Introducing CyberChimps Plus & Cloud Hosting

Author Archives: Bryan Hadaway

Introducing CyberChimps Plus & Cloud Hosting

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Of course we’ve just seen the recent complete redesign of cyberchimps.com, but we’ve also been hinting at a few other things on the horizon.

Today, we’re proud to announce two incredible new additions to what we can offer you here at CyberChimps.

 
First up…

CyberChimps Plus

This one has been in-demand for a long time. An actual membership that gets you complete access to private email support, total pro support for all forums, even the free themes and special support for exclusive users of themes not found here on cyberchimps.com, like Go Daddy customers. That’s not all, incredible savings and even more perks are being developed to follow.

Learn More

 
Second up…

CyberChimps Cloud Hosting

You heard us right, we now are offering up hosting in which you can launch with WordPress and your favorite theme already pre-installed and ready to roll!

Start Free Trial

 
Last, but not least…

Neverending

Here at CyberChimps, development, innovation and our commitment are truly neverending (we’re very tired chimps most nights). We’re working on new themes, getting fully reloaded versions of old themes finished like Business Pro 4 and Responsive Pro which many have been anxiously awaiting.

But, that’s not all, we’ll always have a few aces up our sleeves as far as things we’re quietly working on only to be revealed at the point of finalization.

We know you want better translations, better documentation and better support turnaround, so do we! We’ve been improving and improving and improving slowly, but surely, but now with these new revenue streams we’re hoping for a well-needed revenue boost that will enable us to hire more dedicated professionals to make our team stronger and you the customer, happier.

We Are Listening
(but we need a lot more participation and feedback)

And a warm, sincere and appreciative thank you from myself and the entire team for keeping CyberChimps alive, food in our bellies and roofs over our heads!

Thanks, Bryan

Maintenance Tonight (Apr 25-26)

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A quick heads up everyone that the site will be in maintenance mode and unavailable at most from:

10pm PST on April 25th, 2013

to:

2am PST on April 26th, 2013

We’ve been talking about changes for a few months now and we’re excited to finally get the ball rolling.

You’ll see some drastic changes come tomorrow as well as more to be rolled out over the next week or so.

Stay tuned.

Let your voice be heard!

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We’ve just opened up:

https://cyberchimps.uservoice.com/

Where you can share your own ideas and vote on other people’s ideas and suggestions.

What do we want you to tell us?

Wrong question.

What do you want to tell us?

From theme improvements, to support to the cyberchimps.com website itself, let us know what you want! We’ll all be able to see the most popular ideas that benefit everyone and we’ll be able to let you know which ideas are under consideration, are planned, completed or that just won’t work :(.

Whatever the case, you all have a say and we can now all stay informed in one place.

iFeature Pro Legacy will be Retired on March 15th, 2013

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By Legacy, I of course am referring to versions 4 and below. Of course versions 5+ will continue to be supported.

iFeature Pro 5 was introduced several months ago, yet not everyone was ready for such a serious upgrade and because of this, as a courtesy, we continued to support the legacy version of the theme on the old design and framework.

What This Means?

- We will no longer provide copies of iFeature Pro below version 5.0.
- We will no longer support versions below 5.0 in the forum, troubleshooting wise (we will be recommending that you upgrade to the latest version to receive fixes).

Taking the Plunge

Upgrading is a natural part of the web. As the web itself evolves, so must the technologies used to display it. While you’re not required to upgrade by us, if you wish to stay compatible with WordPress, get new features, fixes and security patches there’s simply no other choice, it’s inevitable.

As always, we’ll do our best to help everyone in the forums with this transition. You’ll have just over a month to workout the details of upgrading:

http://cyberchimps.com/forum-topic/how-to-upgrade/

Many users find it helpful to first setup a test environment to test and refine the new theme options before upgrading their live site(s).

UPDATE – We will be releasing all legacy themes on GitHub for free, iFeature Pro 4 is now available:

https://github.com/cyberchimps/ifeaturepro4

To continue receiving support, updates, security patches, staying compatible with WP and more you will need to upgrade, because again, the legacy themes are no longer officially supported.

Thank You

CyberChimps Gone Viral Contest & Giveaway

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Winners!

Contest winners:

1st – http://completecollective.com/
2nd – http://vanderplas.us/
3rd – http://kuntao.es/

Giveaway winners:

1st – Brandy Bramer
2nd – Jen Reynolds
3rd – Jamie Leigh Martin

Instructions for Winners

Please email us and provide your PayPal email address for payment. Thanks

For the entire month of January we will be running a contest, giveaway and have plenty of great deals for ya.

