It’s the first big WordPress release since July 4, 2011. If you need help upgrading or figuring out how to take advantage of all the new features and bug fixes, contact Item-9 and we’ll get back to you immediately.

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I love Basecamp and have been a 37Signals customer for the last three years. In that timespan, lots of challengers have sprung up–some plainly stealing Basecamp’s features, and others, like the three listed in this article, have come up with new and interesting takes on the project management realm.

These three project management plans offer options for every business need and budget for small and big businesses and every day, I’m temped to switch over to one of them. If you’re not already a loyal Basecamp user, do yourself a favor and take a look at what I think are the three best new project management applications.

Projecturf

Projecturf is a project business management application loaded with user-friendly features is design to optimize business workloads.

• Real time tracking on work groups includes whiteboards, privacy controls and a global dashboard.
• Documents are readily integrated and managed and an event calendar offers scheduling for events with a drag and drop feature.
• Data, file and other media are easily exported and stored on the personal computer for backups.
• Backups are automatic and additional security is protected by an EV SSL 250-bit encryption.
• Dashboard views and RSS feeds are unique features, which help a business ensure optimal work status by tracking function in all areas.
• Email and address contacts are offered as well as an archive for storing discussions for future references.
• Tasks and tickets are effectively designed to be printed for on-the-go or for conveniently working offline.

Plan and pricing for Projecturf start with a fourteen day risk-free trial on every plan purchased at $35 a month. Individual plans are low as $10 a month. Projecturf also offer a 30% discount to non-profit organizations and higher level plans.

This project management application offers a pay-for-project pricing. From one project plan to one-hundred and fifty projects, pricing starts at 9.99 a month to 169.99 a month. The plan that offers a business unlimited projects comes in at $199.99 a month. The pricing difference depends on the number of projects needed, with all features available, no matter the number of projects.

Rule.fm

Rule.fm is a contact management business software application that allows a business to track staff, departments, work groups and companies.

The ability to edit and manage details, activities, documents, tasks, discussions, projects, sharing and permissions offers a tactile way to manage a business from the ground up. Rule.fm is an application that helps a business wisely manage its customer relationships and financial related activity. The interaction with live stream ability enables a business to monitor the activity of staff, projects, tasks, current documents, team divisions, discussions and keep abreast with calendar activity.

A mobile application for iPone, Blackberry and Android will keep a business at the fingertips 24/7 and readily enables a business to be managed on-the-go.

Rule.fm has plans that offer unlimited access to all current and future Rule.fm features. All plans are pay-as-you-go and offers a 30-day free trail, with no long-term commitment.

• The free Rule.fm plan offers a business a workspace for up to three users and 20MB of storage capacity.
• The Espresso offers a plan for unlimited users and 3GB storage capacity for $24 a month.
• The Tall purchase plan offers unlimited users and 7GB storage capacity and is $49 a month.
• The Grande comes in at $99 a month and offers unlimited users with a 15GB with its purchase plan.
• The Double Venti comes in with 40GB of storage capacity and unlimited users with its $149 a month plan.

Each of these plans include unlimited Rul.fm features for documents, projects, staff and wikis management abilities.

Producteev

Producteev brings into play an iPone application that makes it easy for a business to keep organized even when offline. Push notifications will bring important alerts to the user and easily connects with existing tools already installed like social networking media sites, email and instant messenger.

Producteev can automatically prioritize tasks that are waiting and filter reports effortlessly. This software business management program has multiple team support and privacy settings. A real time overview and user-friendly workspaces are offered, as well. Incentives for task managements can be monetized through the built-in Producteev Academy, which awards badges and levels according to completion of tasks.

This project management software program comes with the ability to competently handle from two users via workspace to unlimited users and also offers a free sign up plan for two workspace users. This plan includes a support forum and 100mb of file storage. A monthly customizable workspace and email for 200mb of file storage space is only $5. The fee covers SSL security and a logo. Optional savings for this package is $55 annually.

At the next level, the premium package of Producteev offers 300mb more of file space, a customizable workspace and priority E-mail for $20 a month, or $220 annually.

At the platinum level, for $30 a month or $330 annually, a business receives 1.5 GB file storage, support vie phone, SSL security, customizable workspaces and generates reports.

