{"id":3166,"date":"2013-08-30T11:05:23","date_gmt":"2013-08-30T16:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/?p=3166"},"modified":"2025-05-12T15:46:25","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T20:46:25","slug":"jordi-cabot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/resources\/jordi-cabot\/","title":{"rendered":"Finely Tuned Consultant – Jordi Cabot"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jordi<\/a>Ladies and gentlemen. Today, I’m very pleased to share with you an interview from a recovering “not WordPress” CMS addict. He is a convert, if you will, from the CMS-whose-name-we-dare-not-utter, but sounds like it could be a fancy exotic fruit, and rhymes with “frupal.” We can say with great rejoicing that he has seen the WordPress light, and made the switch over to the most popular CMS in the history of the internet.<\/p>\n

Our amazing convert is Jordi Cabot<\/a>, who runs MigrateToWP<\/a> and Modeling-Languages.com<\/a>. Jordi has a PhD in computer science, and so he brings a huge depth of knowledge to the WordPress work that he does.<\/p>\n

Jordi is from Spain, but after getting his PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Barcelona, he and his wife began exploring Europe and Canada with their daughter and enormous 50kg dog, ultimately settling in France. Jordi’s business specializes in WordPress migrations and he also does a great deal of data modeling. As a former business analyst, I can attest to how much value thorough and painstaking data modeling adds to large projects. It’s a huge value-add that only comes from disciplined experience, and no small amount of talent. Jordi is a rare breed.<\/p>\n

In Jordi’s Own Words:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u00b4m a former Drupal addict. When I fell in love with blogging, I chose Drupal as my CMS choice. I wanted the most powerful platform possible and I was not scared of non-friendly interfaces (remember I have a PhD in CS so what could Drupal do to me, right?). After a few months (and quite a few site crashes) I realized I was not using any of the advanced Drupal features and the maintenance of the site was a constant pain; I saw the light and decided to switch to WordPress.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now onto Jordi’s answers!<\/strong><\/p>\n

When was the first time that you really got excited about WordPress and at what point did you decide to make it your career?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m relatively new to the world of WordPress. As I mentioned before, I was a Drupal addict but I got tired of spending too much time on administration and maintenance tasks and decided to give WordPress a try. That was less than three years ago but I immediately fell in love with WP due to its well-balanced combination of power and simplicity and thought there could be other people in my same situation that may be looking for help with the transition. It turned out there was so I brought in three more people and started a WP company called Nelio Software to help them.<\/p>\n

Where do you go first to get your WP news, insights, and updates?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I follow a bunch of interesting people on twitter. With the demise of WordPress News sites (though it looks like you just launched a new one<\/a>, looking forward to see more of it) I think twitter is the best way to aggregate all the interesting WordPress related information popping up every day.<\/p>\n

What WP consultants deserve more love than they get? Who should we be paying attention to?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Can\u2019t really give any specific name. The only thing I\u2019d say is that people (I\u2019m thinking especially in people outside NA) should pay more attention to local WordPress experts who may not be known at a global level (sometimes just for language reasons) but still be pretty damn good at their job.<\/p>\n

What performance tips would you give to other pros (as related to speed, scalability, security, plugins, backup, etc.)?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Honestly, the best advice I can give you is to go for a managed hosting solution for WordPress<\/a>. There\u2019s no way you can get the same level of results yourself. And don\u2019t even get me started with the price issue. If you do, you should start valuing your time more. And if you really can\u2019t afford anything better than a cheap shared hosting solution then there is not much you can do anyway.<\/p>\n

Confess to us your biggest moment of WP fail?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The most epic fail was a Drupal to WordPress migration where the client didn\u2019t alerted us he had installed WordPress using prefix different from wp_ nor he gave us access to his database since he wanted to take care of importing himself the SQL script we generated from his Drupal data.<\/p>\n

Therefore, as soon as the client imported the file two things happened: 1 – He didn’t see any data popping up in the new WP site (no big deal) and 2 – His main WP site also using the same database and the default WP prefix got completely wiped out (kind of a big deal \ud83d\ude42 ).<\/p>\n

Fortunately there was a recent backup available and we were able to quickly fix the situation. The moral of the fable is \u201cdo not assume that your WP consultant can read your mind\u201d<\/p>\n

If you were going to spend this weekend creating a plugin that doesn’t exist, what would it be?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d go for a comment integration system able to check social networks for comments and reactions to post announcements that could then be transformed into standard WordPress comments so that the WP site centralizes (or at least replicates) all the online discussion around blog posts.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m tired of seeing overlapping subdiscussions around my posts in, e.g. LinkedIn and Twitter, where one discussion is hidden to the participants of the other and neither of the two can be read by people directly accessing the blog post. Many times I had to manually replicate those comments in the WP post because I thought they were really valuable and didn\u2019t want them to get lost.<\/p>\n

Do you use Themes & Child Themes, Roll your own, or both?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We never roll our own. Our theme development services are limited to replicate in WordPress the theme a client already has in her current CMS. Most of the time, this implies an old CMS with a very traditional theme which can be simulated with a Child theme or even by playing with the configuration options and visual editors of many WP themes and frameworks.<\/p>\n

Let me add that, in my opinion, a migration should be seen as an opportunity to go beyond a \u201csimple\u201d change of a CMS platform and be used as the perfect excuse to completely rethink your site appearance and structure but some clients prefer first to stick to their current theme and change the look and feel in a second phase. Clients that do want a brand new WP theme are redirected to external WP designers to get this part of the work done.<\/p>\n

What’s your favorite theme or theme framework? Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Myself I\u2019m always happy to work with the Thesis theme but based on my previous answer is obvious that I\u2019m not a qualified expert to really compare it with others at a deep technical level. It just happened that several clients pushed for it at the beginning and got used to it. Later we\u2019ve worked with all the other well-known frameworks with similar results.<\/p>\n

Favorite plugin?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Due to the kind of services we provide, we often need to access the WordPress database and you\u2019d be surprised how many clients don\u2019t want \/ can\u2019t \/ don\u2019t know how to give us access and the WordPress user is the only thing they can share. In those cases, our only hope is the Adminer<\/a> plug-in.
\nAdminer will open for you a a phpMyAdmin-like interface from within the dashboard (to be more precise, Adminer tool, is kind of a competitor of phpmyadmin itself; as the Adminer people say in their web page: \u201cReplace phpMyAdmin by Adminer and you will get tidier user interface, better support for MySQL features, higher performance and more security.\u201d). Direct access to the database without the need to configure an external database connection.<\/p>\n

Least favorite plugin?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m afraid there are too many bad plug-ins (specially if we take into account the quality of the code) to single out only one but I\u2019ll mention one that I used to recommend to all our clients and now I don\u2019t even think in using: the BackWPUp<\/a> plug-in.<\/p>\n

This plugin let me down due to two main reasons (that any plug-in should try to avoid):<\/p>\n