Contest

Let’s have a good ol’ fashioned website/web design contest.

We want to see all the hard work you’ve done customizing your CyberChimps’ themes into your very own websites. The only criteria is that your website has to be built on top of a CyberChimps’ theme/framework.

Other than that, the sky is the limit on how you’ve designed your site, whether that’s simple and clean, professional, creative or innovative or whatever. I’ll be picking 3 winners, 1st, 2nd and 3rd.

1st Place Winner Prize – $100 Cash (via PayPal)
2nd Place Winner Prize – $50 Cash (via PayPal)
3rd Place Winner Prize – $25 Cash (via PayPal)

How to Enter – Simply comment below with the URL to your site, that you’re entering (so it clearly must be ready, live and public).

Rules – Only one website submission per person (and that website must be owned by the person submitting it).

Giveaway

Love CyberChimps? Help spread the word. Let’s make 2013 the year of the Chimp.

3 winners will be randomly chosen from those that enter the giveaway.

1st Randomly Selected Winner – $100 Cash (via PayPal)
2nd Randomly Selected Winner – $50 Cash (via PayPal)
3rd Randomly Selected Winner – $25 Cash (via PayPal)

How to Enter – You must do all of the following, let’s go viral!:

Retweet

- AND -

- AND -

- AND -

Then, simply comment below (this will serve as your official entry) and indicate that you’ve shared us in the 3 ways listed above. Sharing is caring.

But, I already Follow and Like you. – The Retweet is the most important part, but you will have to do something to make up for the remainder of your entry. You’ll need to join our affiliate program and promote our themes with a Tweet and Facebook post.

Deals

Deals for everyone, whether you enter the contest or giveaway or not.

Store Link

Use coupon code NYTEN upon checkout for $10 off any order.

Can I do all 3?

Absolutely. If you wanted, you could buy one of our themes using the $10 off coupon, then work on customizing it and submit it to the contest. Then share us with your social profiles/follow us (as indicated above) to enter the giveaway.

Expiration

The contest, giveaway and deals will all expire on January 31st, 2013. Winners will be chosen on February 1st, 2013.

♥

Good luck everyone and I hope you have fun! If you need any help or clarification feel free to comment below. I’ll do my best to keep this post up-to-date with any new info to help clarify.

Happy New Year Everyone!
Thanks, Bryan

UPDATED INFO:

#1. Comments Not Appearing – Signing up and using a Disqus account will help. Apologies about some comments not appearing right away. Because we’re asking you to share your URLs in comments, this is naturally triggering the spam filter.

No worries, and please don’t try commenting again and again. We received your comment the first time and I’ll personally and actively be watching this contest and comment thread to make sure they all get approved.

This will thoroughly be checked over and over I can assure you, especially on the big day to make sure no one gets left out.

Having Compatibility Issues with WordPress 3.5?

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No problem, this has been fixed for weeks. In fact, this was ready on day one of the official release of WP 3.5.

Important information like this and other precautions is always readily available and recommended here (which includes precautions, instructions and the theme changelogs). I recommend bookmarking that link for future reference.

You simply need to upgrade to the latest theme version which is a good rule to always follow anyways. Not only for compatibility and new features, but keeping your WP install, themes and plugins up-to-date is important for security too.

There are a few reasons why you might not be seeing the latest update notices:

Free Themes

WordPress.org is mostly comprised of volunteers, at least public-facing. The theme review team are responsible for pushing new updates when received by theme developers (we have no control over this). Again, this requires that new updates are pushed live manually by an actual human, on a purely volunteer basis (they’re doing this in their free time). It can generally take up to a week for new updates to be pushed.

So, you wouldn’t have gotten the notice to update even though the themes were ready. Solution – you can download any version of a free theme any time by simply checking under the Developer tab on the theme page for the subversion repo, for example:

http://themes.svn.wordpress.org/ifeature/ (lists all the versions up to the latest)

Say for example that only version 5.0 was available officially:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/download/ifeature.5.0.zip

But, we’d already made several fixes. You can always manually get the latest version by switching the version number to the latest like so:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/download/ifeature.5.0.5.zip

This will unfortunately, require upgrading manually:

http://cyberchimps.com/forum-topic/how-to-upgrade/

Pro Themes

The old update system was faulty and sometimes you won’t get notice of an update. We have since upgraded to a new and reliable update system, but of course to get that new update system you need to first upgrade your theme. Again, this unfortunately means that you’ll need to upgrade manually (but should be the last time):

http://cyberchimps.com/my-account/
(the very latest version of your theme(s) should always be available here – if the latest theme version is unavailable in your account for whatever reason, request it directly here)
http://cyberchimps.com/forum-topic/how-to-upgrade/

But, I don’t want to upgrade.

