Author Avatars Plugin – fifteen years on

It hardly seems possible that I uploaded my first co-authored plugin, Author Avatars, to wordpress.org over 15 years ago!

That initial foray into the world of plugins was the first step that led to the creation of my premium plugin business, Matador Jobs.

It is rewarding to feel that, with 7,000+ active installations, people are still finding Author Avatars useful. Since I took over full ownership in 2011, I have continued to maintain it regularly. This includes adding Gutenberg support even before Gutenberg was included in WordPress Core.

Author Avatars makes it easy to display lists of user avatars, grouped by user roles, on your (multiuser) site. It also allows you to insert single avatars for blog users or any email address into a post or page – great for displaying an image of someone you’re talking about.

It makes use of built-in WordPress (core) functions to retrieve user information and get avatars.

Avatar lists can be inserted into your sidebar by adding a widget or into posts/pages by using a shortcode. The plugin comes with a tinymce editor plugin which makes inserting shortcodes very easy.

How to List All Authors From Your Blog in WordPress (image from WPBeginner tutorial on Author Avatars)

It is particularly gratifying to find Author Avatars featured in a WPBeginner tutorial dated March 8, 2024. Thanks guys for providing an excellent ‘How to’ guide!

Why contribute to WordPress Core?

So why would anyone want to volunteer their time or sponsor staff to contribute to WordPress core?

WordPress logo

WordPress, which fuels over 40% of the web, is an open source project. This means that the core code on which it runs has been created and is constantly evolving through the efforts of its users, a diverse community of people from around the world.

Developers/Coders

For developers, in the crudest form, core contribution allows them to demonstrate their expertise by saying to clients ‘you can find my name on the WordPress About page’. This is very helpful when a client asks, ‘how do I know that you know what you are talking about?’

Working on core also provides coders with an opportunity improve their skills due to the enforced use of coding standards and constant code review. You can keep up to date about new developments. As a bonus, you also get to know the inner workings of WordPress in weird and wonderful ways.

Contributors have the opportunity to work and learn alongside passionate innovators who are more than happy to share their skills. 

Contribute as an Individual | Five for the Future | WordPress.org

Agencies and other organizations

For agencies, being associated with core development positions you in the top tier worldwide. It creates regular marketing opportunities. Both clients and experts perceive it as validation of an organization’s credibility.

Contributions that improve the WordPress platform help to secure a positive future all round.

Supporting staff to contribute to WordPress core can also be a cost-effective way to offer them opportunities to learn and grow.

For any agency specializing in WordPress development, their ongoing success rests on the ability of WordPress to thrive and prosper. Therefore, it is in their best interests to support its growth.

By becoming involved in core contributions, an organization ‘enters the conversation’. It has at least some possibility of influencing future directions in WordPress. They can also represent the needs of their particular client group.

Participating organizations are able to integrate more deeply into the WordPress ecosystem, while gaining a voice in the ongoing development of the platform.

Contribute as an Organization | Five for the Future | WordPress.org

Core contribution may also provide early insight into what’s coming. This enables organizations to introduce the ‘latest and greatest’ to their clients or users. It may also help to pre-empt potential problems.

For businesses, developing a clear, strategic core contribution sponsorship program benefits both the organization and the individual. It also allows them to respond to the challenge of Five for the Future*.

In any such program, there need to be clear expectations, associated budgets and time allocation. These need to recognize that core contribution can be as much a marketing and training function as falling under the development budget. You can find a short white paper that explores the setting up of this kind of program further on WordPress.org.

Paul’s story

From my first discovery of WordPress in 2006, its community, flexibility and momentum has made it the platform of choice for my work.

Over the years I have been deeply involved with the WordPress community. I have made core commits to every version or WordPress since 3.9. I continue to support the wider WordPress community by speaking and volunteering at WordCamps, most recently at WordCamp EU 2022. I also co-founded a local WordPress Meetup, and regularly mentor others within the community.

XWP sponsorship

In 2021/22, most of my freelance work has been for XWP as part of their WordPress core contributor team. By their own admission in their LinkedIn post, XWP got carried away by the momentum of core contribution. As a result, they found themselves overcommitted. So, sadly, their sponsorship of my time has come to an end. I am so grateful to them for providing me with an amazing opportunity to follow my own passion to contribute to WordPress core in the company of truly skilled and passionate colleagues.

