WordPress.org

1. bob dobalino
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Hi,

   This is focused towards those who make a living or at least generate an income from selling custom WP websites to clients.

   I am quite new to producing custom themes in WordPress and really like the look of WordPress as a CMS having read a few books on it and produced a few of my own custom themes for clients.

   I work for a small agency and have started using wordpress for client sites. It seem much better/flexible/easy-to-work-with than the other CMS that we use here but the more I do the more I get concerned about future support.

   I mean, these free and awesome plugins that are updated regularly, what happens if the developer just stops and the latest version of WordPress 'breaks' the 'old' version of the plugin. Does that mean my clients site will just stop working one day?

   I would love to know how others who generate income from providing clients with a CMS (and using WP) deal with this prospect.

   What I am also interested in is how people deal with updating WP to the latest version for clients, or whether they let the client hit the 'update WP now' button. Do you add it into the service agreement and check every few weeks if anything neeeds updating or something else?

   Not sure if this is the best place to ask the question, but would be really interested to here people's views

   Thanks

2. Ipstenu
   Half-Elf Support Rogue & Mod
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Yes, themes and plugins might break. How you handle it depends on how you support the sites. If you juts build the sites and hand it over (turnkey) then you tell them they run this risk, and tell them who they can hire if things break down the road. If you provide ongoing support, then you need to get good at sorting out how to help them when a plugin breaks and they need a fix.

   Part of it is knowing who is and isn't a good developer to use their plugins and themes. Who has a good, reliable, dependable setup. That comes from being familiar with the culture and environment.

3. bob dobalino
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   OK cheers for the reply.

   So I guess it's a case of being completely up front about the system to the client.

   Ans what about the WordPress update itself and plugin updates? How do you keep track of it if you have many sites that you have built for different clients?

   thanks again

4. Ipstenu
   Half-Elf Support Rogue & Mod
   Posted 1 year ago #

   I have two clients I offer continuing support for on an ongoing basis. I made a calendar alert. First Monday of the month, I hit their sites up and make sure that everything's good. The rest of the time, I'll see the updates in my own dash anyway so I pop over to all the sites I maintain in order :)

5. esmi
   Theme Diva & Forum Moderator
   Posted 1 year ago #

   I use an almost identical system for about 5 or 6 client sites.

6. bob dobalino
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Do you think that system will still be maintainable as you get into managing site in the 20's and beyond in wordpress?

   I suppose you would need to dedicate an entire day to updating WP and its plugins on different sites, and that's if all goes well.

   Also, I know it is a matter of how you run your own business, do you think it is something that should be 'charged' support after the site is live, or a years support included free of charge for a year, for example. There maybe quite a few hours just spent on updating core and plugins (including testing and fixing if things don't quite go to plan).

7. bob dobalino
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Also, I know updating the core as soon as a new version comes out is supposed to be good practice, but do you hold off until each of your plugin's developers say that their plugin is 100% compatible with latest version?

   For example, I have one site on WP 3.0.1, saying that I need to update to 3.0.4 but 5 plugins saying they have new versions available, but the 'compatibilty of with WP 3.0.4 is unknown'

   How do you deal with that?

   Thanks

8. Ipstenu
   Half-Elf Support Rogue & Mod
   Posted 1 year ago #

   If you have 20+ sites, then yes, it will take time, and congratulations, you have to work to ... work :) Welcome to life like the rest of us.

   I don't delay on updating MY site. I also have a dev site I use just for testing every single plugin used on every site I run or support. I check right away and if there are problems, I either fix 'em or make workarounds. The worst was I had to spend a weekend re-coding someone else's plugin. Most of the time, it's only major releases (2.9 to 3.0 or 3.0 to 3.1) where I see a problem.

   Update to 3.0.4 now. You're missing MAJOR security fixes. MOST plugins will work. Some may not. Not all update their readmes for the minor releases.

9. bob dobalino
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Yeh, I guess that is the world of open source CMS's... Just seems like a lot of time spent updating, as you say though, c'est la vie.

   Good to know that it will only be the major releases that should have an affect on plugins. Thanks for the insight

10. Ipstenu
    Half-Elf Support Rogue & Mod
    Posted 1 year ago #

    You wanna know how much time a year I spend running updates on closed source CMS at work? Wanna know how long the upgrade for our SharePoint servers took? I'll give you a hint: the shortest upgrade process was a week, for ONE of my three environments (Development, Testing, Production). And that's excluding the red-tape paperwork.

    Upgrades are ... y'know, work. It's why we get paid to do it, and not just let people do it themselves ;)

11. bob dobalino
    Member
    Posted 1 year ago #

    all part of the job then I suppose, good to know other people's view on this though as my experience of how these things work outside of the agency I am in now (the only one I have worked in up till now) is pretty limited.

    Ta

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