Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
Are you planning to launch a new WordPress website? You’ve installed WordPress and are still in the process of designing your website, but you want to make the most of it before the official launch....
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Getting traffic from new sources, other than the search engines, can be a game changer for any website. Now, implementing a mechanism that can work in a way to boost the overall traffic is not...
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Starting a directory website in any niche can be challenging, initially. The functionality part is tough to add for a developer, but if you’re using WordPress as the platform, then it’s comparatively easy to implement...
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Gravity Forms is a tremendously powerful plugin for WordPress and Help Scout is an awesome customer support system that also provides a service for handling documentation. What they miss, however, is a direct connection that allows site owners to provide customers with a way to search the Help Scout documentation before they can submit a support ticket submission form.
An ideal support ticket submission process goes like this:
As far as I know, there are very few (if any) documentation / support solutions that provide this flow out of the box. There are numerous ways to build it but they are often complex and time consuming. Most product owners and service providers simply allow customers to fill out a contact form to ask for help without providing them with a good way to try and help themselves.
To help provide a better support experience for our products, and to make it easier for customers to help themselves, my team and I decided to build a custom integration between Gravity Forms and Help Scout that would allow customers to enter a search query, see results, and then, only if no relevant results were found, be permitted to open a support ticket. You can see this in action on the Easy Digital Downloads support page and also on AffiliateWP’s support page.
Let’s take a look at how we can set up a similar ticket submission form to the one we use for Easy Digital Downloads.
Setting this up requires the following:
There are numerous ways the form could be configured so feel free to deviate from the steps below. I’m just providing a sample configuration that can work well.
First, install all of the required plugins and setup the Help Scout documentation sub-domain setting and shown in the installation instructions for Gravity Forms and the Help Scout Search Field plugin.
Next, create a new form and add a text field to it that has a class of helpscout-docs:
The class name is required in order for the field to be made into a search field.
At this point you can preview your form and the search field will be functional.
Now, if you wish, you can continue to add additional fields and set up conditional logic for those fields so that they only display after a search has been performed. I would recommend breaking the form up into two pages with the search field on the first page and the other form elements on the second page, that way you only need to add conditional logic to the page break instead of each and every form input field after the search input.
My form looks like this:
The conditional logic for the page break:
On the second page of the form, I have added the following input fields:
Depending on your own needs, you could add additional fields as well.
This gives us a fully functional submission form that includes documentation search.
That’s all there is to it! Now customers can search your documentation before opening a support ticket. This could potentially cut down your support ticket stats dramatically while also making customers happier since it is now easier for them to help themselves.
Huge thanks are owed to Zack Katz for his contributions to the plugin. My team and I wrote the initial version that worked for us then Zack came in and made it 10x more awesome, allowing us to release it as a plugin that anyone can use.
If you could like to contribute to the plugin or report an issue of any kind, you can find it on GitHub.
The login page or the registration page is the first thing that you or your employees will notice when editing your WordPress website. It is an excellent opportunity to create a lasting impression on your employee’s...
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There are amazing free WordPress resources everywhere on the web, and nowadays, you can accomplish almost everything you need without spending a dime.
That said, there are also several tools and services worth paying for because they bring something to the table others didn’t.
In this article, we’ll be going over some software that is worth spending your loot on. Instead of focusing on any specific group of resources, we’ll go through a good variety of tools, which is why you’ll find everything from text editors to builders.
Each of these eight resources can make life easier by allowing you to work faster, function better, or create a friendlier environment to perform in.
Free tools are great, but sometimes spending some money is well worth it – it can pay for itself and then some.
We couldn’t help but kick off these resources with our very own WordPress management tool, The Hub. When it comes to WordPress organization all in one place, nothing beats it.
You can review all of your sites from one dashboard. Here, you monitor, optimize, and update unlimited sites. Additionally, you can view your site statuses instantly and label and organize however you’d like.
Plus, you can manage and automate backups, pause updates on plugins, themes, and WordPress core on individual sites or across all the sites you manage, view the analytics of each site, and much more.
Also, if you have a team that works with you on your site(s), you can add colleagues. Or, if you work with clients, you can assign them roles, site access, and add new users quickly and easily.