Each Producteev plan comes with:

• unlimited tasks
• Gcal synchronization
• task labeling
• a free app for iPhone
• Gmail gadgets
• Producteev Academy access
• file attachments
• import ability
• notifications via email and instant messenger.

Project Management Feature Matrix

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Almost everybody has a great web store idea, but few people understand how easy Shopify makes it to turn that idea into a profitable business. I’ve worked with a lot of clients and on a lot of e-commerce project and I can honestly say that for beginners and even advanced website builders, Shopify has everything you need to create a successful e-commerce website. The best part is that their plans start at $29/month!

I’m not saying that you can’t get an amazing custom-built e-commerce site created for your business. In fact, that’s one of our specialties at Item-9. A lot of potential customers don’t have a $5,000 budget, though. And many other customers are so worried about being ripped off by a web development studio (present company excluded, obviously:), that they’re paralyzed from pushing forward with their dream site.

If you’re looking for the quickest, least expensive and least risky way to get an web store going, continue reading to learn the five best reasons why Shopify and cheap e-commerce doesn’t have to suck.

Reason #1: Shopify is Flexible & Easy to Learn

Nothing is worse than selecting an e-commerce package that uses coding languages and file structures that only a veteran programmer can understand. This makes building a website a hassle; it’s truly demotivating. Even worse, your project might never get completed and you’ve just sunk thousands into dead-end development cost.
With Shopfiy, you exchange the stiff and convoluted for flexible and logical. Without even touching a line of code, you can have a fun and professional e-commerce website that looks exactly the way you want. If you do want to play around with the code, though, you’ll quickly understand how the themes are shaped and be making changes to your site in no time.

Reason #2: Low Cost Doesn’t Mean Low Value with Shopify

You can usually get a comparable outcome by spending $5,000-$10,000 to have a developer to create a site for you. You can also spend about the same amount of money in time trying to figure it out yourself (but you’ll likely give up well before then). You could also use a “bargain” service, and the once you see how crappy the final product, you’ll probably go back to square one.

When you decide to use Shopify, you can immediately create your business with a very low monthly cost of $29. The basic plan allows:

• Unlimited bandwidth (no other competitors offer this)
• The ability to sell 100 products
• No hidden fees or start-up costs
• Most importantly, an incredible 30 day free trial to show their confidence that you will like what you see.

If you really start selling products, you can easily upgrade to one of the four other plans that fits your budget and needs.

Reason #3: Don’t Stress about Software if You Don’t Have To

Not many people can create even a basic website from scratch. There’s no shame in that. Unlike HTML and CSS, creating and setting up a new e-commerce website with Shopify is exceptionally easy and fun to learn and use. It should really only take 10 minutes to create your first Shopify site and subsequently earning money.

Unlike nearly all other e-commerce systems, you don’t have to worry about installing software on your computer or a web server, or even worse, keeping it constantly updated and protected from malware and hackers.

Shopify’s e-commerce software is by far one of the easiest ways to start any kind of internet business.

Most business owners forget this, but it makes a lot more sense to spend time on making money instead of playing around with tools used to make money. To begin,

1. Create an account with Shopify
2. Pick a theme
3. Add your products.

That’s it. You’ll have your own professional business on the web in just a few minutes. Shopify is by far, the most beginner friendly e-commerce web based software anywhere.

Believe it or not, Shopify now makes it even easier for you. Not only does Shopify give you an easy means to create an online business, but they also provide you with statistical tracking for your products and customers. By turning on these features, you can track traffic to your site, sales numbers, inventory, prices, and even customer demographics. You’ll learn more about your business by doing less work.

Reason #4: Pick or Make a Shopify Theme that Works for You

In this Shopify review I’ve shown you how easy it is to start your own web based e-commerce business, but one of the most difficult tasks in any internet business is creating an attention grabbing website that people enjoy. Luckily, Shopify provides style with ease.

Even a basic website can take over 25 hours and thousands of dollars to design for a professional web development company. With Shopify, it doesn’t matter whether you are a complete novice or a HTML or CSS pro. Once you create your account, you’ll get to choose one of the hundreds of beautiful, free themes Shopify provides or even select a premium theme for under $200.

Reason #5: Build an Awesome Shopify Theme and Get Paid

Any web developer can create a Shopify theme and earn money as an affiliate. If you can, take advantage of your design skills and submit your theme for a Shopify review. If approved, you cam earn a lot of extra money.

