My talk is on The Tools We Use to Win here at Freshmuse. The talk boils down to the different lessons I’ve learned growing Freshmuse from a solo freelance business to a thriving small design and dev shop that builds pretty awesome stuff for companies all over the world. In my talk I look at a few of the steps in our typical client process, and highlight different tools we use to help make those processes better. My hope is that some of these tools, and the way we use them, might inspire some thoughtful analysis of your own process, and perhaps even lead you to making a change that helps your business.

I’ll be giving a slightly updated version of this talk at WordCamp Minneapolis April 27th as well. I’d love to hear your feedback or questions.

What tools are you using?

Grab the slides and let me know what you think of the presentation, either in the comments below or by tweeting using the event’s official hashtag #wcyvr.

Grab the Slides

Did you Miss it?

If you missed it, I gave a similar presentation at WordCamp Portland that you can watch courtesy of WordPress.tv.

Video & Slides

WordPress filters allow developers to hook into WordPress core actions, such as user authentication, registration, etc and alter their logic. In this Ben shows you how to replace the WordPress built-in authentication with authentication based off a very simple external web service.

Unless otherwise noted, all development will be assumed to exist at http://localhost for the purposes of this tutorial. Get the code and the whole tutorial on Ben’s writeup.

Here are some of the powerful and most common things WordPress can do for businesses, regardless of size or industry. Some are features that come right with WordPress, and some or functions achievable with a little tweaking. Let us know if you have any ideas to add!

1. Setup

It seems appropriate to start at the very beginning. Setting up a new WordPress site takes about 5 minutes. In reality, building a quality WordPress site takes much longer, but the amount of functionality and usability you can get after just a few hours of working with WordPress is incredible. Whether you’re launching a new site, or a one-off marketing or add-on site, WordPress is efficient from the ground up.

2. Administration

I’m constantly surprised how many businesses I chat with who don’t know how to control the content that’s on their website. Either their current system doesn’t allow for them to control content, or it’s just confusing and hard to use. This leaves businesses with no control over their web presence, and often lagging behind their competition. WordPress not only allows you to edit all the content on your site, but also gives you a universal admin dashboard that’s easy to use and customize.

3. Restricted Content & User Levels

Do you have restricted content that you need to share with different employees, contractors or service providers? We see companies use WordPress to securely catalogue and share documentation, resources, or notes with various user groups, both inside and outside their organization. By default WordPress allows you to create pages that are password protected, or assign users to your system and give them “roles” that can be used to restrict their access to certain content.

4. Flexibility

Oh, you want to change something? Too often we interact with companies who are hampered with restrictive site and data structures that don’t allow them to quickly iterate. WordPress is built to be open to iterations, whether you’re changing the look and feel and keeping the data structured the same, or keeping the same styles but rearranging data.

5. Networks

For large companies with centralized control (corporate, HQ, etc), distributing power to the local level can be scary. Giving users at different levels and locations of a company the power to control various aspects of the business presence is often hampered by legal and privacy issues, a.k.a red tape. The risks often outweigh the costs, leading to strict control, frustration and hampered innovation across the board. With about 5 minutes of tweaking, WordPress can be set up as a network of multiple sites that allows content management at a local level, with complete corporate oversight. It allows for specific user management and tracking, bulk data moving/archiving, as well as the power to make distributed changes throughout the entire network, or to specific groups of sites. Read more about WordPress Multisite ->

6. Automation

Are there any online tasks that if automated could save your business tons of time (and money)? WordPress leverages a time-based task scheduling system that can execute tasks automatically. Examples include automatically publishing or removing content from your site on designated dates, grabbing your latest pins from Pinterest and bringing them into your site, or automatically exporting a spreadsheet of your online sales and emailing it to your accounting department. Read more about WP-Cron from our developer Ben Lobaugh.

7. Real-time Mobile Content Publishing

Imagine a business with employees all over the world having great experiences with customers every day. Wouldn’t it be great if you could capture those experiences, turn them in to content, and curate that content online at any time? Twitter, photo, and blog streams have started to scratch the service of this idea, but WordPress makes these sort of ideas a reality.

Using a free WordPress mobile app, any business can empower it’s employees to publish content on the fly, whether it’s photos taken from their smart phones, text content published from their iPad, or entire image galleries taken while at an event. WordPress can then take that content and curate it into beautiful displays that can then be curated at a corporate level, or automatically published in real time.

Imagine walking into a department store and seeing a digital display with photos from a runway show in New York that happened 5 minutes before you walked in. Now imagine that the screen points out that you can purchase the outfit that model is wearing on the 3rd floor, for $89. Yea, WordPress can do that.

