WP Mastery Weekly #10 - CSS Hacks, Maintenance Contracts & Hiring a Team

Hey, this week you can use this newsletter to revise your maintenance contracts (or set them up if you don't have any), so that your recurring revenue stays rock-solid. I'm also sharing the accounting system that I'm switching to with you (Profit First, fantastic book!) and got exciting dev hacks for you. If you feel that I'm not covering certain topics enough or that I'm lacking information you're searching for, don't hesitate to hit reply and let me know! I want to make this newsletter as helpful as possible for you :) Enjoy! P.S. You might have noticed that I skipped issue #9 in the subject line. That's because I had to send issue #6 twice (one time with fixed links) and Revue keeps counting stubbornly :)

---

Business & Growth

Website Maintenance Contracts & PDF Agreements (2019) — wpbuffs.com Not sure if you've given your maintenance customers a bullet-proof contract? Or do you want to know what other maintenance businesses put into their own contracts? WP Buffs put together a nice blog post, explaining what goes into a solid maintenance agreement and share their own with you. An Accountant’s review of Profit First. - Stark Naked Numbers - Medium — medium.com I listened through Profit First within 2 or 3 days and immediately contacted my bank to set up the system. If you haven't read the book, it's a system to organize your income so you set aside money for profit, tax, bills, and owner compensation. See what I did there? Profit comes first. Here's a nice article of an accountant breaking down that system! Scaling a Digital Agency: How to Hire the Right People | WordStream — www.wordstream.com Are you ready to bring new people into your agency to grow? Candice Harwood breaks down how you can avoid growing too quickly and - if you're ready - how to strategically grow your team!

WordPress News & Tools

Matt Mullenweg and David Heinemeier Hansson Discuss WordPress Market Share, Monopolies, and Power in Open Source Communities – WordPress Tavern — wptavern.com Matt Mullenweg and David Heinemeier Hansson (co-founder of Basecamp) join on podcast and discuss the $300m funding round, power in Open Source communities, and monopolies. Highly interesting read and listen! WooSesh - A Free Two-Day Conference All About WooCommerce — woosesh.com WooSesh is happening on Oct. 9th + 10th - registrations are now open! News – People of WordPress: Alice Orru – WordPress.org — wordpress.org I love reading about people in the WP community, it just makes the whole ecosystem much more personal. Alice is another inspiring example of what we can achieve when contributing to this amazing community.

How-To's & Dev

How I Use tmux For Local Development — deliciousbrains.com Brilliant article that will save me hours every week in managing servers and sites via SSH. Delicious Brains knocked it out of the park with this tutorial on using tmux - a terminal tool. Highly recommend it if you like using terminals and WP-CLI to manage your sites! Optimizing images for the web - an in-depth guide - DEV Community ????‍????????‍???? — dev.to You want the websites you build to load fast, right? Well, knowing a thing or two about image optimization is mandatory then - even if you're not a designer (and especially if you are). This article explains automated optimization, the next-gen WebP format, calculating JPG sizes and more. Possibly the Most Useful CSS Trick - DEV Community ????‍????????‍???? — dev.to Do you want your search form to just show the button when a search term is entered? Here's a nice CSS hack to do just that!

Random Articles

New 0-Day Flaw Affecting Most Android Phones Being Exploited in the Wild — thehackernews.com If you own one of the devices listed (e.g. Galaxy S9, Pixel 2 & 2 XL, P20, ...), you should read this article thoroughly. I'm not sure if my Galaxy S7 Edge is impacted, but the S7 is mentioned - so I'm cautious. 4 Quiet Mechanical Keyboards that Won’t Make You Sound Like a Secretary from Mad Men – Review Geek — www.reviewgeek.com A good keyboard makes all the difference in the world. I recently got myself a Ducky TKL mechanical keyboard, and love it. If you're typing a lot and sit in an office, any of these keyboards can bring you more fun without annoying your coworkers :) Hot, Cold, or Spiked: 7 Apple Cider Recipes to Enjoy This Fall – LifeSavvy — www.lifesavvy.com I love me some ACV when doing intermittent fasting or to boost my immune system. Definitely needed to get used to the taste though and my wife still looks puzzled when I'm having my ACV drink. That's it for this week! I hope you enjoy this handpicked list of articles! If you think that I'm missing certain topics or blogs, don't hesitate to reach out and let me know! Best, Jan https://wpmastery.xyz

P.S. Here are some tools I use daily, they'll benefit your business too.

Continuous Integration (CI). I use CI at WP Mastery to run all sorts of automated tasks in my coding workflow. For example, my code gets deployed to a server automatically whenever I push a new revision to GitHub. Click here to learn about 5 reasons WP developers need CI (imho). Cloudways (hosting). I host all my own and our client sites with them. We have 7 servers and roughly 50 sites on Cloudways and are in love with them since 2014. Their servers make our sites blazingly fast, they give us plenty of flexibility for development workflows (e.g. Github auto-deploy embedded), and the servers run stable. What more could you ask for? VS Code Pro Power-User Workflows. When writing code, you want to be as efficient as possible! Changing to the free VS Code editor has been a massive improvement in my daily coding. Check out VS Code Pro to learn power-user workflows from WP Core Contributor Ahmad Awais. Page Builder Cloud. Looking to transfer your Elementor layouts from the staging site to the live website easily? Page Builder Cloud is my tool of choice. It works with Elementor, BB, Divi, Fusion Builder, Oxygen and so many more. And it's just $99/year. Even if it saves you just 1h, it pays for itself. WP Buffs White-Label Maintenance. Want to sell WP maintenance plans but don't have a team to handle the actual work? The WP Buffs offer white-label maintenance plans at exceptional quality. Schedule a free call with them now to get to know them and to partner up. I keep referring my friends to them.