WooThemes is the most famous example of this. Last October, they created three unique themes for the Shopify system, all of which are available for purchase today.

Conclusion

When you’re building anything that’s poised to make money, it’s important to prioritize your pain points. If you go with a platform that is cheap, fun, exciting, and isn’t a pain in the ass to set up, you’ll have a lot more energy (and money) to spend driving traffic and marketing your products to your customers. You don’t have anything to lose, so I suggest you take Shopify for a spin today.

When you want to thank me, you can do so by hiring Item-9 to help grow your Shopify site into a monster e-commerce site!

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Know that by undertaking the coaching process, you are saying that it is time to move your life forward with absolute commitment and confidence. Be prepared for change. Coaching will have positive impacts on many areas of your life, not just the area you are working on. Be open and willing to change. Don’t hire a coach because someone has told you that you should or because it sounds good. Do it because you are ready to change and take full responsibility for engaging in the process.

Don’t forget that Item-9 offers one hour WordPress and marketing coaching sessions. Sign up for one today!

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• Fixed incorrectly shown number of WordPress posts (incorrect mysql query),
• Resolved jQuery compatibility issue,
• Improved stylesheet mechanism. One external global stylesheet + embedded one for a custom animation. Additional css selectors for easier modification.
• Modified settings page,
• Ability to add thumbnails and excerpt (lots of users requested this!),
• Custom notification for pages with a shortcode [upprev]Sample Text[/upprev],
• Disabled PHP errors notification for a javascript file.

Check it out on this page (by scrolling down) and then use the plugin update feature on your WordPress site or download a new copy from the WordPress repository!

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Landing Pages are the Keys to Improving Conversion Rates

Lately, I’ve been studying the illusive art of improving conversion rates on my clients’ websites. Here are two great infographics I pulled from the Landing Page Rehab Program article I recently read on SEOMoz:

• Rehab Scorecard
• Conversion Rehab

I think that these graphics prove that a webpage always has room to improve.

Translating Conversions into Sales

That’s a tough one.

Since it’s not always possible to make the sale the first time around, an additional goal of almost all websites should be to collect customer information (specifically, visitor names and more importantly, email addresses). Without that information, those visitors might be lost forever. With an email address combined with marketing permission, though, you have a variety of opportunities to:

1. Solicit feedback to improve your products,
2. Make future sales,
3. Build a community,
4. Encourage your community to sell your products for you.

Historically, bloggers and other web workers have given away their knowledge without asking for anything in return. I say you should always ask for an email address before giving visitors access to the most valuable information on your site. Even better–make them tweet or post on Facebook using Cloud:Flood from ViperChill. That will certainly alleviate a lot of the time and energy you spent working on building something interesting and useful.

Those are just a few little ideas and thoughts, but you want to go deeper, I suggest The Noob Guide to Online Marketing (another beautiful SEOMoz/Oli Gardner infographic-based novel of a guide). It’s insanely thorough and would provide your team of marketing interns at least two or three years of projects to increase visitors, convert customers and ultimately, make your company more profitable.

Products and Affiliate Programs are Key to Monetization

The final resource I’m suggesting is the Site Profit Domination learning package from Michael Dunlop. Although it’s a $47 product, I consider it an investment to learn how to begin moving from a service-based firm to one that’s more product-based (and hopefully, better at making sales).

A big takeaway from the first of Michael’s six SPD videos and accompanying literature is that compared to services, it’s much, much easier to create affiliate programs for products. To note, affiliate programs are absolutely crucial to monetization because they:

1. Create a motivated and inexpensive sales force for your products
2. Exponentially grow sales due to affiliates creating affiliates, creating affiliates.

On the flip-side, too, affiliate programs offer easy sales opportunities for products that you didn’t necessarily create but do endorse. It’s supplemental income for something that might have come up in normal conversation anyway and they fit right in with your email campaigns and blog posts.

Conclusion

I made a goal one year ago to begin focusing on improving my marketing skills. Understanding and applying the above three elements has been a huge part of that goal.

