If you’re creating WordPress websites for clients, Jetpack adds a number of features to your client sites without the need for a dozen different plugins — reducing the technical debt that you need to maintain, and saving you time and your clients money. Here are some of our favorite tips for using Jetpack to streamline your work with clients.
Continue reading → Using Jetpack for Client Sites – Updates and Improvements
Hang on to your hats! Jetpack 3.7 is now available for your self-hosted WordPress sites with some great updates to the user interface, support for development sites, and more!
We heard you! Jetpack now provides a much simpler user interface that gives you quick and easy access for turning various features on and off with a single click. However, if you want to tinker with individual module settings or configurations like you’re used to, the old Jetpack → Settings page is still there!
If you use a development or staging environment for your Jetpack site or happen to be moving your site to a new URL, you may have previously run into trouble. You probably had to reach out to our wonderful team of Happiness Engineers for help with sorting out the Jetpack issue.
No more!
Now when you move your site (e.g. by cloning a staging site off of your production site or moving from staging to production), Jetpack detects the change and asks you what you’d like to do: Would you like to move to a new address? Is this a totally different site that needs a fresh connection? Or is this a staging site? Whatever your answer Jetpack will now automatically sort itself out under-the-hood for you.
Alongside this, if your site still has trouble and can’t verify the connection with WordPress.com, we attempt to detect that too and alert you so you can take action before, for example, publishing a new post. Now, there will be no more wondering why a new post wasn’t automatically published on Facebook or Twitter!
Jetpack 3.7 also introduces the new VideoPress player that works on all devices and allows you to paste a VideoPress link to automatically embed videos. Other key changes include:
We worked hard to make Jetpack 3.7 a great release for you and your sites and we hope you enjoy it!
A special thank you to all who contributed to Jetpack during the 3.7 development cycle:
Adam Heckler, Alex Kirk, Allen Snook, Andrew Duthie, Ben Lowery, Bernhard Reiter, Bob Ralian, Brandon Hubbard, Brandon Kraft, Brandon Lavigne, Chris Mospaw, Chrissie Pollock, Daniel Homer, Daryl L. L. Houston, David (Lenny) Lenehan, Dennis Snell, Derek Smart, Derek Springer, Donncha Caoimh, Enej Bajgoric, Eoin Gallagher, Eric Binnion, George Stephanis, Gregory Cornelius, Ian Dunn, Igor Zinovyev (Release Lead), jeiseman, Jeff Bowen, Jeff Golenski, Jeremy Herve, Jesse Friedman, Joey Kudish, John Godley, Justin Kropp, Justin Shreve, Kat Hagan, Maciej Gryniuk, Marcus Kazmierczak, Matas Ventura, Micah Ernst, Michael Adams, Michael Cain, Miguel Fonseca, Miguel Lezama, Mohammad (Mo) Jangda, Nancy Thanki, Nathaniel Taintor, Nick Momrik, Paul Schreiber, Richard Muscat, Rocco Tripaldi, Sam Hotchkiss, Tim Moore, Tony Kovanen, Utkarsh, William Turrell, Yoav Farhi.
If you’re creating WordPress websites for clients, Jetpack is for you. Jetpack easily adds a great number of features to your client’s websites without the need for a dozen different plugins, reducing the technical debt that you or your client will need to maintain over time.
We recommend these best practices when using Jetpack for a client site that will keep things running smoothly and help you provide a great service to your clients.
This article covers:
Jetpack offers a Development Mode that is enabled when using Jetpack on a localhost. If you’re developing on a development server, you can manually enable development mode.
You can enable this as constant in wp-config.php by adding:
define( 'JETPACK_DEV_DEBUG', true);
or you can add this as a filter in your theme’s functions.php or a development plugin via:
add_filter( 'jetpack_development_mode', '__return_true' );
Use a development plugin
We suggest using a “Development Plugin” that you can use for all of your in-development needs. With a custom development plugin, you can include the Jetpack Development Mode filter and include other necessary tools like the Debug Bar. The added benefit is that it reduces the number of items on your launch checklist and consequently less things to slip through the cracks when launching. The code might look something like this:
No matter how you enable Development Mode, ensuring that it is disabled before handing the site over the client is important to ensure your clients aren’t asking you or us why Jetpack isn’t working!
Many site developers will connect Jetpack to WordPress.com with their WordPress.com account for convenience. This becomes problematic however when you end up with hundreds of sites listed on your http://wordpress.com/my-blogs/ page. After your work is done its very likely that for many (if not most) of them you do not need or want access to any longer unless you have a continued relationship with the client. (Even if you do, its a good idea to teach your clients to self-serve so that you’re not a bottle-neck.)
From your client’s perspective, if Jetpack is connected to your account, they aren’t able to manage their Jetpack connection via http://wordpress.com/my-blogs/ or access their enhanced stats via WordPress.com.
Your client may already have a WordPress.com account if they’ve used Gravatar or Akismet in the past so very often its easy to connect Jetpack with their existing account.
Jetpack connections are based on the URL of the site. Often, we’ll see a Jetpack user write in asking why all of their stats suddenly disappeared or why do their wp.me shortlinks don’t work. Typically, their site was originally connected when it was on a development address and the migration to the live URL didn’t pass back to us.
To avoid this, connect Jetpack to WordPress.com only on the live domain.
With the above practices stated, we realize that development processes can’t always follow the practices outlined above. What if you’re developing off of a feature that requires a WordPress.com-connected feature, like styling our Subscription widget?
While on a development server, you can connect your client’s site to WordPress.com with your own WordPress.com account. The key is to disconnect Jetpack from WordPress.com using the link in the footer of the Jetpack dashboard page at the beginning of the migration to your production server and reconnecting after the site is on the production URL with the client using their WordPress.com account.
By doing this, you’ll disassociate your account from the client site and your client’s site will be connected using the production URL, avoiding the most common pitfalls of client sites.
An increasing number of hosting providers include a staging site, where you can have an exact copy of the client’s site on a separate server. This is great for testing out updates, new features, and more.
Jetpack communicates with WordPress.com through a shared token and blog ID that is stored in the database. When the staging site is copied from the live site, these database values are included. Whenever you deactivate Jetpack, Jetpack communicates with WordPress.com to invalidate the token as a solid security practice.
For you, this means if you deactivate/disconnect Jetpack on the staging site, the same token used on the live site is now invalid. If this happens, simply have the client disconnect and reconnect Jetpack on the live site.
If you’ve never used Jetpack before and you’re looking for some guidance on how to install it for the first time, you’re in the right place!
There are two ways of installing the Jetpack plugin:
Finally, if you discover a bug in Jetpack during your development work, please submit an issue or a patch via GitHub. If you have questions or run into problems, drop us a line or leave a comment to share your tips on using Jetpack with clients.