What this has meant for me has been the ability to contribute to much more substantial improvements to WordPress rather than having to focus my efforts into things that I could do in just a few hours. Working as part of a team is both stimulating and stretching. I believe it added value to what I was able to contribute and improved both my visioning and my skills.

Paul speaking at WCEU 2022
Paul speaking at WCEU 2022

XWP also sponsored me to speak at WordCamp EU 2022 and support the Google Performance Lab stand there. This is another aspect that organizations may wish to consider in developing a sponsorship program. It offers an additional means of increasing their visibility, creating marketing opportunities and attracting talent.

A continuing conversation

It goes without saying that I will continue to contribute to WordPress core as time and resources allow.

I am also keen to play a part in the conversation around developing sustainable models for core contributor sponsorship. Based on my experience with XWP, I believe that the benefits to the whole WordPress ecosystem of focused and consistently funded contributor programs are immense.

* Launched in 2014, Five for the Future encourages organizations to contribute five percent of their resources to WordPress development.

WCEU 2022 – WordCamp Europe, Porto

“I’m done with this; I don’t want to do this again. I’d rather just be a recluse!”

The Super Bock Arena, venue for WCEU 2022
The Super Bock Arena

It’s probably not too surprising that these were the first thoughts I had when initially I arrived at WCEU 2022 and wandered around Porto’s Super Bock Arena.

Since March 13, 2020, when we made it home from a vacation in Antigua just as Canada battened down the hatches, we have welcomed only three guests inside our home. Living on a lake in rural Ontario, Covid seclusion has been remarkably easy and comfortable. Our social life has mostly consisted of chatting to neighbours from across the road or the end of the dock. To go straight from this to an event attended by over two and a half thousand participants was bound to be a shock to the system and more than a little scary.

I find it very liberating to give myself permission to have no real agenda; not to tour the stands and chat and pick up swag; only to attend talks that really interest me; not to talk to anyone if I don’t feel like it!

‘. . . the community is where the heart is’

It is also unsurprising that what gently reeled my back in was what I have always valued and admired about WordPress; its strong sense of community, of connection and affirmation. Milan Ivanovic summed it up perfectly in his opening WCEU 2022 Track 1 presentation, Why we community?

“The code is poetry, but, the community is where the heart is.”

I found particularly moving and powerful his reflection on the way in which the WordPress commitment to inclusivity and diversity broke down the barriers he personally had put up against ‘otherness’ growing up in a small Serbian village.

The code is poetry, but, the community is where the heart is.

A WordPress user and blogger, I have some technical knowledge. But who I am is rooted in facilitating change, connecting people – to each other and to information – and the creation of community. WordPress has not been my career focus. But I have volunteered at and attended WordCamps in the past. I also co-founded a local WordPress Meetup.

I don’t know what it is about ‘community’ people. There seems to be an extraordinary, instinctive, gravitational pull that draws us together. There was a heartwarming hug from Josepha, a longstanding community team friend; a lively dialogue with Community Engagement Specialist, Cate, at the WordPress Community Booth; and, out of the blue, a lunchtime conversation with Julia, a Community Steward, that ran so deep it could have gone on all day. I found re-connection, new heart-kin, and so many kindred spirits of all kinds throughout the passing exchanges of the two days. This was a timely reminder of the riches such interactions can bring.

The other sessions I attended, on partnerships and acquisitions, also reinforced the values I associate with the building of strong communities; resilience, curiosity, openness, mutuality, providing a positive and consistent client experience; and appreciation of employee and volunteer effort.

Support, affirmation, inclusivity, and connection

Some of the XWP Team
Some of the XWP Team

My husband and business partner, Paul Bearne, spends about half his time working for distributed agency XWP. They currently sponsor him to work on WordPress Core. I found it heartwarming that the sense of support, affirmation, inclusivity, and connection seemed so much greater with the XWP team (for both of us) than almost any work environment I can remember. Paul suggests this is because people need to have a special kind of energy to be self-motivated enough to work in a distributed setting. They may also have to make a much more conscious effort to build connection. And, of course, this is backed up by the WP ethos of community. Whatever the reason, it made for a positive and life-affirming re-emergence into the post-Covid world.

