also told me that if my site had already been crawled by search engines, it would take 2-3 weeks for that to be flushed out.

All in all, the call lasted under three minutes and Chris did not attempt to fill my head with rambling in order to keep me on the line for a longer period of time which I’m thankful for.

Does This Make Any Sense?

While I like the idea behind the WordPress HelpCenter, I wonder why we need one in the first place. Has the WordPress.org support forums which are supposed to be the go to place for support become such a pain for end users that it would be much simpler to just pick up the phone and give these guys a call?

In the WPTavern forum, we are in the process of discussing the HelpCenter topic and a few people have brought up some good points. For instance, WordPress is used internationally. Unless the HelpCenter employs people who know every language, this may be a bottle neck in their service. Also, the center is closed on the weekends and is not open 24/7. What happens if your database crashes or your WordPress upgrade fails at 3am in the morning? Better not pick up the phone and give these guys a call, their sleeping. Thankfully, email, forums and other support means are available when the HelpCenter is not.

The help center operates on Pacific time. Considering the international nature of the software, it may have been better to pick an internationally recognized timezone. But this is not a big gripe in my book as there are plenty of time zone applications out there to help people figure it out. Also, while the site displays the dollar sign next to the amount for certain calls, it may not be obvious to some folks that the type of currency they accept is the USD or U.S. Dollar.

Last but not least, if you’re going to dial into the HelpCenter internationally, you better use SkypeOut or you’ll be paying some hefty charges.

Poised For Success?

So will the HelpCenter knock other forms of support out of the water? I don’t think so given their inherent limitations. However, I do think Alex King is on the right track creating a service where people can simply pick up the phone, answer a commonly asked question, and provide immediate satisfaction. What I think will be interesting is how the HelpCenter plans on handling support of third party themes/plugins. There are so many in existence that it would be very hard to know everything about them to provide the level of support typically found via the plugin/theme author.

At the end of the day, the HelpCenter is just another avenue of support if you choose to go down that route. With Alex King being involved, I’m willing to bet the site will maintain its high quality of service which I experienced today.

When Small Potato gave up his baby (wpdesigner.com) to a man who goes by the name of Pawel Ciszewski, it was a sad day. I, like many others, decided to give Pawel some needed time to get things squared away and then, jump right in and take over where SP left off. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be happening. It’s been quite awhile now since Pawel’s introductory post with nothing new posted since then. The post has over 200 comments and some of those comments are now appearing as spam.

Near the bottom of the post, someone ended up posting a comment showcasing how one could impersonate Pawel. Since that post, there have been people making it look as though Pawel has announced the closure of the site, theme club prices rising and various other things. I realize this is a bad situation for many of you, especially those who spent $5.00 to get into the club, but from the outside looking in, some of the comments left by the imposter’s were a little humorous. Note that the following comments were made by imposters and not by Pawel himself.

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The other day, I came across a post written by Patrick Algrim of HellYeahDude.com entitled, What Not To Put Into WordPress Themes. Patrick dove into some well known, freely available WordPress themes to see if he could uncover anything out of the orindary. Unfortunately, he discovered some things inside of themes that I find appalling. Things such as blog ranking code to theme author RSS feeds that when clicked on, the end user would end up subscribing to a feed other than your own.

For a few weeks now, there have been a number of people that have preached about how the safest way to download themes is directly from the author’s website. If what Patrick discovered is true, (it sure as hell looks that way) then this leaves the door wide open as to how to go about downloading and using WordPress themes that are not filled with this stuff.

The WordPress Theme respository is not off line but it does contain a number of outdated themes that most likely do not work with WordPress 2.5. So the question is, why are theme authors including this crap into their themes and secondly, do we really need to go through each and every theme and look for this stuff before sites such as WPCandy give themes any sort of press?

Lastly, how do you feel about this situation?

There are many different widgets available for you to use throughout the world of WordPress, but AdaptiveBlue makes their presence known by giving WordPress bloggers the opportunity to use a personalized widget on their blog. AdaptiveBlue is a company which is focused on helping to create the semantic web by using their own methodology:

We think that Semantic Web is really about leveraging existing information to create a better online experience for everyone today.

Out of the gate, AdaptiveBlue offers up to 50 different SmartLink Widgets for you to use. These widgets consist of displaying Amazon Best Sellers, your NetFlix Queue, the top artists on Last.fm and a host of other widgets which utilize a number of different TOP lists from various websites.

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This is a guest post by Jeff Chandler of Jeffro2pt0.com.

Ben Swift of Themelab.com has released a new theme called Nature Blog. The Nature Blog theme is a design that features a designated single column on the left hand side with the right column dedicated to content. The blog title is displayed at the top of the site along with the search bar. The design overall has a great color scheme and is easy on the eyes. The theme also features rounded corners which still look better than those hard edges we’re used to seeing. The bottom of the design showcases a repeating background image of a brick wall with grass growing on top which is entirely inline with the nature theme.

The theme features spots for 125X125 ads on the sidebar as well as a nicely styled calendar. The sidebar is widget compatible along with the footer where you can add three list style widgets. I don’t immediately see support for tags but thats something that wouldn’t be too hard to add. However, I think tags should be a default quality in themes these days considering that it’s as simple as adding that function into the theme.

Overall, I like the qualities that this free theme has but feel as though it could have done a few more advanced things which would of put this theme over the top.

This is a guest post by Jeff Chandler of Jeffro2pt0.com.

Over the past few days, news of a possible multiple SQL injection vulnerability in WordPress 2.5 was spreading across the WordPress community like wildfire. However, Matt Mullenweg has published a post which puts our fears to rest in that the bulletin was falsified. Matt’s post also contains a wide assortment of helpful information in regards to why you should upgrade your version of WordPress to the latest stable release. One of the more interesting portions of his post discusses the most common reasons Matt finds as to why people don’t upgrade their WordPress installation.

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