Finely Tuned Consultant – Steve Bruner

Back in early 2006 I really wanted to blog… just to document my thoughts and share my [many] opinions with the world. A friend of mine introduced me to WordPress and I fell in love.  Instead of using WP.com, I decided to self host and had a ton of fun.  Pretty sure I used Brian Gardner’s Blue Zinfandel theme as a base.  A few friends and business associates saw my site and asked me to build them sites as well.  The next thing I knew I had a business. That was exciting – a business being built on WordPress.

FlipBoard baby!  I love FlipBoard.  It curates my Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and RSS Feeds for me, and magically shows me the important stuff.  I really count on my social network to let me know what’s going on.

Kevin Miller. If you’ve never heard of him, you will. The dude’s a poet… sometimes I tear up when I read his code (I’m a pretty sensitive guy). Kevin is my partner on Piklist, and if you check out the code base you will see what I mean… it’s beautiful.

Rule no 1: Back up often and remember where you keep your backups.

Rule no 2: Don’t forget rule no 1.

Backing up is mandatory… but remembering where your backups are is imperative. Seriously, we once set up backups for a client and they changed the location of the files.  When the site went down it took them over a day to find out where they were.  But we were able to restore the site beautifully.

I spelled WordPress with a lowercase “p” in an email. (Ed: Zing!)

Actually, this one might be bigger.  When I first started SlipFire, the good hosting options for WordPress were limited, so I started to host my clients on my own server. Before I knew it I had a small hosting company.  Cool.  Someone else paying my server costs and a few extra bucks on the side, nice!  This got a little crazy since I was running multiple versions of WP Single Site… not multisite.  I don’t even think I knew multisite existed back then.

Then one Sunday during Memorial Day weekend my phone rang… and rang… and rang. And the buzz of a txt message… and then another buzz… and another. My server was hacked and my clients’ sites, well… didn’t look like my clients’ sites.  Not a good day.

I believe I missed an update with one of the single sites… never again.  I never miss an update.

A Contact Manager. A super awesome, fully extendable, 100% customizable, powerful contact manager. [NOTE: We’re actually building this with Piklist and will release it shortly]

I’ve actually been starting fewer theme projects lately – mostly taking over development work on existing sites or doing more plugin work. Last year I used child themes exclusively, mostly Genesis. However, starter themes look very interesting, especially “underscores”. A few months ago we had Allan Cole present at the meetup and he convinced me starter themes are the way to go. Either way I will usually look for a base theme to start a project; I almost never start from scratch.

I don’t really have a favorite theme framework. However, I have a favorite WordPress framework: Piklist. It’s the first plugin I install on every project since it makes EVERYTHING so much easier and I can develop faster.  It also adds enhanced features to CPT’s, Taxonomies, Meta, Settings and more. [Full Disclosure: In case you skipped over the beginning of this post, I developed Piklist with my partner Kevin Miller]

Favorite plugin?

Hmmm… that’s a tough one. Piklist.

Least favorite plugin?

YARPP. I like Mitcho, I really do. But I’ve had so many problems with YARPP not scaling well.  Now, just to be fair, I haven’t used YARPP in a few years, so maybe it’s faster. But it used to kill me.  Instead, I always used nRelate, a hosted related posts plugin. [More Disclosure: My company, SlipFire, built the nRelate plugins and was a partner… but it was because I needed a solution to YARPP! )

Develop a framework that enhances the standard WordPress CPT’s, and is so easy to use my mother can develop with it. Alright, maybe not my mother, but Piklist really is simple.

This is probably more about “WordPress” challenges, instead of “Consultant” challenges, but I still hear talk about sites “looking WordPressy”, or “Can WordPress do this?” and “Isn’t WordPress just for blogs”? WordPress is headed in the right direction, but I still hear this.

The admin. Alex King mentioned this in his Finely Tuned interview. The WordPress admin needs to be as flexible as a theme, and right now it’s not. Too much code is hard-coded, and there are not enough hooks or filters. Take Post Statuses for instance. Much of WordPress relies on the “draft” status.  If you’re going to use WordPress as a true CMS, then “draft” isn’t always relevant.

We will see more Web APPS not just Web SITES.

A business associate asked me to speak to a friend of his who was running what should have been a very popular pop-culture site in WordPress. One major problem was the site took forever to load… at least a full minute. And there were so many other problems, I don’t remember them all. The client really hated WordPress after this experience, seriously thought it was the biggest piece of (EXPLETIVE DELETED). (NB: That’s Steve’s response, not editing.) After talking to him and showing him both my work and the community’s work, I convinced him I could create a site he would love. He gave me a shot and not only did he end up with a killer site, but he totally loves WordPress. And his site loads fast!

You can’t do that with WordPress… so I do it.

What did you think about my interview on WP Engine? …and show me some code.

If you’re ever in New York City on the third Tuesday of the month, please stop by the WordPress NYC Meetup.  Every month… third Tuesday.

Thanks Steve!

If you all need a baller plugin built, I highly recommend trekking over to SlipFire.com to see the Plugins, and all the other awesome stuff, that Steve has built!