WordPress management doesn’t get better than The Hub.
All WPMU DEV members get immediate access to The Hub. You can try it free for 7-days and then decide what pricing plan works best for you.
Sketch is design software aimed specifically toward web design, and it shows.
The ease with which you can add elements, position them, round corners, mask images, create mobile views, and all sorts of other yummy stuff is amazing!
One of the best features is symbols, which work just like they do in Illustrator: Create a button from multiple layers, make it a symbol, and then reuse it anywhere. You can then update it in any location, and it will refresh across the board.
Sketch is only available for iOS now, regretfully, and it will set you back $9 a month or more if you contact them about their Business package.
If you need to measure the speed of a website, GTMetrix will be a great friend. Like the popular Pingdom, it offers free website speed test and analysis; however, you’ll want a pro account for more robust testing.
A website’s speed can vary over time which means that ideally, you should run multiple tests using multiple variants over the course of a larger time span. GTMetrix allows you to schedule tests as frequently as hourly, giving you a much better idea of a site’s performance.
Perhaps that 16 second loading time on your site was just a fluke? Or the 3 second loading time was a coincidence – GTMetrix can give you the answer. It also offers many tips on making your website faster in general, from CDN to reducing requests and more – custom-tailored to your site.
The most basic GTMetrix account is free. You get one daily monitored slot, 50 weekly on-demand tests, and 10 daily API credits. That’s not bad, but you can get many more options for costs that range from $10 to $40 per month.
You may think Sprint.ly is a bit complex based on the screenshot above, but it really isn’t. Despite the heavily JavaScript-based implementation, it’s lightning-fast, updates in real-time, and it seems to be tested by people who actually do development work because whatever you need is always close by.
Assigning users, creating custom workflows, putting tested issues back into the needs fixing area. Everything is effortless. It’s great using this app when working with a large project or multiple people.
Some packages range from $19 to $399 per month (or cheaper if you pay annually).
Advanced Custom Fields is a perfect solution to take control of your edit screens and custom field data.
ACF has a free version, which is extremely capable already, but the four additional fields added by the pro version (gallery, repeater, options page, flexible content) are well worth the price (that starts at $49 per year).
Best of all, ACF is developer-friendly from all points of view. Price-wise, it’s a pay once and forget – once you’ve paid you get to use it in any and all projects you may have. The code is structured just like WordPress and is clean and well-commented throughout. You also get great developer documentation on the website.
Usersnap is for those of us who work with clients who have many demands and small modifications, which take precious time to go back and forth on.
It’s essentially a widget that allows your users (clients) to add their notes right onto your website, saving them in one central location for you to review.
Your clients don’t need to install anything; all they see is the page with the Usersnap overlay. They can add their notes and send them off to you. You get all the notes in all the right places – perfect for managing that 1px nudge that the client deems extremely important!
The downside of Usersnap is the price. If you can get by on one project at a time with a maximum of five users, the $19 a month cost is OK, but the next step up is $79/month, which is a considerable amount. Still, if you are working with super-finicky clients, it may well be the cost.
Github is always free for public projects, but did you know you can use all of its awesomeness for your super-secret projects as well? Of course, you’ll need a pro account, but Github will let you create and manage private repositories with granular control over access.
There are several plans you can choose from. If you have a company with a number of projects, I would recommend the Enterprise accounts, which start at $21/month. It is well worth the investment if you manage multiple projects.
You can probably get by in the development world without Spotify, but why would you want to?
The ability to listen to something on my iMac, then seamlessly continue listening while running, and locally stored content for plane rides and more make Spotify more a part of my life than many other development apps.
Personally, I listen to music while I write (e.g. I’m doing it while writing this post!) and enjoy the podcasts when creating art.
At just $9.99 a month and available for any platform you can think of, Spotify Premium is a steal! Of course, there’s a free version, but I don’t think it’s worth not paying it when tunes get interrupted with commercials.
Obviously, this is just a smidgen of resources out there for WordPress developers. There are tons more, and these are just a few that come to mind and useful.
New resources pop up practically daily, and hopefully, some of the ones we’ve featured in this article will make it into your regular workflow.