‘Finding your WordPress lifestyle – insider insights from a veteran coder’

Honestly, the prospect of attending Paul’s talk was much too nerve-wracking for me! I sweated with him over creating the slides and we will review the video recording together on WordPressTV if he is planning to deliver it again.

For someone who is much more accustomed to giving tech talks, this kind of ‘lifestyle’ topic was quite a challenge. Paul’s XWP colleagues were most generous in contributing their time to helping shape and refine his content and delivery. I’m glad to say there was a lot of positive feedback – people seem to have found it genuinely useful and interesting. As well as recording a podcast interview for WP Tavern, he was interviewed by HubSpot. His insights are now featured on their Blog, which reaches over 1.3 million readers a month. A good day’s work.

Everybody needs a Gina! (slide)

The talk brought me some degree of personal notoriety. Standing in line to pick up a coffee when I arrived that day, the person to whom I was chatting glanced at my badge and said, ‘oh, you’re Gina!’ A gracious acknowledgement of my back-up role, the slide ‘Everybody needs a Gina!’ emphasized the importance to remote workers and freelancers of effective support.

From recluse to WCEU 2022 party animal

Part of the appeal of WordCamps is the opportunity to interact in person with colleagues from all around the world. In many cases, these are people you may have known for years yet never met. It was a delight to see Paul recognized by so many, often greeted with a hug (a bit scary as an emergent recluse) and with obvious affection.

Paul embraced the party spirit to the full. For him there was an XWP Team Day with a scavenger hunt around Porto and Douro boat trip, a Codeable dinner at the Baroque Palacio di Freixo on the banks of the Douro, the WCEU 2022 Speakers’ Dinner at the cruise ship terminal, as well as the traditional WordCamp After Party held at the Super Bock Arena. I attended about half of these. This suited me fine as I still found that many unmasked people (for eating and drinking) in indoor spaces a little daunting.

Yes, remaining a recluse certainly has its attractions. But WCEU 2022 was a welcome reminder of the joy and energy that can be generated when like-minded individuals are able to spend time together. Perhaps Covid may have given us an opportunity to understand that, in the best of times, both have value. It doesn’t have to be either/or.

If the WordPress culture of community has caught your attention, you may be interested in this 2019 blog post, The WordPress Community – Passion and Participation

Using a Child Theme

(and other things you need to know to start editing your theme)

A child theme allows you to change small aspects of your site’s appearance yet still preserve your theme’s look and functionality.

WordPress Theme Handbook

Child themes

  • allow you to modify a theme without blocking the ability to apply theme updates
  • give you a starting point to make development much faster rather than coding everything from scratch

Slide Presentation on Child Themes from Ottawa WordCamp 2019

WordCAmp Ottawa 2019

I recently led a session on Child Themes for Ottawa WordCamp 2019 entitled Child Themes and what else you need to know to start editing your theme. Hopefully this may be helpful, even without the commentary!

Resources

Here are some additional resources that you may find useful:

The WordPress Community – Passion and Participation

Wapuu - Community; Bring People Together

A major part of using WordPress involves relying on and interacting with the WordPress community at large, which has the reputation of being genuinely friendly and helpful. After all, as an open source platform it has been built and maintained by that community!

Although the members of our local WordPress Meetup are by definition a part of that community, few were aware of the range of opportunities available within it.

So, for our last session before the summer break, we chose this as our topic. I put together a slide presentation covering the kind of resources and experiences the WordPress Community can offer you and the ways in which you can contribute to WordPress.

