Webinar: Transitioning from Adobe Business Catalyst to WordPress

#wpewebinar
How and Why One of the Top Business Catalyst Partners
Made the Switch
Michael Sallander and Scott Shefler, Chicago Digital
Tony Gilharry and Steven Word, WP Engine
Transitioning from Adobe Business
Catalyst to WordPress

#wpewebinar
What You’ll Learn
● Why Chicago Digital is moving from Business Catalyst to WordPress -
debunking WordPress myths and why WP Engine
● Feature parity between Business Catalyst and WordPress
● How to do WordPress right
● Demo of WordPress and WP Engine User Portal
● Q&A

#wpewebinar
Ask questions as we go.
We’ll answer as many questions as we can after
the presentation
Slides and recording will be
made available shortly after
the webinar
Use the “Questions” pane
throughout the webinar

#wpewebinar
SVP of Digital Strategy & Co-Founder
Chicago Digital
Michael Sallander
● Likes skydiving and bungee jumping
● Active strategy board game player
● Ran a marathon, but hasn’t ran
much since
SVP of Digital Experience & Co-Founder
Chicago Digital
Scott Shefler
● Brings dog (Maple) to work everyday
● Eats Chipotle 2-3 times /week
● Has tried over 1200 different beers

#wpewebinar
Partner Operations
WP Engine
Tony Gilharry
● At WPE for 5 years (35+ dog years)
● First website built in WordPress 2.3
● Experienced blown engine on
commercial flight (1:5.3 million odds)
Innovation Program Manager
WP Engine
Steven Word
● Creates instrumental hip-hop
● Loves hiking
● Craft beer enthusiast

#wpewebinar
Why Chicago Digital is moving
to WordPress
(and WP Engine)

#wpewebinar
Chicago Digital has been using
Adobe Business Catalyst as its only
CMS since 2009.
Chicago Digital ran the BC App
Store, BC Academe, BC Gurus and
BC Sandpile.
Chicago Digital has built close to 500
websites on BC.
End Date: March 26th, 2021
1. Our focus is on recurring marketing and PR
contracts
2. Picked up a lot of clients who have sites on a
variety of platforms, including WP
Beckerman PR Acquired Chicago Digital in December 2017
It no longer made sense to be a 1 Platform Agency
Adobe BC EOL
Moving from a Web Agency to an
Integrated Digital Marketing & Public
Relations Agency

#wpewebinar
Upcoming Poll
Find out what the crowd
believes to be true about
WordPress
1. It is just a blogging platform
2. There are no Web Apps
3. It is not secure
4. It is slow
5. The code is messy and bloated
6. It is fragile
7. It is too complicated
8. Expensive to build on to do it right
9. You have to constantly update it
10. Not the latest & coolest tech stack
Which Are
True?
We Almost Didn’t Consider WP

#wpewebinar
What Was Important to Us?
1. A name people have heard of
2. A platform that can be used immediately
3. A platform that is likely not going away
4. A platform that can work for small business and large public companies
5. A platform that could handle the wide-range of Business Catalyst features
6. A platform that is good for SEO
7. A platform we can make money on hosting/supporting starting at reasonable prices for SMBs
8. A platform that we could build custom designed and developed websites
9. A platform that easily integrates with other cloud based software
10. A SaaS platform so that we did not have to worry about the infrastructure/maintenance
11. A platform that is secure
12. A platform that is easy to make backups on and create dev environments
13. A platform that is reliable
14. A platform that has good support
15. A partner portal/program where we could easily manage all our clients’ websites
16. A platform that our front-end developers could build on from start to finish
17. A platform that is at least as easy to make updates to as BC
18. A platform that has Web App like functionality so we can build data-driven, personalized websites

#wpewebinar
WordPress?

#wpewebinar
WordPress + WPEngine?

#wpewebinar
WordPress + WPEngine + Internal Testing?
18. A platform that has Web App like functionality so we can build data-driven, personalized
websites

#wpewebinar
1. It is just a blogging platform false
2. There are no Web Apps false
3. It is not secure false, but can be true
4. It is slow false, but can be true
5. The code is messy and bloated false, but can be true
6. It is fragile false, but can be true
7. It is too complicated depends
8. Expensive to build on to do it right depends
9. You have to constantly update it true, but can be
minimized
10. Not the latest & coolest tech stack true
How Many
Other BC
Partners Have
Decided to Use
WordPress?
We Decided on WordPress
Upcoming Poll
If no or undecided, what are
your main objections (use
Questions pane for your
response)?

