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Managing Email with Flywheel and Pobox Email Forwarding

April 4, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Late last year, I migrated this site to Flywheel for managed WordPress hosting (which I talked a little bit about in this post). I’ve been incredibly happy with them for a number of reasons, each of which I cover at a later time; however, one of the features that they do not offer is email hosting.

Straight from their support channel:

At Flywheel we believe strongly in working with “best of breed” providers for everything we do, and we view ourselves to be a “best of breed WordPress host.” As such, we do not currently host email for our clients. We make a deliberate effort to focus on building a great WordPress hosting environment – and being the absolute best at it.

I love the mentality and the vision they’re after, but this does leave us needing to look for an alternative host.

They mention Google Apps, Zoho Mail, and Rackspace Email as alternatives, but the last thing that I wanted to do was setup yet-another-email-address.

I have a handful of email addresses all of which forward to a single Gmail box that allow me to respond from the address to which the email was sent, and I wanted to duplicate that for this particular domain.

So I tried one of the recommended solutions for a couple of months, and I couldn’t get it to jive with my workflow (for a number of different reasons, none of which I’m covering here).

This ultimately lead me to try out Pobox.

The Third Version of Live Theme For WordPress

April 3, 2014 / Tom

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About four years ago, I had the pleasure of working with a team to help deliver the first iteration of Live Theme for WordPress; however, as the team leaned out, changed directions, and paired down our product focus, we sold the product to someone else for continued development and maintenance.

To make a somewhat long (perhaps even boring) story short, I’m currently working on the third version of Live Theme for WordPress.

How to Set an SMTP Server in WordPress

April 2, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to sending emails in WordPress, the wp_mail function and its related filters such as wp_mail_content_type, wp_mail_from, and wp_mail_from_name are usually enough to accomplish the majority of what we need.

But there are times where it’s not enough. Specifically, there are times where we may need to define the details for using a custom SMTP server in WordPress.

Fortunately, WordPress provides a hook that makes this really easy to do.

How Not To Market WordPress Products (or “Why Customers Don’t Care”)

April 1, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re any sort of a WordPress developer, then one of the things that you’ve no doubt noticed is how we market our work.

I’d say that it can be divided into two camps:

You have the developers who promote the features, design, and options that the theme or plugin offers.
You have the developers who promote all of the things that have gone into the theme as to what makes it significant.

When it comes to marketing WordPress themes or plugins (or any product, for that matter), then the first group has it absolutely correct.

The second group, on the other hand, can take a few cues from the first group – namely, stop trying to market your WordPress products based on the tools and technology that were used when working on the project.

Dealing with Custom Post Types, Taxonomies, and Permalinks

March 31, 2014 / Tom

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One of the most confusing aspects of working with WordPress is managing its rewrite rules. For anyone who has taken a dive into the Rewrite API and looked at how it works, and how to customize it to fit your own needs can vouch for this.

Honestly, if you’ve ever done any work with custom post types, taxonomies, and permalinks and worked with the rewrite parameter (or perhaps have left it out), then you’ve experienced a little bit of the confusion (or frustration, perhaps) that can come with it.

For those who have been wrestling specifically with the latter, I wrote up a short guide for making sense of this occasionally confusing aspect of WordPress.

Tom McFarlin