  • Meetups
  • WordCamps
  • Community Forums
  • The Community Deputy Program
  • Contrib to Core
  • Component Maintainers
  • Contributing/ reviewing plugins and themes
  • Freelance/ remote working opportunities
Overview slide from presentation on the WordPress Community

For quick reference, I also put together the following useful resource links:

WordPress Statistics

Most Marvelous 100+ WordPress Stats & Facts (2019)

WordPress Stats: Your Ultimate List of WordPress Statistics (Data, Studies, Facts – Even the Little-Known)

Meetups

Meetup Program Basics

Kingston WordPress Group Code of Conduct

Kingston WordPress Group Good Faith Rules

WordPress 2018 Meetup Survey Results

WordCamps

WordCamp Central

You may also want to read my account of attending WCUS 2016, WCUS – passion, democratization, accessibility, community

Contributor Days – an example (US WordCamp 2018)

WordCamp Schedule

Don’t forget to keep an eye on your WordPress Dashboard for news about local events!

WordPress Resource Sites

WPBeginner – mostly how-to guides for simple tasks

Torque – more editorial content, from development to light pop culture

WPTavern – editorial content, mostly about the project and open sources

WPMU DEV Blog – some free content, some by subscription

WPShout – mostly developer-focused content, with in-depth tutorials

Online WordPress Forums


27 WordPress Support Forums That Have All The Answers – useful article, including a comprehensive list of WordPress Facebook Groups

WordPress Support Forums

WordPress Slack

WordPress Codex

WordPress Stack Exchange – you may also want to see the Stack Exchange Tour for step by step instructions.

Contributing to WordPress

The Community Deputy Program

Make WordPress – If you want to get involved in WordPress, this is the place to be, with blogs for each contributor group, general news, and upcoming events.

Contib to Core – see also this helpful Developers Guide to Contributing to WordPress Core from Delicious Brains

WordPress Core Components

Submitting Themes

Theme Review

Plugins

Leaving a WordPress Plugin review

Freelance and Remote Working Opportunities

Useful articles from codeinwp:

20+ Sites to Find Remote WordPress Jobs + 5 Great Companies Hiring Right Now

Remote Work for WordPress Professionals: How to Work From Home (And Stay Sane)

Virtual Agencies

Outsourcing Marketplace

Job Boards

How can I know I am writing secure WordPress code?

Security

Even as experienced coder, it can be daunting to try to write secure WordPress code.

There is one golden rule: trust no-one!

But if you habitually make use of a few good tools, you should be able significantly to reduce potential vulnerabilities. As a bonus, secure code tends to be both performant and readable.

Where to begin – good tools

Use the tools that exist – don’t just write your code in a basic text editor!

I would recommend as a starting point using an IDE – Visual Studio Code, PHP Storm (IntelliJ), or, if you want a more editor based option, Sublime Text. Amongst other features, all of these offer code completion and syntax highlighting. This easily eliminates some of the ‘basics’, allowing you to focus on the actual code.

Next, you need a static code analysis tool. For WordPress coders this means installing  PHP_CodeSniffer (https://github.com/squizlabs/PHP_CodeSniffer ). If you integrate this with your IDE, you will get real-time feedback as to whether you are meeting the coding standards that you have selected.  For example, CodeSniffer will complain if you do not sanitize the input, escape the output or use a nonce when receiving data.

Note: A team of volunteers has created a set of WordPress Coding Standards rules (sniffs) to enforce WordPress coding conventions.  You can download these, together with integration instructions, from GitHub (https://github.com/WordPress-Coding-Standards/WordPress-Coding-Standards )

Applying the golden rule

What does it mean to ‘trust no-one’?

Your code needs to check that any input passed to it from a user, another coder or function is what you expect and that any time you return content your code confirms that it is the right type of content.

Example of checking input data

In the code fragment below, I first check that a form submitted was created by the website by using a nonce and then use absint() to make sure the form value is a number, followed by using the sanitize_text_field() to clean the name value input.

// Check we have a form field called wp_nonce
// Check the value of wp_nonce is what WP created
if ( isset( $_POST['wp_nonce'] ) && wp_verify_nonce( $_POST['wp_nonce'], 'save_form' ) ) {

 // make sure that a and ID is an int    
 $post_id = absint( $_POST['id'] );

  // - Checks for invalid UTF-8,
 // Converts single `<` characters to entities
 // Strips all tags
 // Removes line breaks, tabs, and extra whitespace
 // Strips octets
 $name = sanitize_text_field( $_POST['name'] );

 // Save form
 }

Examples of escaping output data

It is important to escape any translated content as you don’t know what is in the translation. In the following code fragment, the last thing I do before echoing the html is to pass it through esc_html() to make sure it is valid and allowed html.