Ultimately, that is your choice, but highly unrecommended. Eventually, you’ll simply have no choice but to upgrade. As the internet itself progresses, so do the web browsers in order to browse the internet, then the code/design standards to actually present the web pages themselves properly, then WordPress, to stay compatible with new web-standards and naturally, the themes and plugins follow suit, required in most cases.

While this may be inconvenient, it is important and unstoppable, progress and innovation. Unfortunately, some customers in the past who may have been starting their first website were under the misconception that once they got their website just how they wanted it, that was it, no more work. That they’ll never need to fuss with it again and when they ultimately do, blame us for any and all arising issues. This is unfortunate.

Please understand, running a website isn’t, never was and never will be a set and forget kind of project regardless of the tools used. It’s a full time, round the clock job to keep up with maintaining a website, blog, business. And remember that at it’s most basic core, CyberChimps is merely a tool to help you build websites, though we actually do go a great deal further in providing custom solutions, education and advice on running and maintaining not only a website, but an online business.

For those that have been editing your themes directly, hacking the files to customize instead of the recommended Custom CSS and/or Child Theming solutions – I understand this sounds daunting, but you need to start doing things the correct way in order to stay up-to-date. Please note that this is solely your responsibility. While we already cover an unprecedented amount of requests in the support forums, we do not cover PHP/JS/Translation/Etc hacks, especially at the child theme level. You may need to hire someone to help you with this transition, respectively.

If you’re considering switching to a different theme instead, please understand that this has nothing to do with CyberChimps. Any theme company (that gives good advice at least), will recommend that you use a child theme for customization, if you also intend on updating to the latest theme versions as they become available (which is recommended for CyberChimps themes).

Additional Points

Make sure that once you’ve updated your theme, that WP itself is up-to-date under Dashboard > Updates.

Worried about upgrading to the new framework, again, this is covered here:

http://cyberchimps.com/forum-topic/how-to-upgrade/ – Yes, I’ll refer you to this link over and over because it pretty much exhausts all the information you need for all issues related to upgrading. You just need to read it.

If for any reason, you’re still confused or have follow up questions, I invite you to comment below and I’ll address them as best I can. For normal support, please post a topic in the forums as usual instead.

Thanks, Bryan

Tip of the Week: Do’s & Dont’s for Your Site

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Hi Everyone,

Do’s & Dont’s for Your Site

There are a lot of things you should do and there are even more you should definitely NEVER do.

Do’s

- Use a clean and easy on the eyes color scheme without any dramatic contrasts.

- Use only readable fonts. Arial, Georgia and Times New Roman are often regarded as the best all around web safe and easy to read fonts.

- Make sure your menu is simple and easy to understand.

- Make sure to optimize images so they’re at a lower resolution (72 is fine for the web) and only the size needed. If you need a 300×100 pixel graphic don’t upload a 1200×800 pixel graphic.

Dont’s

- Never assume just because you like something that your audience will.

- DO NOT EVER USE A WEB INTRO. Never block the user from the content. It has been proven time and time again that people do not want to see a web intro when trying to get to your content. They’re more likely to click back than to click skip. Instead you might use an intro video within the home/landing page that a user may optionally click on.

- Never have sound (of any kind) automatically start when a visitor first reaches your site. This should always be optional.

- Never use flashing text or graphics.

- Never block content with ads. Ads are fine as long as they’re non-intrusive. Blocking a page or video and making a user watch an ad first can only be gotten away with if you’re a huge authoritative site like YouTube that can afford to alienate users. But, still… is it ethical?

- Avoid using Flash as much as possible.

Enjoy!

Thanks, Bryan

We Want to Hear From You!

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Showcase

We know many of you have been hard at work building your websites and now we want to see them! If you want to show off your site to us and the community please do so here. We may even pick some of the best for a more official showcase.

Pro Customer Testimonials

This one is specific to pro customers because we try and spoil you! We hope that’s how you feel, let us know. We may even pick some for future marketing materials.

