Bob started us off with best practices questions about User Accounts.
1. Is it better to use a user name or email address for accounts? The answer was that it doesn’t really matter and depends on your organizations approach to user accounts. A suggestion was made for generic user names based on positions (webmaster, sales, etc) as a way to seamlessly manage change. The downside to that is authorship. If a generic approach is used the author loses the credit for the authorship.
2. When creating a new user account, what level access should be provided? We looked at the five default roles WordPress provides in the Codex (Admin, Editor, Author, Contributor & Subscriber). WordPress provides five Roles with associated default Capabilities. Additional Roles and Capabilities can be defined as your website needs. Each organization uses a different approach to assigning roles. Many use a minimum capabilities approach for security reasons. Bob asked about giving team members who may not really need it admin access to provide a backup. That’s a fine backup plan, a recommendation was made to use a two-factor authentication (Google Authenticator) for additional security.
Ron was excited to share his productivity boost from Emmet.io. Here’s a description from their website-
Emmet is a plugin for many popular text editors which greatly improves HTML & CSS workflow.
Scott shared his template created with WP-Visual Composer and we looked at some questions. He uses MenuMakerPro for his menu layout and customization. Ben suggested searching codepen.io for menu approaches.
looked at pixlr – a free Photoshop-ish image editor
Nick talked about the Google Places Reviews plugin included in his theme which adds his Google reviews on his homepage.
Contact Forms: What are people using to add contact forms to their website -gravityforms($), contact forms 7, fast secure contact, ninja forms
Someone commented about the WordPress community and we paid homage to #wpmom.
Looked at coltonrv.us website
Looking for ideas for future meetups:
- workflow
- tools – editors/version control/deployment
- Child theme development
- WordPress SEO Plugins
- Custom Post TYpes
- Taxonomy
- Framework comparison
- getting schools/businesses involved
- security plugins: wordfence, securi, ithemes
We asked everyone to think about wrangling a segment at a Meetup.
Talked about Meetup funding (ways to cover cost of meetup.com).
- Provide ways for people to donate – Add a donation button to wpbuffalo.com, bring a basket to the meeting and ask for donations
- Add a donate button on WordCamp Buffalo signup
A suggestion was made to change the meeting to 1st & 3rd or 2nd & 4th Thursdays to make it easier to plan.