Only Skin Deep

I reported a problem that I found in their Simple Press theme that I found upon updating WordPress to 3.3.1.  It was a problem with their dropdown menu.  Not a major problem – one that only occurs when logged into the WordPress admin.  I was just reporting it for the most part, and pointed out that someone whose site has significant logged-in user functionality could find this to be a real problem.

The forum staffer asked for a link, which I provided.  In the meantime, others chimed in with the same problem.  Days later, the tech said that she looked at my site, and that it worked fine.  I guess she didn’t read my post, unless she somehow psychically ascertained my log-in credentials.

Elegant Themes Support Trending Downwards?

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?  Does Anybody Really Care?

Throughout the thread, I’ve tried to be polite and patient, while trying to convey that it would be nice to get a status on the problem, and that users may not be happy if they are ignored.  I’d link to the thread to show you, except that it’s paid members-only – you have to log in with their somewhat awkward forum interface.   So much time has passed with nothing that I decided to write this.

So the problem will apparently languish, with no follow-up or status.  And I will question whether or not to renew my membership.

Does It Hurt If You Do That?  Then Don’t Do That

I had asked a question about a problem before, and did get an answer that worked, but it was a hack solution, not a code fix, and they made it clear that they didn’t consider it important enough to fix the script.  I actually found another way to fix the problem myself in the end.

Paid support is an interesting phenomenon.  I’ve found that it’s often brusque but responsive, and usually effective.  Forums for scripts having only free support seem more chatty and friendly.  I chalk that up to small paid support staffs who need to move as fast as they can.  But I think Elegant’s support staff may be too small to handle all the themes they must support.  And if Nick is the only coder, I could be waiting for a very long time for a fix, it it happens at all.

Waiting For Codeau

Maybe they’d disagree, or maybe not.  Or maybe something else is wrong.  Maybe other Elegant themes have really serious problems, and they’re going cuckoo.  I wouldn’t know, because they aren’t saying anything.

On their Support and Updates page, there are a couple of notable lines:

• Always Up To Date
• Timely Support

O…….K.

Update, 1/28/12

I finally got another reply after a few days.  They asked for log-in credentials.  I responded that I’d rather not give those out unless absolutely necessary, but that maybe someone else in the thread might want to.  I added that if I were on tech support, I’d try replicating the problem on my own system.  They didn’t take the broad, obvious hint.  Another reply came, saying, ‘OK, can I have a screenshot?’  Pretty funny, as a screenshot of a dropdown doesn’t show that clicking on a menu item does nothing.  I almost wonder if the tech is not a native English speaker, as communication is definitely not happening here.  That said, of course plenty of non-native English speakers do fantastically well in every phase of communication.  Apparently not in this case.  It almost sounds like an autoresponder.  I finally gave up trying to explain, and didn’t reply.  To them, I’m guessing that this means “yay, done, move on to the next problem”.  Oh well.

Today I did notice that there was an update to my theme!  And when I went to find the changelog, I saw that one item was a change to the Superfish delay, which sounded like it could relate to my dropdown issue.  I installed the theme update.  At first, my dropdowns were entirely removed, even though the Elegant Theme setting said that they were on.  A few re-saves and refreshes later, my dropdowns returned.  At first, they were clickable while logged into admin.  But then upon trying several links, the problem of “unclickableness” returned.  So no real fix.  BUZZKILL!  I have seen similar problems with other dropdown menus, where if you try to look at many dropdown links in quick succession, they just stop working.  It’s as if the menu runs out of gas, and I’m thinking that it’s a JQuery memory leak or something like that.

Note to Self

From the outside, based on my experience, Elegant Themes doesn’t view tech support as a big priority.  Theme updates do occur, but slowly, as they have many themes to support, and not enough coders.  If a change is made, no blog announcement or anything like that (maybe they think it’s bad publicity).  At least there was a notice in WordPress admin, but you won’t know that unless you log into admin.

On the forum, if they do post a fix, it’s often a code hack you can do, but may not  fix the underlying problem.  I ding them for this, too.  I’ve already removed the link to Elegant Themes from the footer of one site I built.