There is so much information available on the internet (how meta!) but unfortunately, a lot of it is either poorly written, poorly synthesized or just plain inaccurate. I’m going to keep weeding through the junk, though, to find the good stuff. If you have any special resources you’d like to share, feel free to post them in the comments. It takes a community to learn, and I would definitely appreciate your feedback. Thanks and good luck!

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If you don’t mind, I wanted to get some input from you regarding the interactive/web community in Chicago. As you know, I’ve been interested in brushing up on this aspect of my design skillset and found what I think might be an intensive web design program. It has also been suggested that I look into the Art Institute and IIT Institute of Design. I like the idea of the down and dirty 1-year portfolio school, but I’m looking for inside info about it. I think it is the kind of thing where you get out what you put in, but I would like to know more.

Here is a list of the programs I’m looking at (scroll down to Web Design track).

• http://chicagoportfolio.com/p_design.html
• http://blog.chicagoportfolio.com/

Do you know anything about this place? Do you know anyone who has gone there/is going?

Any thoughts you have would be helpful or if you happen to know anyone in the local scene who has dealt with students or been in attendance themselves, I would love to talk to someone.

I wrote her back:

I actually took a course in javascript programming at the Chicago Portfolio “sister school”, Digital Bootcamp. While it’s true that I’ve yet to find a good mechanism to learn development, those classes provided some of the worst ROI of any educational program I could imagine.

I know you’ve got your mind set on school, but I don’t think that’s really the answer. I’ve never known anyone to gain much from using their Art Institute or Columbia College degrees, either. Those degrees don’t open any special doors. In a years time, you could learn a lot more just by reverse engineering the best web designs you can find–even if just as a hobby.

If you’ve got the cheddar to throw around, though, there’s no dearth of online programs from folks who are much more “with it” than 99.99% of classroom instructors. You could start with either ThinkVitamin or NetTuts. These sites cost well under $30/month. Another great option is Ben Hunt’s Pro Web Design Course. It may be slightly pricy, but it focuses on how to create conversation-oriented sites that are profitable (read: you can charge higher fees), so it’s definitely a great investment.

I never dropped money on either of those sites, though, because I knew I wouldn’t immerse myself to justify the cost. If you’ve got the dedication, I really do see them as great, less expensive options to traditional classroom learning. There are also lots of free articles and tutorials on those memberships sites, as well as many other sites you’ve probably read.

Keep in mind that video has another great advantage to live classes, too–your lessons will always move forward (and rewind) at the speed you’re most comfortable. That was my biggest gripe with my programming class; even with three people, we moved at the professor’s pace and I think he didn’t minded leaving us behind.

The other major issue is that these instructors are never going to be teaching you the latest techniques or technologies–that’s the nature of the ivory tower. You’ll never know it, but whatever you learn from these classes will have already been heavily devalued in the real world by the time you fully grasp it.

If you need any other suggestions, just let me know. Also, if you could, provide me with a rundown of the technologies you’re already comfortable with, as well as the ones you think you need to know. I’d be more than happy to help you find the resources to help you learn more. I’ve attached a few ebooks that you might like in the meantime. Good luck!

What do you think about the idea of a portfolio school or additional web design classes in general?

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Basecamp boasts millions of users and even more importantly, it’s the software that all other project management applications (both web and desktop) are now judged. In short, it’s the lifeblood of many web workers, this one notwithstanding. I see a real need for formal documentation on Basecamp’s best practices, so I’m going to be publishing a series of posts about properly using the software, starting with how to use to-do lists. I hope you enjoy.

Creating To-do Lists in Basecamp

Basecamp makes it incredibly easy to split up responsibilities and keep your team on track. With Basecamp’s to-do feature, you can quickly create a list of tasks and determine who’s doing what. Here’s how to do it.

1. First, select the project you and your team will be working on. Make sure everyone you need to include in your project has been included. You won’t be able to assign your to-do items to people who aren’t included in the project.
2. Next, click on the to-do tab. It’s right under the name of the project and three spaces over from the leftmost side of the upper menu bar.
3. You should see two small red links at the top of the to-do list page. Click on the one that says “new to-do list.”
4. As soon as you click the link, you’ll see two boxes. One of them has a title field and another contains your to-do list description. There are a few other options like the ability to make the list private, but we’ll ignore those for now.
5. Enter the title of your list and your short description of the items in the list. Once you’re done, click on the “create this list” button at the bottom.