 echo esc_html( sprintf( '<p>%s</p>', __( ' Some content to by translated', 'text_domain' ) ) );

You should never trust the output of a function, even if you wrote it, as someone else might change it later. In this example, I use esc_url() and esc_attr() to clean the returned output of the functions.

echo sprintf( '<a href="%s" title="%s">click here</a>', esc_url( get_a_url_from_somewhere() ), esc_attr( get_a_title_from_somewhere() ) );

Writing secure WordPress code – the last word

Security is always going to be a challenge – change is a constant and vulnerabilities exist everywhere. But it is our responsibility as coders to do the best we can. At the very least, consistently using the tools available, applying coding standards and following basic good practice guidelines, is just good sense. It should eliminate a significant proportion of risks and leave you some headspace to tackle the edge-case scenarios.

Privacy and your WordPress sites

Last night our local WordPress Meetup group hosted a round-table on privacy issues and the implications of the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that comes into force on May 25, 2018.

I think all of us rapidly became aware of how little we know and how complex it is becoming!

As a brief summary, GDPR is legislation that aims to protect the privacy of all EU citizens. It is a system of principles, rights and obligation which everyone who has a website needs to be familiar with.

If you have a website at all, it is very likely that you need to make some changes to it to comply with the legislation.

If you fail to comply with GDPR, you could be fined for up to 20 million euros or 4% of your yearly turnover, whichever is higher.

Key principles

  • Personal Data must be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the individual
  • You must be honest, be open about who you are and what you are going to do with the personal data you collect
  • personal data must be collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner incompatible with those purposes
  • personal data must be adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which it is processed
  • personal data must be kept in a form which permits identification of individuals for no longer than is necessary for the purposes of the processing
  • personal data must be processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the data using appropriate technical or organisational measures

You may think that this doesn’t affect you or apply to your website. But if you ever ship or sell products to the EU or offer a digital service that’s used by EU-based customers, then it is likely that it will.

Examples of things to consider

  • You should already have a page that sets out your privacy policy on your website, but this in itself is not enough. Privacy information must be clear, concise and explicit.

Best practice suggests a ‘layered’ approach, with headings that can be expanded to provide more detailed information that is backed up by a dedicated Privacy Policy page.

Perhaps an even better alternative is clear pop-up notices whenever you are asking a user for personal information, explaining how this will be used and linking to further information. For example, if you collect an email address on a contact form, you might add an explicit message as to why you need this information and how you will use it, e.g. ‘to allow you to access your account and so that we may contact you with important information about any changes to your account’.

  • The default for any ‘opt in’ box must be un-ticked. Individuals must actively give consent.
  • If you use cookies, you will need users to opt in explicitly.
  • If you have pages, say on a blog, where people can comment, you will need to get their explicit permission to retain (store) a connection between their comments and their identity in the form of their email address.
  • If you are using analytics, there may be implications about what data you can legally collect and store.
  • If you are running an e-commerce store, you will need to be clear about what information you may legally hold. This gets complicated in that most countries require that you retain a copy of all invoices for a certain length of time. So you may find you have to delete copies of orders, but retain copies of invoices for the prescribed time, with an effective process for deletion when that time expires.

 

There is a great deal of good information available about GDPR and how to tackle compliance. Below are some links to resources we have found useful, including information about the work WordPress is doing to help users with compliance.

Links

Site Owner’s Guide to GDPR – a really excellent resource manual is available, whether or not you download the plugin it supports. (Codelight)

GDPR: How to write a Privacy Notice – Best Practices – very helpful article with some practical examples. (Hashed Out)

Worried about WordPress and GDPR? Start Here – a good starting point (Pagely)

GDPR Compliance Tools in WordPress – what WordPress is doing to support users with GDPR compliance. If you want to see a bit more of the background to this, you may want to look at Roadmap: tools for GDPR compliance

 

 

 

Matador Jobs Development Roadmap

Following on from our launch post about Matador Jobs, this post from our Matador Jobs site sets out our development roadmap for the months ahead.

Matador’s developer Jeremy discusses the short-term development goals for Matador Jobs and its extensions now that we’re officially launched.

