Things are looking exciting here at WAM. Some challenges with WordPress and conflicts with databases are putting us in creative mode to riddle a solution. We may be on the cusp. It may be too early to say.

And we’re launching a series of Mastermind Groups for participants in the Social Media Success Summit 2010. Exciting!

Much more coming up, for sure.

How’s yours shaping up?

If you’d like to appear on one of our new, shiny podcasts, drop us a line.

Summary of WAM’s week, here (please accept my profuse apologies for the quality of the audio – this is in no way indicate of sonic prowess or the capabilities of the Heil PR40 microphone – more the atrocious synching between Hercules webcam and the mixer. We’ll be back to glory once the Xacti has decided to recharge, promise…):

I’m sensing excitement in the business world. Suddenly people are switching on their reality goggles and realising that the world really has moved on since 1987 and hot pants (whichever was in fashion more recently).

Businesses are starting to amaze more regularly:

The good:

• Gravity Forums for its astonishing dedication to customer service and listening to the folks who pay Carl’s wages.
• My eBay goods, the mic and the USB audio interface, delivered overnight. Stupendous.

A polarised remarkability:

• M-Audio not having produced a Windows 7 driver for its MobilePre USB. Beta is bullshit, guys – either release one that works, or just admit you don’t have a fucking clue.

Remarkable at either end of the satisfaction spectrum will get you press. Where Barnum talked about all being good publicity, I’m not so sure. But I’ll always cherish the moments of absolute frustration at the hands of this silver box’s non-compliance with the latest and greatest OS ever made, so the M-A school of sonic stupidity still gets recognition.

But we’re not yet at Business 2.0.

I’ll tell you why:

Until someone leads the pack and counsels subliminally all others that WordPress, CMS, community builders and Social CRM conjoin as a single, stellar future-focused strategy representing the only way to flow, we’ll still be stuck at just-past Iron Age in our evolution as champion entrepreneurs.

You have no idea – or maybe, just maybe, you have – how important a socially-extroverted philosophy is to any, all, enterprises. Now, and forever forth.

Forget the nonsense spouted about fiefdoms and lowest common denominators on the horizon as governmental non-believers in tech and the web catalyse a power struggle ending in the  meekest of digital offerings and a culmination of liberated speech.

We’re oblivious, in the main, to what is approximating in front of our very eyes. We’re wearing in metaphorical and existential contexts, across our entire peripheral vision, blinkers that stop horses fearing audience participation in their gallop. We want to do things by the book, as we have always done them.

Customers revolt. Customers talk. Customers do your business for you. Customers are in your business.

So why, oh why, have so few businesses seized the moment to galvanise community, CMS and CRM to stand so far ahead of their competition that they’ve already got the marathon medal before the race even began?

If you’re smart, you’ll lose the Six Sigma, Prince and all that nonsense, and stretch, flex and strengthen your understanding of what it takes to be a 21st century customer-focused corporation.

It takes participation; embracing customer want; delivering accurate, changing content via CMS that are in such an advanced state of development already that all you have to do is dance with Miss QWERTY. Drum up some server activity by installing open source SugarCRM locally, then deliver tailored social media messaging based on customer feedback, experience, and website analytics.

That’s it!

Rid the staff chaff, waste hanging around your business waist. Lose the factory approach (no wonder satisfactory is no longer enough) and deliver relevant, meaningful experiences.

Solve problems. Be the inspiration your customers want and need. Deliver extra value at every turn: insight, commentary, even speculation. Use any medium: face-to-face, virtual, podcast, vodcast, anything to be there when they want you. Be the real-life, real-time FAQ they desire and deserve.

We’re on the cusp of a tipping point where CMS admins with killer content coursing through their corpse, and community managers hugging the likes of BuddyPress and interweaving all corners of the business at a lodestar fulcrum, become your most valuable staff.

Make it work. Make it through the next year. Make yourself rich, successful and adored.

And be happy. You’ve just learned the most important lesson of the week.