But I’m pretty sure that suddenly I will actually hear from them when it comes time to renew my membership!  They’re pretty funny! I should point out that any system or business can have problems like this.  And if they had communicated with me effectively, I would have been more tolerant, and wouldn’t have bothered writing all this.  Communication may be their downfall.  At least they look extremely cute!

Stacked, But All Looks and Few Brains

My client wanted me to move her MODx site from a Stackable test server to Namecheap to go live.  Stackable strikes me as decent hosting, with reservations.  I’ve not experienced downtime there yet, and the couple times I’ve used their chat tech support went just fine.  I’m not crazy about their admin interface, though.  It’s cute and Ajax-y, and appears to have been designed for looks more than everyday use by developers.  It’s the classic right-brain “designing for the 30 thousand inch monitor”, so when your screen is a little smaller, suddenly you can’t find things without fiddling.  There’s also some non-traditional navigation that they must have found to be tragically hip.   Anyway, it works mostly OK, but it takes me about 1/3 longer than doing similar stuff on a normal admin interface (and time is money).

Your Party Package, Buy Now! Operators Are Standing By! Cheap, Cheap, oh, and Cheap!

Much of Namecheap’s web hosting is quite standard, with the familiar CPanel interface.  So I was able to move my stuff over very quickly, and I got the site running.

Magic Quotes Innie, But No Outie

Then the fun began.  I wanted to edit a MODx snippet because it required an exact file path on the new site for a 3rd party script.  Then I was surprised to find extra backslashes saved in my edited code, so I realized that Magic Quotes was turned on.  Come on, Namecheap! Magic Quotes are SO 1995, having been un-recommended for years now.  So I tried a couple normal methods of turning that off via .htaccess and php.ini.  Ouch, errors relating to using PHP 5.3!  And then code to fix the errors also errored.  MODx forum offered a couple more suggestions, but although they may work on some hosts, they didn’t on this one.

I asked tech support to turn off Magic Quotes.  They would not, and suggested some of the stuff I’d already done.  To be thorough, I tried again to make sure I hadn’t made typos.  Same result.  They at least gave some .htaccess code for changing PHP back to version 5.2, which did work.

They Didn’t Come Cheap, So I Was Left to Plug the Hole

Annoyed, I took a different route.  Since nothing was working on the server end, I decided to write a plugin to handle the editing.  I cadged some nice code from php.net for this purpose:

if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
    $process = array(&$_GET, &$_POST, &$_COOKIE, &$_REQUEST);
    while (list($key, $val) = each($process)) {
        foreach ($val as $k => $v) {
            unset($process[$key][$k]);
            if (is_array($v)) {
                $process[$key][stripslashes($k)] = $v;
                $process[] = &$process[$key][stripslashes($k)];
            } else {
                $process[$key][stripslashes($k)] = stripslashes($v);
            }
        }
    }
    unset($process);
}

Notice how there are no opening and closing PHP tags like you’d find on a normal PHP script.  This is how MODx Evo wants its plugin code, and I forgot that at first (these days I spend much more time working with WordPress).  I set the script to fire on the OnSnipFormSave event.

That did it!  Suddenly my code edits worked fine with no cruft left over.  The site ran without errors, and the 3rd party script (Machform) worked beautifully.  It turned out reverting to PHP 5.2 was key; my code above did not work in PHP 5.3, although one of you expert coders out there could probably hook that up.

A Tiny Bit Awesome, Kinda

So the moral is…. Namecheap hosting does not like MODx Evo all that much, but it will reluctantly accept it. A similar strategy could be used for Revo, I think.  While investigating this problem I found some related MODx forum posts, and I see that Revo may also have problems with PHP 5.3 on some hosts, so a fix similar to mine may work for that release, too.

I’m not especially impressed with Namecheap tech support, although at least they did respond, and were part of the solution.  The dopeyness of having Magic Quotes on should be noted, as well as their unwillingness to turn that off at the server level.  For now, keep using them for domains – for hosting, they’re still working that out.

If You Ask in the Next Ten Minutes

But if you’re reading this, I’ll bet you’d like to know the difference between Thesis and Genesis, right?  Just send me $27 and I’ll tell you.  But seriously, as any of you know, you can’t just try these before you buy.  This is a bit off-putting for those of us who are used to either entirely free open-source stuff, or at least free trial versions of stuff.  Woo Themes, for instance, offers a bunch of freebies that are high quality, and that really give you a chance to put them through their paces before deciding to lay down some cash on a premium theme.  Thesis and Genesis deal with this by giving a money-back guarantee.

