April Fools 🤪

OK, yeah. So, today is April Fool’s day. You think there will be a bunch of online punks going on today?

I’m not going to try to “punk” you today. But, in the past, we used to have some fun with this.

I remember back when I ran my tech site talking all about PCs. And one year, we made an official announcement that we were converting to an all Mac site. And renaming the site from “PCMech” to “MacMech”. 🤓

This was in the days when the whole “Mac vs PC” debate was still raging. And we wrote this whole announcement about how we determined that Macs are clearly better and decided to re-orient the site toward the future.

Yeah, such nerds. 🤣

But, not going to do that to ya today. We’ll just sit back and watch. Here in this week’s newsletter, I’ll be answering a subscriber question about FluentCRM… and talking about an “oops” where people thought a web host would OWN your content. Good times.

Let’s get nerdy…

FluentCRM: Install on Separate Site?

In last weeks’ newsletter, I talked about 4 big advantages to having your email list inside of WordPress. You can check out that back issue here if you missed it.

A subscriber (Hey Jeff!) responded and asked…Dave, in a future newsletter, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on whether Fluent CRM should be hosted on the main Wordpress site or on its own server/WP installation. I’ve been following your articles and newsletter comments about your switch to Fluent CRM and value your thoughts on the matter.

So, let me answer that….

In almost all cases, I recommend that FluentCRM be installed on your main site. In fact, unless you’ve got a pretty good reason, I recommend having everything you need on just one site.

There could be exceptions, and I’ll spell that out below. But, the main things to keep in mind here are:

• FluentCRM has no impact on site performance on the front-end since there are no front-end assets. It will only affect performance when an email is actually in the middle of being sent.
• One of the joys of FluentCRM is the integration into the rest of the tech stack. For instance, if you use WooCommerce, you can view their entire purchase history and see active subscriptions right on their FluentCRM profile.

The integrations are huge. And for those integrations to work as well as they should, you need to have everything on the same WordPress install.

If WooCommerce and FluentCRM are on separate sites, they can’t “talk”. And that goes for other integrations as well. If FluentCRM is installed elsewhere, you just give yourself more technical headaches to handle and some of the conveniences of FluentCRM simply won’t work.

So, why would somebody want to install FluentCRM on a separate it?

Really, the only valid reason would be they intend to use one installation of FluentCRM in order to handle the email marketing of several different websites.

In that case, you could put FluentCRM onto it’s own WordPress install. Perhaps on a sub-domain. And then you have your other sites feed into it. FluentCRM can be worked with via the API.

Now, when you do that, you’re basically treating FluentCRM as if it were a remotely hosted platform like ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign. All interactions with your CRM would have to be done via remote API calls. The easiest way to do that that I’m aware of is by using WP Fusion, which it has the ability to tightly integrate with a remote FluentCRM install via REST API.

If that’s all “nerd talk” to you, then that’s all the reason not to go this route. 😇 It is more work, for less capability.

But, in some instances, people want it this way. They want to use FluentCRM to handle the email lists for multiple sites. And perhaps those easy automation triggers aren’t all that important to them. In which case… have at it. But, in my view…

FluentCRM should be installed on your main website where you have all the other “plumbing” going on. It makes things much easier, and it will not draw down your site performance.

RELATED:
Membership Site Domain: New Domain, Sub-Domain Or Same Site? How To Avoid My Mistakes.

WordPress Quick Bits…

Canvas and Affinity To Merge. Canva has acquired Affinity, the maker of Photoshop alternative Affinity Photo. I love Affinity Photo and use it all the time since I don’t want to get into the recurring billing of Photoshop. Thing is… this acquisition does tend to lend itself to a future where Affinity Photo embraces a subscription model. Perhaps with some new AI-driven functionality. But, if I had to guess, the one-time purchase business model of Affinity which was so popular with people like me… might have proven to make things difficult. Just as happens with any acquisition, they say “nothing changes”. Well, it probably will.

WooCommerce to introduce new Woo.com Update Manager. Starting with WooCommerce 8.8, there’s going to be a new plugin called Woo.com Update Manager. This will be a separate plugin that is required if you want to get automated updates to paid WooCommerce extensions that you have subscriptions for. Apparently they’re doing this to remain compliant with WordPress guidelines about plugins. This new plugin is only required if you want these automated updates. You can still update manually and it won’t affect how any of your extensions work. Read more about the change here.