Matador Job’s launch this month is the result 7 months of concentrated work by the Matador team as well as the culmination of nearly three and a half year of custom development on the Bullhorn platform by both developers. We feel we put important features into Matador at launch and are proud of our initial release, but we are enthusiastic about continuing development on the project and bringing even more features to Matador in the future. As we continue to nurture Matador post-launch, we have many goals for the future of the project, and we’d love to share our thoughts with you all.

Get To Know Matador

Please note, projecting timelines for software development is an imperfect art. This is a statement of goals, not a promise of delivery. Timelines will shift forward or backward, and features may or may not make it into a specific release. Until we formally announce a release, the following are just goals, not promises.

Everyday: Bug Fixes and Documentation

While we’ve launched what we believe is the best, most stable, most fully-featured WordPress and Bullhorn integration, it will only take a handful of you getting it out in the real world to exceed the sum of all our tests over the last seven months. An always-present goal of ours will be to ensure Matador works the best it can, so if you find a big, we are committed to fixing them as fast as possible. If you find something not working right, file a support request as soon as you can.

Matador Documentation

Also, Matador is built to be customizable and extensible, but right now, our documentation is sparse on those details. A goal of ours now and moving forward is to always be improving our documentation. You can help us do this by asking lots of questions and even submitted Github gists to our team for examples. Got a question? File a support request.

Near Future: Easier Extensions

Matador Jobs Pro plans include access to our Pro Extensions, but its not exactly easy to get them and install them right now. Our biggest development goal beyond bug fixes at this time is making finding and installing extensions easier for our Matador Jobs Pro clients.

2-4 Months from Now: GDPR Compliance and GDPR Extension

The European Union’s upcoming implementation of GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation) will put important rules in place on site operators that store customer information. We want to make sure that your use of Matador in the EU is compliant.

As it stands now, Matador Jobs Lite (free on the WordPress.org plugin repo) does not store information about site visitors, and therefore will already be GDPR compliant.

When you upgrade to Matador Jobs Premium or Pro, an option can be set to store applicant data locally, which is recommended to enable for faster application processing and data duplication, but thus qualifies as stored data covered by the GDPR. In order for our Premium and Pro users to be compliant with GDPR while using that setting, we add some features that will need to be enabled in the settings screen. This will be completed ahead of the May 25th deadline and provided in a regular update to all active subscriptions.

Further, we are developing a new Pro Extension that will use the Bullhorn API to help your company become GDRP-compliant when it comes to data it is storing on Bullhorn about clients. We are working with our European users to develop this tool and don’t have a lot of details to share at this time. Our goal is to also have this available by the May 25th deadline and downloadable by all Matador Jobs Pro subscribers.

3-6 Months from Now: WordPress “Gutenberg” Editor Support and Job/Applicant User Interface

WordPress is working on a major update that will include the code-named “project Gutenberg” changes to the post editor. It is a pretty awesome project that will make writing and editing content on your WordPress site more streamlined and intuitive. If you’re a current user of Matador, you’ll note that our Job Listing and Applicant admin areas are somewhat boring, and we agree, but we purposely decided to wait to flesh it out until we have more clarity on the “Gutenberg” project. As WordPress gets closer to its next major release that will include “Gutenberg”, our admin user interface for Job Listings and Applicants will improve to not only be easier to use and more intuitive, but also support the new “Gutenberg” features. These changes will be for all Matador Jobs users, including Lite users.

4-8 Months from Now: Recruiter Support (Pro Extension)

A common feature request from past clients of our custom Bullhorn integrations is recruiter support. We understand that some candidates develop rapport with specific recruiters (especially in higher-turnover industries) and like to follow their recruiter’s offering, while some Bullhorn companies are heavily segmented by recruiter and want their site to sort and display jobs with more emphasis on the recruiter. The need to have recruiter-related features in a Matador-powered site is something some of our users really want or need. Those users, provided they are Matador Jobs Pro subscribers, can look forward to a new Recruiter-related Pro Extension sometime later this year. If you’re one of those firms that need these futures and are already a Pro Subscriber, file a support request asking to be added to the Recruiter Support beta test when we open it up.