So I did buy Genesis after researching and trying LOADS of frameworks and themes, but I did manage to try Thesis without paying!  How?  The old-fashioned way.  No, not stealing it.  I got hired to work on a site that had it already.  What better way to do a test-drive?

I’m going to keep it brief, as there are some really good comprehensive reviews like this one that already do a great job in being exhaustive and accurate.

Mr. Wonderful

Seeing the many well-publicized antics of Chris Pearson, the developer of Thesis, initially turned me off.  So I approached Thesis with some reservations.  Apart from his personality, when I looked at the Thesis site, there was very little detail about how the tech support worked, which concerned me.  ”Members only” made it sound like it might be all volunteers, which is not good enough if you’re shelling out money, IMO.  And I couldn’t ask a quick question on the forum, because I hadn’t bought it.  I have, however, read elsewhere that this support is very good.  So they’re just not good at advertising it.

And now to the good stuff – as I began to use Thesis, I found that I didn’t need tech support anyway, which was important: because since I didn’t buy the software, I had no access to their forum.  But they do have some documentation available to non-owners, and with any framework, documentation of hooks is paramount.  After reading that and some tuts, I was on my way, and got everything done just fine.  I’d say this is about a tie between the systems… I was able to do what I needed with a bunch of CSS and a moderate amount of PHP code.

For Those Who Loathe Code

More goodness – I would say that the person who cowers in fear at writing code will prefer Thesis.  The admin panels are full of options that will allow you to do lots of things without touching any CSS or PHP code.  I love writing CSS, so this is less of a selling point to me, but I can’t deny that it’s nice to have quick access to so many appearance features.  Genesis has some quality panels in its admin, too, but it’s much more limited, and assumes that the user understands CSS well.  In the Thesis site I was working on, the designer got as far as she could with the panel, but she likes everything custom, so I had to make all kinds of CSS changes and structural changes, neither of which can be done without writing some code.  But if you can get by with a fairly standard set-up and your client isn’t too obsessive-compulsive, you may get by cranking out a site with Thesis not having written any code.  But that’s not typical in my experience.

Another thing I enjoyed with Thesis is the setting that gave “instant full width” to the design.  Upon a closer look, it looks like what they did was to have a bunch of CSS already written for both full-width and smaller-width designs, and what that magic button did was to simply activate a class that turns on all the full-width CSS.  Very clever and clean.  Suitably impressed, I went back to Genesis and I realized that although they don’t have the Magic Big Full Ass Width type of button, they do have handy classes on their standard markup for handling it – just a less showy implementation, and again, relying just a bit more on decent CSS skills.

Such a Deal!

One place where Genesis does clearly win, though, is pricing.  Both frameworks come with lifetime updates, but Genesis costs considerably less than Thesis.  Also you have an option to buy every Genesis child theme that they make (and any that they make in the future).  You can also get the Genesis framework by buying one Genesis child theme.  Thesis offers the framework for unlimited sites, or for a single site.

Having listed some Thesis perks, I will say that Genesis has been a real pleasure to work with.  In its quieter way, I’ve been able to easily handle anything I’ve needed to do with it, and there are a host of free Genesis WordPress plugins to enhance it even further.  The documentation is very helpful, albeit with fewer code examples – their stance is that you should look at the scripts themselves to understand the more obscure hooks and filters, which I find a little questionable.  So it does take more of a coder to get at every little part of the system, but will reward you if you examine it carefully.  I prefer this approach to that of other paid frameworks, which is to cram every possible feature into huge admin panels, which can slow down your site’s performance.  Since I don’t need the extra admin features of Thesis, I have what I need with Genesis, and won’t be buying the extra system.  I should also add that although Thesis has a hefty admin panel, it still comes out with good performance numbers in benchmark tests I’ve seen on some sites.

Temperamental Soloist

Another thought that occurs to me is that Thesis development is pretty much a 1-man-show, so if something bad happens to Mr. Wonderful, or the ever-mercurial developer suddenly decides to tell everybody to stuff it, I wonder what would happen to Thesis.  Genesis doesn’t have a huge staff, but have more hands working on their code, so this may be less of a concern with them.  That’s speculating, of course.

