Today I am officially releasing Do the Woo version 3.3. Now, why do I give my site version numbers? Honestly, I can tell you that it grew out of changelogs. Then why a changelog? I wrote a post did an epiosde on that here.
Since you can read the full post, in a nutshell it is essentially three things.
- One is to give you, the listeners or the reader, a sense of history of the site.
- It helps me to know what I’ve done with the site.
- Just doing something different.
Releasing the new version, what you will find in v 3.3
So if you were to name a version like WordPress always names their major versions, even though this maybe isn’t a major version, I would call it builder opportunities. Real exciting, obviously not as cool as a name of a jazz artist, but I’ll leave it at that.
I’ve talked about several of these things in various other podcasts or blog posts. So they’re all scattered around and I thought if I brought it all together to give you more of a synopsis of everything that has recently been added to the site.
Woo BuilderBytes Podcast
The biggest piece is builder opportunities. And what I mean by that is elevating builders out there more, giving you the opportunity to voice yourself through either written word or a podcast. First I have started BuilderBytes, which is a podcast that will be interjected between and around our regular Tuesday and Thursday episodes. They’re going to be shorter podcasts, 15 minutes or less. And the simplest way to describe them, episodes by builders for builders. So I will essentially be bringing in you, the Woo builder community, to do these shorter podcasts.
There are a few formats that I recommend to follow as a guideline. And some parameters to the content. But again, it will give you the chance to do a little podcast. This may be a monologue, or you maybe want to interview somebody. It’s putting the podcast even more into the community hands, which I’ve done through my co-host as well.
>35 minutes?
As for as the regular episodes you’ve been hearing, twice a week, we’ve had to be a little flexible with those lately because of all the stuff going on in the world. And every once in a while, our co-host or a guest, unfortunately gets COVID and they’re a little under the weather and we have to rearrange sometimes last minute. Hey, we’re flexible, so we’re good to go on that. But we are going to try to start doing some of the episodes more in the 30 to 35 minute conversation range, and the reason being, just trying to make it a little bit shorter. Of course, Woo Dev chats, that’s not going to be happening, the developers do need some time to talk and I pretty much give them a bit more flexibility. And of course, I’m not going to have anyone stop a good conversation short to meet a certain time, but we will be attempting that. So you’ll see that, and that is also why I’m interjecting these BuilderBytes as they’re smaller pieces of podcasts, 15 minutes and under.
DTW site tweaks and changes
What I did to the site, I think it’s a lot of what we do to our sites, constantly updating stuff. Sometimes we do it on an ongoing basis. For example, I did some tweaks to the home page and the archive pages.
On the single podcast episode pages, this is where the most change happened. I moved the transcripts from a widget down at the bottom into post content instead. Now, there’s a lot that can be said around transcripts and the effectiveness of them and whether they should be in there and if they’re too long and on and on and on, and I’m not going to get into that part of it, because that could be another whole show.
But the fact is I’ve tried a lot of different things with transcripts. I do them for my own specific reasons, but I think they’re a necessity and I put a lot of effort and resources into them. Let’s just leave it at that. So they became a big part of the Single Post.
Lastly, I added more links to the footer menu for easier navigation. So check out the site and see if you notice anything different.
When the plugin doesn’t work
Let me tell you this little story and it’s something I think you can all relate to. I’ve been working to bring more value to my sponsors. And one of the things I do with my site and for those of you that do build WooCommerce sites or have WooCommerce sites or whatever, you’ll be able to visualize this, is I use the account pages via WooCommerce for my sponsor account pages. And these aren’t normal WooCommerce account pages, because there’s not all these subscriptions and orders and all that stuff. Essentially, it’s several tabs that gives them access to resources and allows them to easily supply me with needed content. It. also gives them the ability to update their public profile page on the site.
My goal, streamlining it all for my sponsors. In this mix I use the YITH WooCommerce Customize My Account Page. It lets me list sections in a orderly fashion on the WooCommerce account page. But there was one piece that I was missing and that is the ability for sponsors to have their team members log into their account page and you Woo does not allow that by default. Only one user, one username and one password has access to it. Then that person has to share with everybody else. Something I don’t consider “streamlined”.
Well, I found an extension on the Woo marketplace. And it seemed to do the exact thing I wanted to do, and it was a single extension and the price was right. So I went ahead and bought it. Unfortunately, installing it on my staging site, I discovered that no, it does not work with the YITH plugin.
The problem, the tab for team members would not show on the account page. And since plugin conflicts is nothing new in WordPress, I didn’t stress. Instead, I decided I can’t use it, that’s it. Bottom line, asked for a refund at WooCommerce marketplace and got it right away.
With that said, I did have another option without having to take the time to hire someone to do the customization. I shared this on the Post Status WooCommerce Slack channel and asked for some input on it. Seeing if anybody had experiences or any suggestions for it. Bless his heart. Patrick Garman from Mindsize, one of our Pod Friends, came in and he recommended the membership extension and the team’s for membership extension from SkyVerge.
Now, I’m like Patrick, I trust SkyVerge and I’ve used SkyVerge for a long time. I’ve even used the membership extension way back when I tried a membership site. I weighed teh differences in the beginning. And thought it might be overkill to use the other two extensions. Well, lesson learned and you know what I will be getting soon.
Buy me a coffee transcription
The last thing I wanted to tell you is I have a thing called Support Transcriptions here on my site. This was something I recently added and I have included it in the release of 3.3. What that does is it replaces some of the other support modules I had set up. For a while there I was accepting support from various other companies besides my main sponsors. And I felt that the outside perception of that might be some kind of membership site and you would ask, do I have to belong to that particular so-called membership or club to get certain content? And that wasn’t the case. So I ended up eliminating those for that specific reason and am relying totally 100% on my sponsors, which are bringing me the resources to actually do what I do here, Do the Woo.
But I thought, well, there might be a few people that occasionally want to throw a few dollars my way, I’m not big on donation, plugins or pages, we all know how those work out. Especially if you’re builders, you know when you put up a donation for your free plugin on the site, people don’t swarm there and drop in money. In fact, the results are often pathetic.
Yet, I wanted to have an option. I didn’t want people to buy me a cup of coffee or buy me a beer or buy me a donut or buy me a zucchini or buy me anything like that. I just didn’t need a consumable. Some of those, with the exception of zucchini’s, you find everywhere. And honestly, I don’t think they ever really use it for coffee. So with that all said, I’ve decided that if you donate, no matter how small they are, itwill go directly to paying for transcriptions. And of course, I’ll be doing more transcriptions as I do more episodes so that will help.And of course, I have the resources through my sponsors to do this, but knowing if you do want to ever go a few bucks in support of this community, that every little cent of those few bucks that come through my way will be applied towards transcripts. So in other words, you won’t be buying me a cup of coffee, you’ll be helping create a transcript, which in the world of accessibility, everybody applauds you.
So there you have it, Do the Woo version 3.3.
Leave a Reply