Tip of the Week: Security Time

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Hi Everyone,

Security Time

I wish we didn’t live in a world where people were out to get you, but we do. It may not be personal, but owning and running a website exposes you to the world. And there are a lot of spammers, scammers, con-artists, hackers and criminals out their looking for exploits.

WordPress, with how popular it is and how many 3rd party scripts are involved make it an easy target. There are a number of things you can do to harden WordPress.

Having the right hosting and WordPress installed professionally is a great first step.

A professional install includes:

- A strong database password used
- A different username than admin set
- Having security keys and salts added
- A different database table prefix than wp_ set

This is all done in a manual install that 1-click installs do not offer.

There are also some wonderful security plugins to consider:

- Secure WordPress: Tightens up some basics like hiding your WordPress version.

- Bad Behavior: Blocks spam attempts. WARNING – This is a very strict plugin that can block some good things like open id logins and shopping cart apis.

- Restrict Login By IP: If you have no need or intention of allowing people to register for your site and only you need to login this is a great plugin. WARNING – IPs change often so make sure you know how to use FTP to edit your .htaccess file or you’ll lock yourself out of your admin.

- SABRE: For those that do allow registrations this is a great plugin with many options to help you block spam registrations.

Enjoy!

Thanks, Bryan

Tip of the Week: Tools for Development & Design

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Hi Everyone,

Tools for Development & Design

When it comes to developing and designing your website you’re not left alone in the dark. Even for complete beginners there are many tools and resources to ease the overall learning curve and greatly help you to improve productivity.

First, we’ll start with the browser. Three great browsers that I recommend for development and overall web surfing in general are:

- Firefox
- Chrome
- Safari
- Note about Internet Explorer: I do not recommend this browser for any reason. This is poorly designed software that is neither secure nor respectably standards compliant by web industry standards like the above three browsers. 99% of all browser specific issues occur within IE where every other browser manages to display the same website beautifully.

The only reason to use IE is to check and see that nothing is broken to appease those that still use the browser. We try and educate people the best we can and we hope that people will continue to stop supporting IE until it no longer dominates the browser market. Until then we will support IE within reason. But, when we have to compromise design and function (to bring the best in modern web design) is where we draw the line.

Firefox comes with a personal favorite add-on of mine, Firebug and all three natively support Inspect Element.

With Inspect Element you can simply right-click on any area of your website and gain more info about the code of that specific section and make live test edits (that only you can see) and troubleshoot and style your site before actually implementing them in your theme options:

Design > Custom CSS
http://cyberchimps.com/question/pro-custom-css/

For more advanced users we can also make hard coded changes to the actual template files, framework (HTML) or even edit the PHP, add JavaScript and so on with a child theme:

http://cyberchimps.com/question/child-themes-support/

Using either of these techniques you will never have to actually modify template files or add to your stylesheet of the main theme files. Meaning your changes will be safe upon upgrading (which still very much should be done correctly regardless).

For graphics editing I love Photoshop (and Illustrator too). But, for web graphics all you’ll ever need is Photoshop. However, if you don’t already know you’ll soon find out that Photoshop is very expensive software. A wonderful and completely free alternative is GIMP:

http://www.gimp.org/

Which can help you design logos or create beautiful and professionally prepared and sized slides for your slider:

http://cyberchimps.com/forum-topic/slides-best-practice/

One amazing tool I use for precision both in web and graphics design is Screen Calipers.

The default WordPress Visual (WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get) editor is plenty powerful already to help you style your pages and posts. However, what you see in the editor isn’t always what you get in the page/post (as many of you know).

It’s the same issue that occurs when using web design software like Dreamweaver. It’s not 100% precise and involves a lot of guess work. People will always be smarter than computers when it comes to certain things, and this is definitely one of them. So, once you get more comfortable and any time you add code to pages/posts you need to anyways, I recommend always using HTML mode.

Learn CSS | Learn HTML

Enjoy!

Thanks, Bryan

Tip of the Week: Feed Me Ideas

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Tip of the Week has been retired. You may still add your ideas for possible posts at a later time.

Hi Everyone,

Feed Me Ideas

This week I’m reaching out looking for your feedback on just what tips you’d like to see on Tip of the Week.

(If you haven’t been reading Tip of the Week and are unfamiliar checkout old Tip of the Week posts here and to keep up with the latest, make sure to subscribe.)

What would you like to learn?

What would you like to improve?

Comment with your ideas below.

(please note that this is not the place for feature or design suggestions, Tip of the Week is about improving your web knowledge and skills)

Thanks, Bryan