I blame – in the nicest sense possible – the lovely Jane Wells for starting it. In her blog she told us that she and Matt had spent a short time creating a website for the WordPress Foundation.

It looks a laudable effort to take WordPress to an even greater audience through outreach projects designed to get more folks blogging.

Or as Matt Mullenweg himself would have it:

to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.

Details, conceded Jane, are scant. And a cursory scan over the WordPress Foundation site provides little more information than what’s already been said.

Creating the Foundation as an official non-profit organisation is the right start. As they say, it’s all about creating a stable [and free] platform for web publishing for generations to come.

With all the banter and feud over GPL I wonder how many developers will rally to this apparently innocuous cause? I, for one, with a modicum of skill in the coding department, would be happy to contribute in any way to making blogging a part of the school curriculum, for example.

I found a letter I wrote to a pen pal about 20 years ago. It reminded me in a sugary way how cool it was to wait for the postie to deliver news from a friend you’d never met, but connected to via ink and paper.

Imagine how distant a reality that is, today. The idea of spending an hour or two composing a message to be read by an audience, even if that audience numbers just one.

With texts, Facebook and Twitter, kids don’t have the wherewithall or resolve to chatter through dozens of paragraphs of insight into the comings and goings of life. One thing pen-palling instituted in me was a fondness for the welfare of others. You don’t get that from an impersonal, acutely concise electronic message.

So blogging, for me, should be as letter-writing was for the boot-strapped kids of the 80s. Given precedence in academic environments. Inspiring people to create new worlds through words rather than pixels.

And did I mention the WordPress Foundation website is built on the 3.0 platform?

So I mentioned three, twice. That makes six. I’ll have four reasons to say ‘A-HA!’ later to reach my tally of 10 for the day… If you don’t get it, read the sticky post a the top of my home page!

And all are free.

1. The fantastic and free WordPress theme, Atahualpa
2. Bamboo Invoice
3. Rolopress

Atahualpa is the first free WordPress theme I’ve ever come across – and that is quite literally EVER – that offers all the options you could possibly need, wrapped into the funkiest and easiest of Options interfaces in the platform’s admin area.

It deservedly receives plaudits from all over the place. Some have granted it such high repute as to rank among the elite of paid themes such as Chris Pearson’s Thesis (which is damn good, but I ain’t gonna learn hooks right now – I have too much scrawling to do).

Why?

• No need to run down the Headspace/All In One SEO route – it’s all built in!
• Everything is customisable – crucially, for beginners upwards – via the Options panel
• Stack of widgets available out the box. Man, this is crazy cool.

Most importantly…

• It works the second you install it. Even premium themes take a bit of clobber setting up to look awesome. But this… well, it’s sensational.

Of course you can donate (that’s the perk of GPL for me – developers who offer you the chance to reward them fiscally, rather than forcing you to pay in advance and in many cases, pay unsighted for their failures) but it’s not mandatory. Atahualpa simply rocks. If you do blogging, seriously consider this theme.

As a writer of disputable but paid repute, I value my time above anything else. So you can fathom I’m incredibly moved to post what is essentially a free ad for these three denizens of the web realm.

Bamboo Invoice does what a ton of paid services do – better. I love this crazy stuff. Setting it up on a server is a cinch, and a couple of quick button presses and you have your very own fully-fledged invoice system. In an age where we’re all eating each other to save cash, this is the way forward for your fledgling accounting efforts. Hell, I’m rubbish at maths but even I can use this baby.

Rolopress converts a WordPress install into a contact management system. It’s dead easy to use, totally widgetable and is much better than Cloud computing (when it rains, it rains) because you retain complete control of all the data.

Punch in the sensational WP DB Backup plugin to your WordPress platform and you have totally bulletproof data, whenever and wherever you want it.

And on that note…

Have yourself a merry little weekend and see you next week!

I’ve been developing a client’s site. In WordPress. This is my very first commercial project on the platform. And it’s quite the revelation.