#wpewebinar
• Web Forms (Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, WPForms, …)
• Custom Post Types (CPT UI, Advanced Custom Fields)
• Secure Zones (MemberPress, PaidMembershipsPro,...)
• Blog
• eCommerce (WooCommerce)
• CRM (UkuuPeople, WP-CRM, Salesforce, Agile, …)
• Email Marketing (MailChimp, Constant Contact, Mailster, …)
• Media Downloads (Custom Post Type)
• FAQs (Custom Post Type)
• SSL (free)
• Editing Experience (Customizer, WYSIWYG, Gutenberg, ..)
• Menus
• Media Gallery
• Widgets
• Sitemap (WP Sitemap Page)
• REST API
• Plugins (Google Analytics, Admin Menu Editor, Role Management, Yoast SEO, Import/Export)
• PHP (Timber (Twig), Jade, Mustache)
• Themes
• Documentation/Resources/Education
WordPress
Content Focused, User Friendly CMS, Thriving Community, and Easily Extensible
• Web Forms
• Web Apps
• Secure Zones
• Blog
• eCommerce
• CRM
• Email Marketing
• Media Downloads
• FAQs
• SSL ($80 /year)
• Editing Experience
• Menus
• Sitemap
• API’s
• App store
• Liquid Markup
• Templates
• Documentation/Resources/Education
Business Catalyst
All-in-One Solution
Comparing Business Catalyst vs. WordPress

#wpewebinar
Web Apps = Custom Post Types

#wpewebinar
Editing Experience

#wpewebinar
WordPress Challenges Compared to Business Catalyst
1. Can take longer to build custom designed websites
2. Can be more expensive to host/maintain
3. No unified login
4. Fight prospects/clients on where to host their WP site
5. Prospects/Clients think they are a WordPress expert
6. No longer differentiated by the platform we use (but how we use it)
7. Harder to take sites live: more steps and more difficult to coordinate with
clients

#wpewebinar
How to do WordPress right

#wpewebinar
WORDPRESS THE RIGHT WAY
Code is Poetry
• Do things the “WordPress Way” (learn from Core)
• Reference the Handbooks (Plugin, Theme, Make)
• Learn about the Coding Standards
• Use Best Practices
• Beware of “copy pasta” (Stack Overflow, Gist, etc.)
• Take advantage of open source nature
• Leverage the WordPress APIs
• Understand how plugins interact with your site
• Leverage trusted plugins and themes

#wpewebinar
At WP Engine, we have created a
specialized environment fine-tuned
for optimizing WordPress for the
best performance.
Code is Poetry
“Adhering to WordPress best practices will ensure you and your team are
set up for success in the future as you build upon your skills and your
website.”
• Make WordPress core code updates quickly
• Proactively upgrade plugins and themes as new versions
become available
• Protect User Information with SSL
• Keep it Cacheable
• Optimize Images
• Prevent sniffed login attempts with unique user ID’s
• Enforce strong passwords
• Conduct frequent, proactive vulnerability scanning
WORDPRESS BEST PRACTICES

Agency Landscape
CMS
Content Strategy
Site Design & Dev
Marketing
Developer Tools
Site Optimization
Tech Ops
Security
Caching
Analytics
Service & Support
Managed Hosting
+

WP ENGINE AS A PARTNER
CMS
Winning
High Performance
Digital Experiences
Content Strategy
Site Design & Dev
Marketing
Developer Tools
Site Optimization
Tech Ops
Security
Caching
Analytics
Service & Support
Managed Hosting
+ + =

POWERFUL INFRASTRUCTURE PARTNERSHIPS
WORDPRESS SOLUTIONS DEPLOYED ON THE BEST-IN-CLASS INFRASTRUCTURE
• Innovation partnership and collaboration
• Early insights and impact on GCP roadmap
• Google’s connectivity, expansive network
• Self-healing to protect from HW failures
• Live migration
• Security defense and compliance through
Google Information Security Team
• Advanced Technology Partner status
• Passed AWS Well-Architected 44 point
inspection best practices
• High availability clusters
• Enterprise-grade uptime & security
• Redundancy across multiple data centers
• Eliminate single points of failure

#wpewebinar
Demo - WP Engine User Portal

SCREENSHOT HERE
WP Engine User Portal Demo

#wpewebinar
Adobe will stop hosting existing sites on
Business Catalyst on March 26th, 2021
and new sites will no longer be available
for purchase starting June 18th, 2018.
Side headline L2
Business Catalyst has native features for exporting your content.
Moving from BC to WP

#wpewebinar
Inquiring minds want to know.
Questions and Answers.
* Slides, recording and resources will be made available within
the next several days

#wpewebinar
WordPress Plugin Directory
Resources.
Chicago Digital
Education Section - WP Engine Solution Center
Official Plugin Developer Handbook
Local WordPress Meetup Groups
Official Theme Developer Handbook

#wpewebinar
Resources.
What You Most Need to Know About WordPress
Developing with WordPress Forum
Ultimate Guide: How to Make a Website in 2018 - Step-by-Step Guide
Torque Magazine
WP Engine Solution Center

#wpewebinar
How helpful?
How to improve?
Future topics?
Help us get better.
How helpful?
How to improve?
Future topics?

Webinar: Transitioning from Adobe Business Catalyst to WordPress

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Mehr von WP Engine

Mehr von WP Engine (20)

Kürzlich hochgeladen

Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)

Webinar: Transitioning from Adobe Business Catalyst to WordPress