Publish content from your mobile device on-the-go. Text, images, galleries, video… with WordPress publishing is actually powerful.

8. Community

Do any of these ideas seem awesome but too overwhelming for your business or skill level? You’re not alone! Since WordPress is universally used, you can find support, designers, developers and just about anyone to help you, with costs ranging from $10/hr to $100/hr+. Whatever business size you are, there is a large community out there waiting for you to tap into. If you’re here in Seattle, check out the Seattle WordPress Community.

9. Extensibility

As a business, you don’t want to pick a platform that is hard to customize and extend. With an advanced hook & filter system, WordPress allows developers to hook in to it’s core and create amazing things that don’t come right out of the box. With other platforms, you may end up paying developers thousands of dollars to do something that can be done in 5 minutes with WordPress.

10. IT’S FREE

Oh yea, WordPress is open source and completely free. Although you may need to pay a developer to work on your site or maintain it, the platform itself is always free. That includes future improvements like security updates and new features. Read more on WordPress.org.

Anything we missed?

Well we’re here to help! I’m giving a talk at the Minnesota Blogger Conference on Moving Your Blog to WordPress, and the different considerations involved in doing so. Below you’ll find the major talking points, as well as the slides and resources you’ll need to learn and do it yourself.

Download the Slides

I’ll post the video and photos from the conference once it’s processed so you can follow along. Cheers!

Moving Your Blog to WordPress

1. What is WordPress?

WordPress is best explained using the metaphor of The Hotel & The House.

The Hotel (WordPress.com, Blogger, Tumblr, etc)

Often referred to as “a hosted solution”, you can use WordPress.com to get blogging instantly. There’s no technical knowledge or setup required, you just tell them to give you a blog, and it works, similar to going and getting a hotel room. In a hotel the elevators, sinks, toilets, etc all simply work, no setup required. If there’s a problem, you call the front desk and they fix it. Similarly, on WordPress.com, or any of the other popular hosted platforms, everything is taken care of for you, allowing you to just signup and get started.

WordPress.com is amazingly easy to use and maintain, but lacks customizability and originality. Imagine calling the front desk at a hotel and telling them you want to re-paint the walls in your room.

The House (WordPress)

Often referred to as a “self-hosted solution” WordPress lets you setup your own blog/site using their awesome framework. Similar to building your own house, WordPress let’s you download the awesome blueprint from the WordPress.com “Hotel”, and use it to build your own house, on your own property. You get to choose the appliances, the paint color, even the roof… but you’re also ultimately responsible for all maintenance and setup.

WordPress is great if you want to set up an original blog or website, but it does require attention and upkeep.

2. Why switch to WordPress?

• Customizable: Simliar to building your own house, you get to make it your own. With ~17,000 plugins and an uncountable amount of themes on the market, you can have an extremely customizable blog up and running in a few hours.
• Powerful: WordPress powers some of the most powerful sites in the World including sites for CNN, CBS, BBC and NASA. Want that kind of power underneath the hood of your blog?
• Community: With over 17% of the internet running on WordPress, and over 20,000 people making their living using WordPress professionally, chances are you’ll find peers, service providers, and resources for any problem you encounter while using WordPress.

3. How to switch to WordPress? (And not lose everything in the process)

It’s different depending on what platform you’re migrating from, but here are the general steps.

1. Purchase hosting and a domain
2. Install WordPress
3. Export your old blog’s content
4. Import that content into your new WordPress site
5. Customize to your hearts desire!

Here are some great resources for you to use to guide you through your migration process:

Blogger (Blogspot) -> WordPress
Tumblr -> WordPress
WordPress.com -> WordPress

Some Photos from the session thanks to conference attendees:

If you have photos from the session feel free to email them to us at support at freshmuse dot com.

So really, the question is, why would you ever not use WordPress?

Grab the Slides Watch on WordPress.tv

If you have any questions feel free to leave them below and we’ll do our best to help! Thanks to everyone involved in making it a great WordCamp and getting the video up online.

Ben Lobaugh: How to Use WP-Cron

Ben gave a developer oriented talk on using WP-Cron, an API within WordPress that allows for automation. You can read more about his talk and get his slides on his recap blog post.

Grant Landram: How to Build a Professional WordPress Business

I gave a talk on a few ways to better build and/or grow a professional WordPress business. While there are many types and sizes of professional WordPress businesses, I talked about the underlying methodologies that help any size business grow. You can grab the slides and check out the last slide for resources on learning more.

Weekend Recap

There are already a ton of great weekend recaps out there, including Laura Kimball’s community oriented recap, and our own Ben Lobaugh’s weekend wrap-up, so we’ll just leave you with some of our favorite photos from the weekend, and a quick message about the WordPress community:

Although there are millions out there using WordPress, a community of peers, services providers, customers and friends, it is a distinct honor to meet in person to share collective lessons about the software we love, the community that drives us to be better at what we do, and the platform that empowers us to share our message with the world.

