In this episode of the podcast I interview Caspar Hübinger from MarketPress. As well as the German WooCommerce extension, MarketPress make a multilingual WordPress plugin as a solution for multilingual site content. Caspar also talks about the importance of being yourself and getting to know who you are. His theory is that this is what makes you truly unique inside and outside of work. Love it!
Win one of three Multingual Press Pro licenses worth $75 each kindly donated by Caspar! Just tell us how you want to use Multilingual in WordPress as well as letting us know your selection criteria for choosing premium themes and plug-ins.
Congratulations to Christian, Mark and Ralf - our lucky prize winners this week! (August 29)
Some of the highlights of this episode include:
Here are Caspar‘s answers to the questions in our Elevation round. Watch the interview to get the full scoop.
You can reach out and thank Caspar on Twitter @glueckpress or marketpress.com.
Or come to the Europe WordCamps or the Berlin local Meet-Up Group – Caspar would love to see you there!
Caspar suggested I interview Remkus DeVries from Forsite Media. Remkus, keep your eyes on your inbox.
Hint: to enter the competition, leave a comment below and tell us how you want to use Multilingual in WordPress as well as letting us know your selection criteria for choosing premium themes and plug-ins.
19 Responses
Another »Wow!« for the WordPress universe. I’d no idea about wpelevation until Caspar appeared and linked it. Troy: I have to spend some hours on your podcasts now ;-). The link to this page is even more worthy as the $ 75 Multilanguage Press Pro licence ;-). Caspar: thanks for that!
Often enough the free version of a plugin/theme/snippet/… does offer all I really need for a job. But I’ve there is a Pro-version of it and the job is well paid, it’s no doubt to buy the Pro version, even if it wouldn’t be absolutely necessarv. It’s not more then just a little »thank you« for the programmer/designer and a respect for his/her work. I even wonder how people can give away their great products for free and even greater (Pro-)products for really small amounts and putting a great support for free on top. 10, 20, 50, 75 or even 100 bucks are no big deal in a project with several hundreds or thousands $/€ estimate.
I fell in love with the idea of Multilanguage Press on the day I first heard of it @ WPCamp Berlin 2012. Having build several projects until then with (sorry for this) bulky Typo3 esp. where multilanguage was a request, it was clear that WordPress can and would do this job from now on.
So many points mentioned on this one, but one thing that got me thinking is am I honest to myself,especially when marketing my services out there…So yeah I need to be my f*** self and be brutally honest on what i can deliver to my clients and the turnaround time for a project..
Awesome! Btw, listening to the podcast got me thinking again. Most certainly, there are numerous people out there making a quick fortune while performing the exact opposite of a be-yourself kind of approach. Masters of fake, so to speak, or just very good actors in business. While it’s obviously possible to create success that way (monetarily, at least), I do believe you don’t get very happy in the long run trying to wear someone else’s suite all day. Perspective determines action, and over time you’ll want to get credit for who *you* really are, not for making up a character.
However, there’s faking and … faking. 🙂 Sometimes being honest with myself might include becoming aware of my own limitations and feeling the need to “stretch out” in order to reach my next goal. In that type of situation it could be a good thing to “fake it” just a little bit and risk being the next higher version of myself to master that next higher level of my business, attract those next larger client etc.
Happy to hear you did, thanks for the comment! Just to add context for other readers who might not be familiar with our plugin: the “idea” of Multilingual Press here being to leverage and rely upon as much of WordPress’s core as possible. Multilingual Press builds upon the Multisite core feature in order to keep the infrastructure for individual language sites as flexible, secure and performant as WordPress itself.
Great show as usual – really enjoyed listening. My criteria for a commercial or premium plugin would be:
* Solves a problem I experience on multiple sites (using WordPress)
* Solves a problem that is too hard for me to solve quickly on all these sites
* Solves the problem in a flexible and extensible way to allow me to customise the solution on a per site basis.
Look forward to the next show.
Great show as usual – really enjoyed listening. My criteria for a commercial or premium plugin would be:
* Solves a problem I experience on multiple sites (using WordPress)
* Solves a problem that is too hard for me to solve quickly on all these sites
* Solves the problem in a flexible and extensible way to allow me to customise the solution on a per site basis.
Look forward to the next show.
@disqus_q9rwX4mvWo:disqus Thanks for your feedback, much appreciated! What would be your favorite features for extendability/customization? Custom API with hooks/filters? Templates?
Yep, your right, but the sooner someone realizes they need to up their game the better, so that they don’t get comfortable with the “fake character”..
Nice show.
“Just stop it!” is the very best advice.
For me and my clients I’m looking for premium plugins and themes that have things like:
* a reliable german translation (maybe a niche-problem)
* a lot of hooks and filter to modify things without overwriting templates or have to hack it
* themes that are prepared for popular plugins (like Jetpack, Woo, Contact Form 7, MailPoet) and CPTs. Depending on the kind of theme
I’m about to start my journey around the world to visit WordCamps and WP-People around the globe. Thefore blogging in German, for friends and family, and in English for all interested outside my home-country is a challenge to me.
Thanks, Ralf!
Proper internationalization as a prerequirement for localization to other languages than English, of course, is a key feature for almost all users outside the anglophone context.
Fortunately many WordPress developers have become aware of the importance of i18n for their products lately. (I recommend stepping through Otto42’s slides from WordCamp Europe 2013 for those who are interested in the technical details of WordPress i18n.)
On the contrary, it might be news to many WordPress users that creating and sharing a formerly missing translation for a theme or plugin can be a contribution just as highly appreciated as any code commit. Often times all it takes would be installing a plugin like Codestyling Localization, translate away and notify the plugin author you got some fresh .po/.mo files for them! 🙂
Thanks also for your remarks on extendability via hooks and filters. We’ve found those are mostly welcomed and used by more advanced users (implementers, developers) who would regularly touch code, while for our „user-users“ the copy-paste approach of templates and child themes (besides regular options) often seems to work better. We’re trying to provide both where applicable.
Have a great trip!
I am looking forward to language-packs for themes and plugins to get more translated plugins and themes. With an UI-way to translate strings directly on WP.org it could make a big thing for internationalization.
With Plugins like Toolbox by Sergej Müller also copy-past-user can take advantage of hooks and filter.
A premium plugin must just be that: premium in quality and helpful support. It hasn’t even to offer (much) more functionality as a free version as I’m willing to pay for a good plugin (after I could elevate that it does what I need). German support and documentation is also a big, big plus. I understand (and even speak) English quiet well but there are many (potential) WordPress / -plugin users that don’t. Never forget them even if the English market seems more lucrative.
Thanks for your feedback, highly appreciated!
I totally agree on the localized support/docs part. In a widely anglophone market it can indeed be tempting to focus on an anglophone target group, particularly when you feel you need to reduce/manage potential complexity in your infrastructure. However, catering to your own people in your own language can and will most certainly win you a very loyal user base right from the start.
Congratulations chzumbrunnen. Caspar has awarded you one of the 3 the podcast prizes! We’ll be in touch with the details soon.
Congratulations Ralf. Caspar has awarded you one of the 3 the podcast prizes! We’ll be in touch with the details soon.
Congratulations Mark. Caspar has awarded you one of the 3 the podcast prizes! We’ll be in touch with the details soon.
Thanks for the prize @CasparHuebinger:disqus. In terms of extensibility yes to all three. Trying allow as much as possible control of the plugins markup output, perhaps through filters or allow template overrides and plenty of places to add custom code or change this with hooks.