• Online Presentation: WordPress Custom Content: Refresh South Florida + WordPress – September 8, 2011

Resource Links

We decided to get a VPS account at HostGator, where we got our own cPanel and lots more control than we actually needed for the site. However, the assurance that only our web sites would be running in our virtual space made me feel a lot better.

Overall I have been impressed with HostGator. It was my first experience using them. I have been a DreamHost customer for years and were it not for the fact that I have 30+ sites running on my DH account I would move to HostGator in a heartbeat. I did not feel confident enough about DH to recommend them to my customer.

So, after we got the new account set up on HostGator I uploaded the web site files and the WordPress database and we were in business. The only thing left was to do the DNS cutover.

In all my years of web development experience DNS cutovers have usually taken anywhere between 4 and 8 hours to propagate. Of course, when you do a cutover you want to ensure that the old web site is available for long enough to support the propagation and that was the plan with this cutover.

It turns out that using HostGator VPS you have to create your own nameservers. No problem I thought. Even NameCheap.com which is a reseller for eNom which is a reseller for Verisign let me create my own nameservers. We contacted Earthlink and their support staff didn’t even know what it meant to create a nameserver. The customer was handling the contact with Earthlink and during the course of a few days trying to get the nameservers set up Earthlink at one point recommended shutting down the existing account. For whatever reason, this actually happened and the DNS had not been cut over yet.

To make a long story short, my client’s web site was down for close to 2 whole days and Earthlink still had no way for us to create a nameserver. For every DNS change request that we had with Earthlink they told us it would take between 24 and 72 hours. It turns out that they use Network Solutions and they only put in change requests during a certain time in the afternoon. So, we would have to call Earthlink and wait for their request to get sent to NetSol. Then we’d have to wait for NetSol to handle the request.

The solution I came up with was to create my own temporary name servers and point those to the new HostGator VPS IP address. I then told Earthlink to use those nameservers. After waiting an unusually long time the web site finally came up.

Here’s how you can avoid a similar horror story in the future:

• Don’t use a company to host your website that is not really in the business of web hosting (hint: Earthlink).
• No matter what, make sure your current web host will keep the site up during the DNS changeover.
• Plan for the worst.

The last thing I would recommend is to use a site like webhostgear.com to get cPanel hosting reviews and recommendations on WordPress hosting options.

Find out everything you need to know and register at the WordCamp Miami website. Follow WordCamp Miami on Twitter to keep in touch.

Kudos to local WordPress gurus, David Bisset, John James Jacoby and John Carcutt who have done a super job organizing the event in an extremely short timeframe!

Feel free to add your comments to let me know what you would like to learn at WordCamp Miami 2010.

Powered by WordPress

Calvary Chapel has been using WordPress for several years and we wanted to keep the momentum going with this redesign. One of the major goals of the new site was to allow church staff to design promotional graphics for events and activities and incorporate them into the site in addition to adding events, news and other textual content.

Site Design

For this project I started with the Aperture theme from Woo Themes (affiliate link) and then customized the design and developed new widgets and along with other PHP enhancements.

We wanted to keep the design framework minimal but feature the colorful promotional images that Paul Funk (J.P.), our creative assistant pastor, creates week after week. The Aperture theme was designed for a photo blog and that worked out great to feature the image links on the home page which draw site visitors in to find out more.

Church and Social Media

Many of the church family members have been using Facebook, including the pastoral staff. It has been a great way to keep in touch with people here in Miami but even more so as a way to stay connected with those who have moved away. Calvary Chapel Miami Beach is in a “transient” community and we see many people come and go. If you come to our church and then return 6 months later you will find many new faces.

The logical next step was to create a Facebook Fan Page for Calvary Chapel Miami Beach. Pastor Robert Fountain updates the page regularly to let people know what’s coming up and to share devotional and encouraging messages.

We hooked up the Facebook page to the Calvary Chapel Miami Beach Twitter account. The twitter posts are really links back to the public Facebook page. We have found this to be effective since it expands our audience to the general Twitter community but makes it easier for us to post on Facebook.

The custom theme features in-site integration of our Facebook feed as well as an embedded Google Calendar for our events. It was a definite win to use Google Calendar for managing our schedule. With a little bit of tweaking I was able to get it into a widget on our site footer.

Lastly, we started using MailChimp for our email newsletters and mailing list management. MailChimp has an API that we use to allow people to subscribe right from the website and also manage what groups they are interested in.

The Point: Better Communication

The new site looks better and is easier to use. But the major change we have seen is improved communication with our community. Using WordPress and social media has allowed me (geek) to get out of the way and allow the pastoral staff to do the communicating themselves. I think I did my job right this time.

One of the cool things about WordPress.tv is the channel that is just for WordCamp videos, WordCampTV.

Just in time for WordCamp Miami on Feb 22.

Check out the introductory video below.

• Theme Development
• Designing for WordPress
• WordPress tricks
• Using WP as a CMS
• Installing WP Locally
• Uploading Pictures
• Using an Image Gallery
• lots more… get over there and check ‘em out

I now humbly apologize and I confess that I have been assimilated. Yes, I’m on Facebook and I have used it to keep in touch with old friends. I’m also on Twitter and use it to follow other professionals the same way I have been doing with RSS Feeds for years.

I also use LinkedIn for professional networking and Plaxo for my contact management. But Facebook and Twitter have seen the most use over the past few months.

I eventually saw a need to centralize my updating of status and other messages in one place. I tried using Twitter to update Facebook but realized that I use Twitter too much for geek stuff and it would wear people out on FB. I thought I could go the other way but sometimes I use FB for more private, family and friends updates that I might not want “out there” on Twitter. (There’s a FB app that allows you to post from Twitter.)

I also wanted to have a way that I could update this blog with Twitter posts. That’s easy enough with a nifty WordPress plugin by Alex King called TwitterTools. It allowed me to display the most recent Tweets in my sidebar. I also hacked my theme so that it would display the most recent message in the header. That worked for a while but then as I used Twitter more and also got replies from people, sometimes it was hard to understand the context of only seeing the latest tweet.

What I needed was ONE PLACE where I could:

• Add status messages or quick blog posts
• Update Facebook, Twitter AND my blog with general status (“Out to dinner with the family”).
• Update only one of the above with status appropriate for the audience
• Update my blog with status or a customized message for the header
• Mix and match any 2 of the above.

Enter Ping.fm. This tool allows you to update several social networking sites with status updates, microblogging posts (like Twitter) or even longer blog posts with a title. You can configure Ping.fm with what they call “triggers” to update any combination of your target sites.

The best part was that I found a WordPress plugin called Ping.fm Custom URL by Matt Jacob that allowed me to set up my site to receive posts from Ping.fm.  It’s pretty cool and since Ping.fm sends 3 different types of posts (status, microblogging and blog posts) I can have my status messages appear in the sidebar and blog posts go to one particular WordPress category.

I customized my template to grab the most recent post from the blog posts coming from Ping.fm and display it in the header. Then I had to figure out how to NOT display these on the front page along with my normal blog posts.  Enter another cool plugin called Simply Exclude by Paul Menard that lets you control what categories appear on your front page and other archive listings.

All done.  I love WordPress.

Read all about the new features of the release.

I think my favorite feature will be the ability to update WordPress installations from within the admin area.  This will make my life so much easier.

Cool new admin redesign also!