I’m from the old school of HTML/DHTML/XHTML/CSS. Dark arts but lovely in context when you get your head around their vaguaries. Having said all that I’m no coding ninja, not by a long way. And now I’m back in the family after some time off from the tags, I’m already bemused by the apparent loveliness of CSS 3 and the new flavour of HTML.

The site is a news one. Or at least that’s part of it.

Since WordPress and I have been friends a fair while, I decided to look up a theme, find strains of wonderfulness within and customise it to become a magical SEO-wielding temptress for all to savour and indulge upon.

That was my initial plan.

Having spent an ungodly amount of time hunting down the ideal jumping off point; being bewitched at first by the range available, challenged by the realisation that there’s nothing truly startling out there, and finally bemused at the apparent waste of time (although I like to think of it as constructive learning) I have come to the following conclusions:

1. Premium themes, no matter how great, are ok only if you are prepared to settle for something expected, rather than groundbreaking. They’re either too flashy or too simple. I need something effective, with a fast foundation and no bloaty nonsense that doesn’t need to be there. Do people really buy premium themes with ITALICS on header texty images? Really?
   The only exception to this rule, for me, is Mimbo Pro - despite it being roughly as old as Noah (more on him later), gets my vote right now since it ticks the most boxes. But I’ve seen some frankly atrocious customisations of its layout which made me reconsider my options about 175 times.
   And I did consider some of the options from Solostream including the latest, WP-Sublime (props for packing in a superb range of subscription Calls To Action across the sites you develop, Mike), but the collection just didn’t give me the scope I need as a layman in the art to end up with a result that would satisfy both the perfectionist Virgo in me, and the client
2. In-house support for premium themes is sometimes, but not always, a step-up from those offered by freemium theme designers.
3. Frameworks appear to be the way forward for a truly innovate WordPress solution. I absolutely love the look of Hybrid by Justin Tadlock.
   I also love the feel of Thesis but for a man with my limited abilities and an apparent allergy to ‘action hooks‘ (awesome guide and hacks how-to on the subject, if you’re feeling bold), it feels like it would always look the same as 75,000 other sites. You really have to be a true PHP god if you’re going to actually come out the other end with something that matches your needs.
4. Plugins are inherently evil. Sometimes they break your WordPress install, sometimes they make it chug to the point where only the toilet-bound would be willing to spend time with your elephant in the corner.
5. You can get round the problems of 4 by building your own custom functions, adding funky code to hooks, etc. But it takes some serious PHP knowledge to do it.
6. There are an indecent amount of websites devoted to WordPress that are superb in offering designers/developers of all levels the chance to expand their minds.
   But they never seem to have the answers you’re looking for and when you ask, the answers aren’t what you wanted.
   And there are some frankly amazing tutorials that can help you really get to grips with the platform. If you have time, and don’t need to earn money. Yeah, I totally get the ‘learn and earn’ concept. But it doesn’t wash at 2.30am.
7. There is no premium theme that offers (all of the following) a subscribe by email/RSS widget; flexible advertising logo options in the header; a related posts/’subscribe to my RSS feed’ in the footer of each post; a space-economical, horizontally-based listing of new-ish postings on the home page featuring sub-headings (highlights) you can link from to secondary news stories; a ‘list of authors and their latest posts’ page template; an ‘archive starting with the latest 20 posts’ page template.
8. In stark contrast to my balls-out statement in 4., Widget Logic looks like an absolute must-have and the best plugin ever.
   But some other plugin developers are starting to charge for the best ones.
   And everyone’s getting a bit too heated about what GPL really means and whether you can justify making money from a platform that is essentially free.
   But people have been doing that since the Ark. Which was in itself a money-making exercise since Noah had a side business going on selling rhino burgers to the terminally wet.
9. Your eyes hurt at 4am in the morning after a frenzied coding session.
   This is founded in fact and experience. I would much rather be sampling the world’s entire range of bourbon than staring at a screen. Or playing with a funny cat.
10. All said and done, WordPress is like the cute but bearded woman; you know you shouldn’t love her, but she captivates you with her irrepressible wit and lovely smile. And leaves you with a nasty case of stubble burn.