October ’09 Newsletter

October seems to have rushed by and for those of you who have been reading the blogs you will know that we have been extremely busy. Finally, we managed to release version 1.3 of the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin which is now compatible with WordPress 2.8.5.

In this article

Feedback

Feedback from our clients indicate that the new ticket system that has been in place for the last two months is working well and response times have been reduced considerably. October also saw a number of new marketing strategies implemented, allowing you as the customer to participate in a few ways to earn Tribulant credits which provides the opportunity for those of you who participate to reduce your monthly spend on service costs (five dollars every three months) and earn credits towards additional products you may wish to purchase.

Currently we are trying to roll out a new version of the WordPress Custom Fields plugin that is compatible with WordPress 2.8. As many of you are aware because the call was changed in WordPress this involves quite a bit of programming. I will keep readers informed the progress during November via the blog.

Upcoming

There are a number of substantial innovative improvements that Antonie and I have in mind for up-and-coming releases of the products in the next coming months and once again I will keep readers posted as we finalise what will be included in the new releases. You are invited to submit a ticket with your suggestions. For those of you who are unaware, we do and take custom development for those clients who have specific needs. This work of course is charged at it and agreed at an agreed hourly rate between you the customer and us. Once again please don’t hesitate to submit requests. Depending on the size of the project and the time involved, we are very competitive in this area and the costs of development work may not be as expensive as you might think. It provides a quick and affordable solution for your business’ specific needs.

Last week we noticed an increase in the sales of the Shopping Cart plugin with the release of the new version which was quite positive, however, we would like to ask all of our customers to support us by way of word of mouth and tell others about our products. The new version of our WordPress e-Commerce solution really is rocking good!

When to upgrade your WordPress

For those of you who may not be aware WordPress is busy testing version 2.9 beta and it appears that this will be released in the near future. I specifically want to mention that it is good practice not to upgrade to a new release of WordPress as soon as it is released. As we have seen in version 2.8 when major changes are made to the core of WordPress it takes us some time to make all our products compliant. This is also true for other plug-ins that you may be using. I know there is a tendency amongst a lot of users to want to use the latest version of WordPress immediately. If you remember when WordPress 2.8 was released there were a number of bugs, the most serious in a security issue which WordPress managed to fix in a couple of days. There’s an old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. While new versions often bring enhanced features, as we have seen, there is always the danger that drastic changes can severely affect your site. If you are in doubt and do not have the flexibility to separately test new versions on your server that is not running live then please contact us by opening a support ticket. Not only do you lose important revenue when you have the upgraded your site and a plug-in (be it the ours or someone else’s) doesn’t work with a new release of WordPress it to then also places us under additional pressure to do emergency work to try and get you the customer up and running. The end result as we have seen is that many of you are having to wait for a number of plug-ins to be upgraded. For many of the developers out there they generally concentrate on a single plug-in while we have a variety of products that we offer our clients. You will therefore appreciate that this can be a time-consuming exercise.

Documentation

We are busy with updating the documentation this is a slow process and if any of you have written a book or dissertation then you will fully appreciate what I mean. Going through each product and revising what we have is no easy task. The documentation will stay on line but I am hoping that we will also be able to release PDF’s in the near future to distribute with our packagesby default. For now if you can’t find the solution in the current documentation open a support ticket and we will assist you as quickly as possible.

FAQs

We hope to build up a knowledge base from the support ticket system. We will be using FAQ’s in conjunction with the support ticket system. Remember that if you have a question always open a support ticket. FAQ’s are there more to provide us with a means of sharing with you the most commonly asked problems and what the solution is.

Advertising

We are thinking about providing advertising space in the newsletter which currently goes out world wide. We would like to hear feed back from you about this idea. Its meant to be inexpensive and affordable. We currently have over 300 people signed up to the newsletter. Please let me know what you guys think of this and give me an idea of what many of you would consider affordable. This is not a means to generate income but is an idea born out of wanting to provide our customers with yet another way of interacting with us and gaining benefit from being a Tribulant customer.

Articles and Snippets

Another new idea is to invite you to send in articles of interest, comments etc and feedback. This will be like a ‘Readers Column’.  If you have an News press release or for those of you who are interested in writing an article please feel free to submit it for consideration in the next  newsletter.  Topics may be varied at this stage as this is a pilot project. All we ask is that the articles are related in some way to your business, field of interest or expertise and are non-political, may be considered of general interest and are suitably tasteful. For those interested, you can submit a ticket.

The Wrap up

Well folks that’s it for now. We look forward to hearing from you and wish you a great November. Be safe and be well.

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