Ricardo Correia

Blog

  • Low budget high expectations

    The Web Developer “challenge” in a country on a budget

    Being a Portuguese Webdesigner and web developer adds a new challenge to the everyday challenging world of web development.

    “We work every day on a budget”.

    The Portuguese market is what you can call “low-cost high expectations market”.

    Due to the economic crisis and the way the market grew over the years, even before the so called “crise”, the website development business, in Portugal, is extremely under-appreciated.

    Almost every client and prospect wants to pay a “dime” for their new website having all the new technologies and gizmos adding value to it, without adding its correspondent cost to the final project quote.

    As a developer you ‘re stuck in the middle, you want to “WOW” your client with your beautifully crafted website with all the functionalities he wishes and at the same time keep all the project implementation schedule on time, keeping the unbillable hours 0 or as low as possible to “WOW” your boss.

    In order to achieve this goal, I’ve found the need to know where I have a “shortcut”, when to use it and most importantly if it’s going to “kick my ass” later down the road.

     

    The first “Shortcut”

    I’ve found that you need a good foundation settled in and work on top of it, for front-end and content management alike, building everything from scratch doesn’t work well on a budget and will give you a headache whenever it can.

    Personally I use for the front-end Twitter Bootstrap and as a CMS WordPress.

     

    3 Reasons for using bootstrap

    – Responsive layout, both fluid and fixed width
    – Lots of features out of the box
    – Simple and straightforward markup, allowing a fast customization

     

    3 Reasons for using WordPress

    – Lots of plugins available for free
    – A great community ready to help you when you need
    – A stable and powerful platform with thousands of hours invested on its enhancement and ready to receive your customization whenever you need it, in form of a plugin or a simple function.

    Conclusion

    Whatever the tools you choose, you need to understand them and be able to correctly use it’s built in features in order to save implementation time.

    Also one of the shortcuts as stopped being it, WordPress, I’ve been amused by it’s power, by the community, by it’s built in capabilities and available plugins, I’m using it for every project, small to large company website and always with great results.

     

     Note:
    WordPress.org also has an extensive theme repository and you can find several other websites selling themes for your every need, out there.This is also a awesome feature you can use in order to save you some time.

    Personally and due to the kind of projects we develop @ samsys I build almost all the themes from “scratch” using a custom Starter Theme and this is the reason I haven’t mentioned themes as a good starting point to save time.

     

    PART II – The shortcuts I use (Coming Soon…)

  • WooCommerce – Customizing Checkout Fields

    Adding a new field to checkout and Order info on WooCommerce Admin

    Working on my latest project I’ve needed to add a new field to WooCommerce checkout, a “NIF” (Portuguese equivalent of VAT number) field, that isn’t available by default in WooCommerce checkout.

    After checking a couple of websites I’ve ended up creating the following snippet:

    // Hook in WooCommerce checkout fields and add new field
add_filter( 'woocommerce_checkout_fields' , 'add_field_to_checkout' );

// Our hooked in function - $fields is passed via the filter!
function add_field_to_checkout( $fields ) {

$fields['billing']['billing_fieldname'] = array(
    'label' => __('Field Name', 'woocommerce'),
    'placeholder' => _x('Field Label as placeholder', 'placeholder', 'woocommerce'),
    'required' => false,
    'class' => array('form-row-wide'),
    'clear' => true
  );

return $fields;
}

//Add info on Admin
function add_field_to_admin($order){
  echo "<p><strong>Field Name:</strong> " . $order->order_custom_fields['_billing_fieldname'][0] . "</p>";
}

add_action( 'woocommerce_admin_order_data_after_billing_address', 'add_field_to_admin', 10, 1 );

    With this little snippet you can add your new field to “billing” or “shipping” information.

  • Experimenting with WordPress Multisite

    Managing multiple WordPress powered websites

    The Problem

    In my current position the web team is in charge of the day to day maintenance of more than 20 WordPress websites.

    In order to facilitate this maintenance I’ve searched for a tool wich allow us to quickly update, install and uninstall plugins and WordPress core, this day to day task has being done by hand and sometimes left behind do to it’s time consuming nature.

     

    WordPress Multisite

    When I first heard about Multisite, I was thrilled, a free tool that allows me to manage multiple websites, and It’s totally embed with the usual WordPress install even greater, used also to power WordPress.com and all it’s websites, must be awesome! And it’s but not to manage multiple websites with different scopes and different types of information and built by different people, let’s see why…

     

    The Pros of using WordPress Multisite

    • Ability to update plugins across all websites at once
    • Manage all themes, plugins and WordPress install from a single dashboard
    • Ability to map new domains with a few clicks
    • Ability to use child-themes to raise the repetition in theme building

    The Cons of using WordPress Multisite

    •  All websites are in the same database
    • Difficult retro-activity (import all sites to the multisite installation is very time consuming due to the amount of manual changes needed in each one)
    • Possible plugin incompatibility in some older websites
    • Unable to provide our clients with a FTP access, as all the website share the same installation and folders (only upload folders are defined “per-site”

    Conclusion

    WordPress Multisite it’s great and awesome and I’ll be using it to build a Websites network (of similar websites), exactly it’s purpose, but I won’t be using it to manage a website network.

    Why?

    A Multisite install it’s harder to manage and more heavy to the server maintenance and it won’t excel in managing multiple and different websites, each one with different plugins, different approaches and different functionalities.

     

    The Solution

    After some research I’ve found one excellent alternative http://infinitewp.com/.

    It’s tools allows me to perform almost every action I wished to achieve using WordPress Multisite from a single dashboard and it’s FREE (I love that, as will your employer/client).

    Some of infiniteWP functionalities are paid “add-ons” but the free version takes care of almost every part of the routine maintenance of the network and some of the “add-ons” sound really great also.

    One of the big “PROS” of this tool is that it’s self-hosted, awesome for someone who wishes to guarantee that everything he uses will be around when he needs it and wont be disappearing without any warning.

     

    Note:

    There are other tools that may be better looking or even with more functionalities like: ManageWP, WP Remote, Worpit, etc.

    Our choice for infinite WP is based essentially in it’s FREE version capabilities and in being a self-hosted solution.

  • Hello World

    As the first post in my blog, I’m going to do something completely “new” introduce myself.
    A hello to you, probably one of the three people who’ll be reading this.

    So hi, my name is Ricardo I’m from Portugal and I’m a professional webdesigner and developer since 2007, and after so many years building my own cms and managing tools I’ve (truly) discovered WordPress in July 2012 and I’m loving it!

    I consider myself a fanatic and evangelist of WordPress, for me the CMS, blogging and even ecommerce  solution for everyone, from small to large projects and clients.

    I’ve been pushed to start my blog by my team leader @vitorsilva and I’m now ready and eager to start sharing my experience and opinions on WordPress development, Webdesign, Front-end development, Branding and other stuff I might write about in the future.