Thank You to Everyone Who Entered!
Last month, we launched a short survey calling for feedback and suggestion to improve our products and service. Our ultimate goal is to decide what types of features are built next, so we can better meet your need.
We had nearly 100 feedback entries in the first two days after we started the survey. A big motivation to our team indeed! We expect to hear many comments from you, both old and new members, but did not foresee such an incredible number of submissions that fast!
Great thanks to you all for your feature request and ideas. Your valuable inputs help us shape the upcoming improvements in a more solid way.
What we’re currently working on
Deciding what new possible features (or updates to existing features) isn’t easy, as a single change need line up with the big-picture of the whole theme or plugin.
Right now, our short-term roadmap is oriented towards taking the steps we need to push improvements and changes in our first-ever multipurpose ecommerce theme DW Store (here is the theme preview & features). The improvements will cover a wide range from the page builder, layout variants, shortcodes to single theme setting perspectives etc.,
Then our dev team will move back into the pain points in our existing products. Just know that we may not be able to work on all changes right away – or ever, if it turns out that adding a feature need to break the whole code base.
Congratulations to Rainer Berthold, the winner of One Year Developer Membership
As mentioned in the survey announcement, there is an awesome giveaway – One Year Developer Membership – for the best feedback that is submitted before 1 Aug. Our team has discussed and decided to pick one of the best feedback, and that was from: Rainer Berthold
Woo Hooooo! Rainer Berthold, I’ll be sending you an email with details on the giveaway today. Congrats!
And let’s take this chance to say hello and share the WordPress passion with Rainer Berthold, so here we go:
DW: Tell us a bit about your WordPress beginnings
Rainer Berthold: Maybe my first contact with WP was a such a sort of job, where I had to publish events into an good old html-table-layout. Sounds awful? It was. Next step to WP was to work with friends on Typo3 (a “european“ cms like Drupal) and to organize and teach a team of people publishing exact this events. That is not WP, you think? Wrong: all this let me look for an easier solution and I found it much later with WP. In the meantime I optimized a events-plugin for Typo3 and later another guy wrote a hand-tailored jsp-solution. A good job, but in the wp-universe there are some professionals with unpayable experience and so I found a _free_ event-plugin. This little baby saved us tons of work. Write recurring events once and dispatch them afterwards with individualized fields: true gold. So done and used the appropriate way, WP & WPplugins can work like charm.DW: You seem quite advanced WP users, how did you come across DesignWall?
Rainer Berthold:I look around daily, I’m a fan of newsletters, so I stumbled across DesignWall. Thought about DW Timeline Pro and DW Question&Answer. As I got your email with the survey, I reserved some time for it. I appreciate people asking others about what to do better.DW: What are some of the specific challenges you needed to solve when working with WordPress theme?
Rainer Berthold: Every time the biggest challenge for me is to work out a consistent data architecture before doing anything else. In many situations this may seem to be a no-brainer, but hey: I like it. After understanding the connectedness of all these wonderful data it is so much more relaxed than the other way round. In most themes you have to search via Firebug for deeper customizations – often time consuming and sometimes frustrating. Like some other guys I have to delve in a specific issue and gain it step by step by trickery. Some instant buzz, if you want so. This is now not much different from the days of yore, complexity aside 🙂DW: What are your top WordPress plugins, and why?
Rainer Berthold: IMHO: For most elaborated event-sharing-plugin: Event Manager http://wp-events-plugin.com/ (great time-safer, see above). For easy to build & reusable templates: Combo of Visual Composer / Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer / Templatera. For individualized Loops: Wonder-Loops is fun and intuitive. For Backups, duplicate, transfer to a new server etc.: Duplicator https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/ I didn’t mention Yoast, WPML and other of the TopTen, you’ll find these ones over and over again in nearly every list.DW: Any tips for people new to the world of WordPress?
Rainer Berthold: Look for a theme you can love. Install it, smile a while and love it. And – if you can’t love it truly – look for another. Try to use the theme as it is, if not, do just a few customizations. Here stops any correlation to teen marriage. If you can’t get satisfied, look for another theme or someone you can learn from. There are great insights, post and tutorials around. Most suitable I find working side by side or via screensharing. Since a while I do this with my clients and this is definitively the part I find most agile and aimed.
Go Far Together
I can’t thank both Rainer Berthold and you all enough for taking the time to share your feedbacks via the survey. I believe the best way to show our sincere thanks to you is to make our products better and better. For sure, you will see incremental improvements in the coming time. So stay tuned.