To Infinity and Beyond

Beyond those four goals, we have a long list of more things we plan to add to Matador either as a Pro Add-ons or included in the core packages, including easier to customize forms, integrations with other job-seeking tools like LinkedIn and Indeed, and more. We will do our best to keep the pace of Matador moving at breakneck speed, but you can help speed up that pace in several ways:

  • Talk to us. We value your input. Whether coming to us as user feedback or as a feature request, we listen, and will ultimately shape our development goals around our users’ needs; after all, that is why we made Matador in the first place.
  • Subscribe to Matador Jobs Premium, especially if you’re a user of Matador Jobs Lite. Matador Jobs is a project of two full-time WordPress developers, but until we have many subscribing users, it won’t fully replace our regular work. In the meanwhile, we’ll divide our time between Matador and other client work. The more people who sign up for Premium and Pro, the more time we’ll be able to focus on Matador, speeding up its development for all.
  • Sponsor Development of a feature or add-on. If your company needs something that isn’t included yet in Matador or something we plan to do but not right away, file a support ticket and explain that you can’t wait. If we feel your requested feature is something that belongs in Matador or available as an extension, we may make arrangements for you to “sponsor” the development at a reduced custom-development cost and move it to front of the line. Requests that don’t fit the long-term development goals of Matador will be subject to the full custom development and integration service.

Announcing the release of Matador Jobs 3.0 for Bullhorn CRM

For the last seven months or so I’ve been working with a colleague on developing the Matador Jobs plugin. It’s finally here!  Below is our release announcement from the Matador site. 

 

Introducing Matador Jobs, the new family of plugins for WordPress to integrate your website with the Bullhorn CRM.

After seven long months of development, hours of testing, one too many emails telling our eagerly awaiting customers “soon”, many long days, early mornings, and late nights, we are excited to finally announce and introduce Matador Jobs. This is the first major release of the new Matador Jobs family of plugins, and we’d love to get you acquainted!

What is Matador Jobs?

Matador is a premium WordPress plugin that connects and integrates your businesses’ marketing website with the power of your Bullhorn CRM subscription. If you’re here, you are likely already a Bullhorn customer, or a developer working for one.

When you install Matador, you will be prompted to use REST-API credentials to connect your website to Bullhorn. After a few settings tweaks, your website will reach out to Bullhorn and gather all the information about the jobs your firm is currently hiring for. It will make a local copy of the job data and then build a page on your website for every job, optimized for SEO and Google Jobs Search that loads incredibly fast. It will then regularly check your Bullhorn account about every half hour for changes to the jobs, and update your site if needed, so you only need to manage your jobs in one place: on Bullhorn.

Matador Jobs - Job Listings Screenshot

Each job also has an application form, either on the job page at the bottom or as its own application page. This form is fully customizable with 14 different fields, including a resume and a cover letter. When an applicant visits your site and finds a job they’d like to apply for, they can do it directly from that page. They are sent a confirmation email, your recruiter is sent a heads-up email, and their information is transmitted directly to Bullhorn to create a candidate record and add them as a new lead or applicant for the job they were interested in. This application data is also saved on your website, for both reference and in case something goes wrong, and if something does go wrong, Matador will retry at a later time. When an applicant provides a resume, Matador will send the resume into Bullhorn’s resume processor and build their candidate profile on Bullhorn with that processed data.

But Other Plugins Claim to Do That, Why Matador?

What makes Matador so good at what it does is that its developers have spent a combined 7 years developing for Bullhorn and we’ve figured out how to address all of the challenges our colleagues haven’t. We’ve seen almost everything that can go wrong, and we’ve tried to include failsafes for as many problems as possible. Two of those big issues are: its very hard to connect a site to Bullhorn and it disconnects often. To address these issues specifically, we built a user-friendly “Connection Assistant” tool and a behind-the-scenes connection recovery tool that successfully recovers from a disconnect up to 80% of the time without user intervention required.

Matador Jobs - Bullhorn API Credentials Screenshot

I’m a User of the Old Plugin, What Happens to Me?