Congratulations, you’ve created a new to-do list for your project! Now you can start to add items and assign them to your team members.

Adding and Assigning Tasks

1. The “enter a to-do item” box should appear right under the title of the list. Enter a description of the thing that needs to get done.
2. Just underneath, you’ll see the words “who’s responsible.” When you click on the menu below it, a list of team members will pop up. Select the person who is responsible for the task.
3. You can also decide if you want this person to receive an email notification as soon as you post the new to-do item. You do this by clicking on the box next to the menu.
4. If more than one person is responsible for an item, you can just pick “anyone” under the who’s responsible menu.When you’re finished adding items to your list, click on the small red link below.
5. You can order the items in your to-do list by click and dragging the cross shaped icon on the left. You can also check items off of your list by clicking on the box to the left of each item.

Commenting on To-do Items

Another really cool feature in Basecamp is the ability to comment on individual to-do list items. That way, whenever somebody stumbles upon the to-do item, that person can see what others have said about the item in the past. This keeps everyone up to date on any recent project developments.

1. Move your mouse over the to-do list item. As your mouse hovers, a little speech bubble will show up on the right side. Click on it.
2. When you click on the speech bubble, you’ll get redirected to the to-do item’s page. If there are already comments on the to-do item, you can read them or you can add your own comment below.
3. Whenever you leave a comment, you can attach important files and pick who gets an email notification. This is handy when you don’t want to bother everyone with your comment.
4. Go ahead and leave a comment. Now head back to the to-do list page and have a look at your to-do list item. You should see a black speech bubble to the right of the item. The black speech bubble means the item has a comment (i.e. your comment silly).
5. Whenever you see a to-do list item with a green speech bubble, it means the item has new comments that you haven’t read yet. It might be worth your time to have a look at the item’s comments.

And that’s it for to-do lists in Basecamp. As you can see, Basecamp was designed to be simple, fast, and intuitive from the bottom up. With to-do lists, it’s remarkably easy to get things done!

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I couldn’t download plugin updates, let alone install the latest version of WordPress without using a plugin like WordPress Automatic Upgrade. That plugin throws WordPress into a fancy maintenance mode, so you can go about your upgrading business. It works well, but it’s not meant for making quick plugin upgrades.

The final straw came today, though, when after manually updating a handful of plugins, I was unable to reactivate all my recently activated plugins. I tried activating them all at once and when that failed, I went in batches and finally, one by one until almost every one was turned back on. When I finally got most of my plugins going simultaneously, I faced another conundrum—couldn’t see any content on the plugins.php page on my WordPress backend.

I did a quick Google search to try to understand memory issues as they pertain to WordPress (and more importantly, how to get around this on a shared host). One forum explained that this was actually called a PHP memory limit.

I had dealt with this issue once before—a long time ago—back in my WordPress salad days. At the time, the PHP memory limit set by my work’s webhost was crashing my first WordPress site several times a day. Since I knew very little about WordPress then (or any kind of web development, for that matter), I never did figure out a good solution to keep that site from going down. I think I just ignored the downtime as best I could and passed the buck when I moved on to a new company.

Anyway, this time I had the benefit of four years WordPress and development environment experience. After learning a bit about PHP memory limits from the forum I mentioned, I checked to see if any plugins could solve my issue. It was a long shot, but I did find a plugin, WP Overview (lite) Dashboard Memory Bump Usage, that allowed me to see my site’s memory usage and limits.

So after seeing the numbers in front of me (32MB available, 31.3MB used) and making a final attempt at changing the values through CPanel, I was finally ready to submit a support request. When I finally contacted WPWebHost to see if they would up my PHP memory limit, of course they said yes. Within 10 minutes, I was ramped up to 64MB, my plugins page was working and I even activated Scribe, the plugin I originally gave up upon using.

I have to say, that it’s very cool to see everything working on the backend of my WordPress site. I bet I could even update my plugins and upload images to my posts without bringing down the whole site, too. So if you are having issues updating your site, contact your webhost. You may have a very low PHP memory limit that only they can change for you.

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A lot of the feedback I received was positive, but more importantly, I think that I started a great discussion between Envato and many members of the WordPress community–exactly the outcome I was hoping to achieve and exactly the situation that the article noted had been missing in the past.

