FAQ

A. It is a plugin for WordPress that gives the end user both a video and online manual explaining the functionality available to Editors in WordPress.

A. It is for WordPress developers to give to their clients. It is designed to save you the time of creating new manuals for each client, and helps your business have a more professional handover to the client.

If you own your own business checkout our case study of how one developer managed to cut half a day off his projects by using the plugin.

A. It is not for developers wanting to learn about the WordPress codex. It is not for hosting companies.

A. On the homepage we have a calculator that helps you realize how much time you spend making manuals for your clients each year, by putting a $ value on your time. Once you see just how much time this takes, and how much work is involved in producing a comprehensive and professional manual, you will quickly realize that you could put your valuable time to better use (like getting more clients!).

Consider in the last year how many times you’ve had to answer the phone to answer simple questions from your clients. This video manual helps reduce those questions and therefore saves you time.

A. As WordPress releases each stable version, we analyze it and create new or modify the existing videos and manual. You don’t need to worry about it. The plugin checks which version of WordPress is running and shows the correct version of the manual. For example, a website built in WordPress 2.8.6 will have videos about deleting a page. But one built in 2.9 will have videos explaining the trashcan. WordPress 3.2 includes new functionality like distraction free writing. It is all done automatically.

A. The videos are served from our servers, so you don’t need to worry about the bandwidth**.

After surveying a number of WordPress developers, we found that the majority give their clients Editor logins when they hand over the site to their clients. The reason is for this is quite obvious (a lot less things can go wrong). Hence the reason our videos are made from an Editor’s perspective.

Currently, WordPress have over 8,000 plugins. For this reason we do not feature any plugins. However, if there is demand for it we would consider this is in the future.

A. The plugin with still continue to function to the end of that months subscription. After that, the videos will not appear and you will see the invalid ID message.

A. Yes! We realise that everyone uses WordPress slightly differently. That is why we have made it possible to add your own videos above the manual videos if you want to.

A. Yes! You can add your branding to appear above all the videos, to present a more professional experience to your client. In fact, you can change all the images, including the menu icon, if you wish.

A. Yes! You can actually write a introduction to the manual if you want, giving the manual a more personal feel. Of course, you don’t have to, and you can either have a generic welcome message for all of your clients or remove the welcome message completely if you want.

A. Yes! We realise that in some cases you don’t want your clients to know about certain functionalities. (Posts are the more requested functionality to be removed from the video manual.) The config.php allows you to specify which sections should be on or off.

It is up to you. This plugin is most useful to developers who produce lots of websites. We use it ourselves and we find it easier to download and store the plugin, edit the config file once adding in our couple of custom videos that we have and then always upload that plugin. Time is money, and this saves us about 10 mins per installation, which all adds up in the end!

Paste in your serial code, which you should have received by email. The same serial should be used for every website on which you install the plugin.

This is the logo that will appear above the videos. We recommend you change it to your own logo. Please make sure the logo is no more than 30px high and that you use a absolute url and not a relative one.

If you don’t want a section of the video manual to appear, then you can turn off that section by setting it to false. You can not turn off individual videos.

These variables allow you to customize the titles of the manual if you wish. You could, for example, add your company name to each of the titles. If you want to change the logo that appears at the top of each of the manual pages, then you just need edit the $wpm_plugin_heading_css variable.

If you want to personalize the introduction for one or all of your clients, you can. Simply edit the $wpm_intro_text string and you can give a much more personalized experience to your client.

If you want to create your own version of this image, then you can! All you need to do is download the original psd cover. Then we use a product called Box Shot 3D, which we highly recommend, and this is our original Ebook cover file so you can get the rendering the same. Please note you will have to buy Box Shot 3D if you want to produce something similar to ours, though of course you don’t have to.

When you are happy with your image, just replace the $wpm_custom_ebook_img variable.

If you want to feature your own videos in the plugin, then simply set $wpm_show_local to true. You then need to set the following variables to make sure the videos are displayed correctly:

• $wpm_local_video_height and $wpm_local_video_width: These are the height and width of your videos. (We are assuming that all of your videos will be the same height and width).
• $wpm_local_title: This is the title that will display above your videos.
• $wpm_local_player: If you have made your videos using Jing and they are in .swf format, then please select true. If your videos are in .mp4, .flv or .mov format, then set it to false.

In order to set up your videos, they will be part of an array. Increment the array as necessary. Here is a breakdown of the array:

• $wpm_localvideos[0][0]: This should be the name of your video, and will appear as the text link below the video.
• $wpm_localvideos[0][1]: The small thumbnail should be 240px by 150px. If you want to keep consistency with the other thumbnails, then use this thumbnail template.
• $wpm_localvideos[0][2]: The video url – use the absolute url.
• $wpm_localvideos[0][3]: The ALT text that will describe the video.
• $wpm_localvideos[0][4]: The large thumbnail image that will appear in the video player. If you are using a jing video, then you don’t need one. If you don’t have one then please leave it blank.

Video Thumbnails

If you want the videos thumbnails to look consistent, then we recommend you use our Photoshop thumbnail template.

We realize you may want to try and make your videos as similar to ours as possible, so the setup is as follows:

• Videos are made at a screen resolution of 1280 × 800 on a 17″ MacBook Pro LCD screen with Screen Flow.
• Voice overs are then recorded into Logic Studio Pro with a Rode NT2 condenser microphone, into “The Brick” mic pre-amp, then a Behringer Tube Composer Compressor. Light software compression is then applied when the voice overs are rendered out as 44.1 Wav files.
• Final edited videos are then exported from Screen Flow as QuickTime .mov files at 75% screen size (960px x 600px) with the H.264 video encode at high quality and AAC stereo audio at 96kbits/sec with Motion Blur turned on.

We hope this helps!

A. We created the plugin because we wanted to give our clients the most professional handover possible. Our clients have a good experience with our brand, and this is very important to us. So we use the plugin in the following way:

• We replace all images with our own logo. This means: the menu logo, the heading logo, the brand_img, and the manual image. It only takes a few minutes and you only have to do it once, and we think it is worth it.
• We use our special navigation plugin, so we have a couple of videos that we add to the config.php so that they will appear above the main manual.
• We personalize the welcome message for each client, and use their first name. Again, you don’t have to, but we believe it is the little details that make our clients into repeat customers.
• That’s it. We have one version of the plugin with the changes made in the config.php file, and for each new project we just upload it and change the client’s name. Simple!

A. Everything else is editable through either the config.php or the options page, however if you want to change the icon the will appear in the left hand navigation for the manual, then it is quite simple. You must edit line #13 of plugin.php