One of Matador’s developers offered a free plugin on the WordPress plugin repository called Bullhorn Staffing and Recruitment Job Listing and CV/Resume Uploader for WordPress for the last few years which Matador Jobs Lite will be replacing. If you were a user of the that plugin, have no fear! When we finish our release, your website will upgrade the old plugin to Matador Jobs Lite and all features you once counted on will still be available to you as well as some great new ones.

So Why Should I Upgrade?

Five reasons: Application Processing, Connection Recovery, Support, Regular Updates, and Extensibility.

A premium version of Matador will be required to receive and process applications from candidates on new installs. Not only does Matador Jobs include application processing, but it includes tools that prevent duplicate candidate submissions, allow single candidate records to apply to multiple jobs, parses and processing resumes into candidate data points, and accepts applications in fewer than 1 second on average via our smart local caching of candidate data.

Matador Jobs - Applications Screenshot

As mentioned earlier, the connection recovery tool is our answer to one of the huge problems when working with Bullhorn. In our years of writing WordPress plugins for Bullhorn users, we found that Bullhorn API connections can be broken somewhat regularly. In the past, our solutions was to email the site administrator to ask them to repair the connection manually, but that required someone intervene every time. Matador Jobs premium includes Connection Recovery, an automatic process that detects disconnections and attempts to reconnect before requesting administrator intervention.

When the old plugin was released, it was released “as-is”. It wasn’t yet fully realized and definitely required an advanced-to-expert level of knowledge of WordPress and Bullhorn to install and configure. The problem is that many of the people who installed the plugin were not developers, so many users reached out to us for support that we couldn’t offer. Not only do all users benefit from the easier to use and configure features of Matador, but our premium users will get access to around-the-clock email support from the people who build Matador day in and day out.

The old plugin only got updates when one of our users offered to sponsor development costs. This meant some users would get frustrated waiting for updates that weren’t coming. Premium offerings will help ensure regular bug fixes and new features, and we’ll deliver those automatically to your site.

Finally, another thing we learned in years of offering and occasionally supporting the old plugin is that everyone who uses Bullhorn uses it in a different way, and we needed to offer a solution that is customizable, configurable, and extensible. While Matador Jobs is the spiritual successor to the old plugin, it is nothing like its predecessor. When we built Matador, we started from scratch, both to create the most stable, most reliable solution available, but also to create an extensible solution. We put hundreds of filters and hooks into the plugin, and we are launching with 7 extensions that add optional features available only to premium subscribers.

So I’m Sold. What Version Should I Get?

Matador Jobs Pro is available as an annual subscription and includes updates and support and all the pro features. It is ideal for smaller firms who don’t need access to our extensions and add-ons. Pro Plus is available as both a one-time lifetime purchase or as an annual subscription and includes all of the Pro features plus access to any or all current and future extensions and add-ons that help you make your Matador experience even more tailored to your business needs.

Why is this version 3.0? What happened to 1 and 2?

In a way, this is the 1.0 version of Matador because it is a completely new plugin, but as we explained before, Matador is the spiritual successor to the old plugin. The final version of that plugin was version 2.5 and so we are releasing Matador Jobs at version 3.0 to ensure existing users of the old plugin can enjoy the automatic upgrade path.

Shout-Out and Thanks to Our Awesome Supporters

Let us take a minute to shout-out to and thank the people who made this possible! Jeremy and Paul, the co-developers of Matador Jobs, couldn’t’ve made Matador without the loving support of our wonderful better halves, Cyril and Gina. While we’ve both had mentors in our careers as developers, one that has been an incredible mentor in many facets of the development of Matador is Chris Klosowski, who embodies the spirit of the WordPress community in every way. We also owe thanks to several of our clients, including Kelly, Tim, Lisa, Lee, and others for being supportive during the development and helping us test our early work. Thank you all!

 

 

WordTechCon! Toronto 2018

WordTechCon

I’m delighted that WordTechCon has just announced that I will be speaking at their conference in Toronto, on May 4 2018.

WordTechCon describes itself as “a new premium conference that will allow WordPress Theme and Plugin Developers as well as hosting services to learn from industry leaders at a relaxed pace in a wonderful location”.

I will be be speaking on a pretty fundamental issue for all coders;

How can I know I am writing secure WordPress code?