A Universal ThemeForest WordPress Framework

One of the ideas that I proposed in that article was creating a WordPress theme framework for ThemeForest authors. This idea actually looks like it has traction now; the two Envato staffers disclosed that they are indeed working on the project and hope to release the framework shortly.

I love the idea of an options page framework. I really think this is a big step in standardizing what is almost always the same bit of functionality (i.e. logo, footer text, etc).

A lot of authors may resist the idea of someone else creating their theme’s code, but somehow, I bet when the authors who insist on doing everything themselves see the increased sales for themes using the Envato framework, they’ll likely change their minds.

I’ve always believed that theme developers need to focus on designing beautiful themes, not writing variants of the same options page we’ve seen over and over again. I’ve never bought an ugly theme with a great options page. Eventually, authors need to determine how much ROI there is in being a complete independent.

For argument’s sake, I wouldn’t want a developer to rewrite the WordPress core every time they publish a theme, either. It’s obviously best for everyone to use a centralized, updated version of a software that works and can be built on top of.

Stricter Coding Standards

Keeping with the standardization idea, there certainly needs to be higher coding standards for templates ThemeForest sells–framework or no framework.

Many of the comments on the original article alluded to the issue of these themes having sketchy javascript code, thus leading to plugin incompatibilities. This becomes even more evident when theme updates are few and far between–long after developers have had to edit the theme’s code in order to get it to work properly.

A lot of the detractors were specifically peeved that they had to spend so much time fixing ThemeForest authors’ code, when obviously, a theme should probably work with common WordPress plugins right out of the box. There’s no excuse not to play well with GravityForms. If your theme doesn’t, though, there are going to be quite a few unhappy customers.

More Detailed Theme Rating and Theme Details

Right now, how do you determine the quality of a theme on ThemeForest prior to purchasing it?

Other than the number of sales and other experiences with a particular theme author, I usually go by the kinds of questions I read in the theme’s latest comments. If they’re all newbie questions (“how do I load the XML file?”), then the theme is probably fine. The amount of updates is a huge indicator of author involvement, too.

Unfortunately, that system leaves a lot to be desired.

With any marketplace (i.e. Amazon.com), ratings are undeniably crucial. But the ratings on ThemeForest are worthless. They don’t collect comments, they don’t reflect version numbers and they aren’t specific at all. A great rating system needs to tell a product’s story quickly and concisely but a simple 0-5 star rating tells us little if anything about what we’re purchasing.

Ideally, there should be multiple ratings for each theme; one for design, one for code, one for uniqueness and maybe one for compatibility. Those four criteria would certainly help buyers make a better informed decision about the themes they’re purchasing.

It also wouldn’t hurt if the comments were separated by theme version number–version number being something else that should also be listed generously throughout the theme purchase page. Adding a change log to go with that would go a long way to helping alleviate update questions, as well.

WordPress and WordCamp Participation

The Envato team is spread around the world and I can’t see why more of their staff hasn’t appeared/spoken at the WordCamps equally spread around the world. I mean, I spoke at WordCamp Chicago in June and I hardly represent the zeitgeist of WordPress.

I also think that there needs to be more communication (like that in the original article’s comments) in the WordPress community. We’re not going to improve the project if we keep bringing the same people to the table, all with the same background and opinions. Envato as a whole as very valuable to WordPress and it just seems weird that they aren’t more represented in WordPress community events.

ThemeForest won’t improve, either, unless the experts let them know what needs to be changed with their service. It would be great to have more open discussions about ThemeForest at events like WordCamps–it wouldn’t be a bad marketing move by Envato, either.

Better Affiliate Payouts

This might be a stretch to include on this wishlist, but I can think of one other reason why so many bloggers and developers love companies like StudioPress and WooThemes: they have much (much) better affiliate programs than ThemeForest.

[To note, ThemeForest provides affiliate payout, but only for a customer's first deposit. That doesn't really provide any compensation for selling to people who have already purchased an item from one of the Envato marketplaces. The other theme companies have more traditional affiliate programs--a percentage of each sale for referring customers.]

So, in the end, it may be the lack of economic incentive that keeps folks quiet about ThemeForest (although maybe they want to keep the service a secret, as well. Who really knows?).

So, did I miss anything?

Chime in with your comments below.

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