All in all, both frameworks are very good.  It’s almost a tie.  For me, Genesis wins.

It's rumored that the engineer was distracted while comparing Genesis and Thesis

For some time now I’ve been really enjoying the excellent StudioPress Genesis Theme Framework.  (In fact, I like it enough that I also became an affiliate)  Developing WordPress themes is easier and more organized than ever.  While learning the framework, I made use of their helpful hook reference, which offers easy access to Genesis features.

While working with a new theme, I wanted to include a custom field that would attach to a Post (or Page).  Then this field would be displayed in the sidebar when viewing that Post – essentially showing some unique content for the Post that would not be displayed in the Post’s body.

I looked through the Genesis hook reference for something relating to custom fields, and I was surprised not to find one, given that there are helpful hooks for almost any purpose you can think of.  After searching further through forum posts and tutorial articles, I found what I was looking for: the hook is (surprise!) genesis_custom_field.

So say you want to be able to display a slogan (or some other bit of user-entered content) displayed just above your sidebar content.  Edit a Post, and look near the bottom of the page.  You should see an area for Custom Fields.  (If not, go to the upper right, click Screen Options, and be sure that Custom Fields is checked).  Click Enter New, put in the Name and Value, and click Add Custom Field.  In my case, I named the field “slogan”.

Then under Appearance… Edit, I added this code to my Theme Functions script (functions.php):

add_action( 'genesis_before_sidebar_widget_area', 'slogan_meta' );

function slogan_meta() {
  genesis_custom_field('slogan');
}

The names of things make it more-or-less self-explanatory.  Essentially, I set up a function that will place an item at the top of the sidebar widget.  This function consists of our new field, “slogan”.   Then when you view a Post on your site, its slogan will appear at the top of the sidebar.  (or you can choose not to have any slogan value for a particular Post, so none will display).  That’s the simplest implementation of the custom field; you could add additional HTML code to the field for styling purposes, but this illustrates the general idea.

You can, to be sure, use regular WordPress functions and code to implement Custom Fields, but Genesis allows you to do this sort of task more elegantly, with very little code.  I hope you found this helpful.  Let me know in the Comments if you have a question.

A Pie Made Entirely of Smartphones. Mmm, just like Mom's!

According to Pew Research, texting is overwhelmingly the preferred method of communication for teens.  Anecdotally, that seems pretty obvious, but I was not aware of the numbers involved, and how much other methods have waned.  The teens and people under 25 that I know certainly are emblematic of this trend.  If I send one of them an email, I get either no response at all, or maybe one that arrives in a month or two.  Email is just so last century!  Of course it’s possible that they just find me totally boring. 

It occurred to me that this will have implications for those of us doing web development.  If you’ve worked with clients, you know that communication is critical for having a job go well.  Recently I am seeing more clients who will communicate via texting, and if it’s a simple answer to a short question, that’s perfectly fine, but if you have more than one question, or require significant input from the client, texting and smartphones are deadly.  So projects take longer, and misunderstandings proliferate.  Quality vanishes.  I’ve written before about one client I had who steadfastly refused to ever talk on the phone, have an online chat, or Skype.  Projects with him did eventually get done, but were irritating and always very slow, with so many corrections needed.  I believe this trend will only increase – people are so addicted to their phones that they will continue working this way even if advised of the pitfalls.  This is not good news.  You get communication like this, but without the humor.

Communication Breakdown – OMG, It’s a Good Thing

But I did see an upside.  As brand new web developers are minted, they will also want to do everything possible via their phone, thumb-typing on their tiny screens.  That means that if a client emails one of these developers, they may get no answer at all, or maybe a one-word answer to a 5-part question.  This client will not be pleased about that, and may fire the developer.  And the developer may not even know he’s fired if it occurred via email.  It would also be interesting to see the numbers of people trying to do web development or other business solely through Facebook.  TMI taken in a special new direction.

Hey! I'm totally updating my website now. If I get run over, at least my shoes look awesome! lol

So those of us who are willing to use multiple communication methods will have a distinct advantage.  Not because we’re smarter or better, but simply because we answer requests, provide timely information, and facilitate communication.