WooCommerce 8.8 Getting New Store Designer. Also in WooCommerce land, the upcoming 8.8 release is getting something called “Customize Your Store“. Basically, it will be a theme customizer for your Woo store. It will be pretty limited in the beginning as it will only work with the Twenty Twenty-Four theme (and who actually uses that?), but we’ll see how it progresses.

WordPress 6.5 Delayed. WordPress 6.5 was supposed to launch last week, but instead saw a rare last minute delay. The delay is supposed to be for a week, which means tentatively it should come out tomorrow (April 2nd). Seems like a lot of the reason for the delay had to do with the new font library. Read about it here.

Learn WordPress CLI. A lot of people don’t know this, but WordPress has a command line interface where you can make it do things via command line and it is often much faster than otherwise. A new site has launched called WP CLI Dev which gives the “unofficial” and simpler documentation on how to use it. Not gonna lie… this one is for the nerds. 🤓 But, hey, we all got a little nerd in us, hey?

Migrate Learndash into MemberPress Courses. If you were using Learndash and MemberPress at the same time, now you have an easy way to migrate that Learndash content right into MemberPress Courses.

SureCart now in the top 2K WordPress plugins. SureCart just has been growing in usage and popularity and now finds itself in the top 2,000 plugins of the entire marketplace. It definitely has some advantages over WooCommerce, but it is also a SaaS solution ultimately so you’re either OK with that or you’re not.

Divi 5 Update News. Elegant Themes has shared another update on the progress of development on Divi 5. I don’t envy the position they’re in… trying to completely re-build Divi from the ground up in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. The want Divi was originally built just became problematic. I know many swear by it, but personally I always disliked it.

Vultr Wants Your Data?

Last week, there was controversy on social media with regard to the terms of service of Vultr. Vultr, if you’re not aware, is one of the major infrastructure companies online that you can get cloud servers with. I used them via Cloudways… and now I still use them via xCloud.

So, the controversy had to due with a clause in their TOS that basically made it out as if they were claiming rights to do whatever they wish with your content and your data.

Obviously, no bueno.

But, of course, social media being what it is… everybody got super alarmed about it. It ended up on Hacker News. And I saw it discussed in the Admin Bar. People start ripping on Vultr. Saying they’re going to move all of their websites off of anything Vultr. People making fun of the name, saying they’re living up to it. Which admittedly… is kinda funny. 🤣

And I’ve had people ask me my reaction. And it is this…

It is much ado about nothing.

The Vultr terms of service (which you can view here) was last modified back in January. Not only that, the verbiage everybody is concerned about existed way before that. If you use the Wayback Machine to look backwards, you can see that that verbiage has been there since 2021.

So, it has been there awhile. But, suddenly, somebody decided to get everybody hot and bothered about it on social media. Reality is… it is nothing new at all.

But, not only that… it is also just not a concern because I don’t think that’s what they intended at all. There’s simply no incentive to it.

Some have speculated that they wanted to use user data to train AI. I don’t know where that came from. In the end, Vultr is infrastructure. That’s their business. There’s just no incentive for them to do that. And they know full well they’d kill their business model if it was known they were doing that.

So, I think people need to step back and look at the big picture before getting alarmed at misguided social media posts.

Plus, the CEO of Gridpane had a chit-chat with Vultr (since he works with them directly) and said this…

That’s exactly what I suspected. It is “sloppy legalese”.

I mean, be honest…. you know how this legal mumbo-jumbo works. People either sloppily copy that crap from other sites… or they over-pay some lawyer to go through it and they just say stuff in a dumb way. There’s a lot of sloppy TOS out there. Plus, if Vultr was going to change their business model like this, does it make any sense that they’d just silently do it and bury some gotcha into their TOS and hope nobody would notice?

So, the lesson here is…

Don’t believe everything you see on social media. People knee-jerk to extremes on there. People don’t think. And people pile-on without giving it an ounce of thought.

And if you use Vultr, don’t be concerned. Nothing has changed.

UPDATE: Funny, but since I originally wrote this late last week, Vultr has already changed their TOS again to remove the language in question.