Awesome mainstage where I got to present.

Nervous view from the podium just before my talk.

Ben delivering his talk on WP-Cron to a PACKED room of devs

Post WordCamp celebration. Scotch, scotch, scotch!

Our favorite piece of Portland “art”.

The freshmuse crew grabbing food before WordCamp Portland day 2: Dev day.

Solving the world’s problems talking core contribution with Jane & Barry.

Proof that Portlandians put birds on everything.

Pinterest seems to be all the rage these days. If you’re not familiar with the service, it allows you to “pin” images from around the web to your own “boards”, leaving you with collections of awesome pictures from around the web in nice little groups.

Today we’re going to explore how you might pull in your Pins from Pinterest and publish them as blog posts in a WordPress blog or site. This tutorial doesn’t require any advanced programming knowledge, but you will need to know how to setup a new WordPress installation on your webhost, install a theme, and maybe do a little bit of CSS tweaking.

Here’s a Quick Demo of what we’ll be building.

Step 1. IFTTT

In order to pull your Pins from Pinterest into WordPress without a bunch of code wrangling with the Pinterest API (yuck) we’ll be using an awesome service called  IFTTT. It allows us to authorize and automate actions on the web. Go create an account on IFTTT and leave that tab open, we’ll come back to it later on.

Step 2. Choose How you Want to Display Your Pins

Next you get to decide how you want your pins to display in your WordPress site or blog. We opted for a fluid layout just like Pinterest, using a theme called Pinfinity. If that theme isn’t your cup of tea, here’s a link to more themes that replicate the style of Pinterest. You can use any theme you want as it will be running separately from your main site. For now, choose a WordPress theme and set it aside until Step 4.

*Quick Note: if you don’t want to go through the hassle of designing a new UI, you can simply pull your pins into your normal blog feed. In which case, skip Step 4 and carry out the remaining steps on your main site.

Step 3. Grab Your Pinterest RSS Feed

Head over to your Pinterest profile and and grab your rss feed. You can find your rss feed at http://www.pinterest.com/your-username/feed.rss

Step 4. Set up Your New WordPress Site

In order to setup a separate Pinterest board within your WordPress site, we’ll actually be creating a whole new WordPress installation and assigning it to a sub-folder of your site. For example, if you want to make your live Pinterest board at yourdomain.com/pins/, create a new WordPress installation in the /pins/ subfolder in your hosting account. If that’s confusing consult your webhost or a friend who knows more about WordPress installations.

Once your new WordPress site is up and visible at yourdomain.com/pins/, install the theme you’ve chosen in Step 2 on your new site.

Step 5. Enable XML-RPC

Before we can use IFTTT to pull in your Pins, we need to let your WordPress site know to allow an outside service to have access. In your new WordPress site, login to the admin area and visit Settings > Writing, then mark the XML-RPC checkbox to “enable the WordPress… XML-RPC publishing protocols”. Make sure it’s checked, then save. Almost there!

Step 6. Build your IFTTT Recipe

Now it’s time to make the auto-magic happen. Go to IFTTT , login, and start a new recipe: http://ifttt.com/myrecipes/personal/new

• THIS = Click the orange feed button > New Feed Item > Fill in your Pinterest RSS feed from Step 3
• THAT = Click the WordPress symbol > Fill in your new WordPress site’s url, your username & password > Creat a Post
• Now you can craft what you want your post to be like. Below is a screenshot of what we made Mollie’s.

Step 7. Style your Posts

When you pin something it will take IFTTT about 5-15 minutes to process it over to your WordPress blog. Once you get a few succesfull pins and posts, you can play with the IFTTT recipe and your theme’s CSS to make it looks just right. For our use we copied some of our main theme’s styles over including the background image, and some navigation styles. Play around with it and let us know if you find any cool improvements or tweaks. We’ll be updating any changes we make in the comments below.

I know, that’s bad, especially being an 8 year resident of Seattle. However August 18th I get to cross those two very important goals off my list, as Ben Lobaugh and I will both be featured speakers at WordCamp Portland.

If you’ve never been to a WordCamp, I would highly recommend it. A full day/weekend packed full of WordPress knowledge, insight, and professional help for only $20. You can’t really get any better deal than that.

Ben will be giving a talk on the WP Cron API, and I’ll be talking about building a business with WordPress. More details coming soon to the WCPDX site. Hopefully we’ll see you there!

Any ideas or feedback on what you’d like to see at WordCamp Portland or WordCamp Seattle? Let us know in the comments!