Welcome to your final Sponsor Spotlight before WordCamp LA drops like an unwelcome hot tamale on your lap, Children of the Corn!

Today, we’re going to talk about this company that you all have heard of. They’re called iThemes. Look, you know em’ and so do I. Do I need to sit here and tell you about how cool they are? I know a number of folks who have been members for years. I should know, I’m one of them. To this day I still pay for their plugin membership club. Backupbuddy alone is worth the price of admission. While I use other tools to smoothly migrate DBs from point a to point b, Backupbuddy is still the only WP Plugin I trust to actually backup a site on a regularly scheduled interval. I do this for all my staging sites. True story. iThemes Security is rock solid as well and their devs actively, perhaps even ferociously, support the essential plugin. Quality and simplicity is what comes first over there and you see it in the product design. Have you played with Exchange yet?

The plugin marketplace is maturing which has created positive changes in the WordPress Ecosystem for product developers and a lot of that has to do with all the good stuff the folks at iThemes have been doing and, most importantly, what they give back to the community, whether it’s their online offerings over at WebDesign.com or simply the invaluable free resources they put together. Others have taken copious notes over there.

I don’t give them my  money because I like them, because, I mean, they’re all great folks doing great things. They don’t just make products, they’re involved in the community, giving back and going above and beyond. Ask far and ask wide and I challenge you to find one person that says company founder, Corey Miller, is the kind of guy to start a bar fight or rain destruction down upon a small town. Spoiler alert, you won’t find such a person… And even if you did, it’s probably not someone you’d want to spend any time with… and they probably smell like moldy cheese and sweat socks. Pass!

So join me in giving a rousing thank you to the good folks over at iThemes for helping make WordCamp LA possible and possibly the World’s most awesome WordCamp, nay, the UNIVERSE’S most awesome WordCamp!!!

Thanks guys!

CHRS Interactive is a Los Angeles based WordPress development agency. They do it all from the creative to the technical to the marketing. They can dream it, build it and get the word about it. This is a team you want on your side when you’re out there looking for the right team with the right tools to market your solutions to the web.

CHRS is the right size to still be agile and creative while being able to solve a variety of problems for business from small shops to large, high-complex operations that require custom development know-how. Best of all, they speak WordPress. If you need help, they’re the right team for the job.

Let’s take a moment and say “thanks” to the folks over at CHRS Interactive for helping WordCamp LA become a “cool thing” in our tech community. Big thank you CHRS Interactive. You all rock!

Man, the sponsor spotlights just keep comin’ don’t they? =)

Today, I’m going to tell you about a company whose name you may not know so well, but they make some stuff that is absolutely mind-bending. Yes, MIND-BENDING!

I’d like to introduce you all to a little company called Soflyy. Sure, you could go “Google” them and that would tell you what you needed to know. But I’d like to sit you all around the campfire, people. Soflyy isn’t just a company. They make a couple of bad-ass products which, unless you’re living under SOOOOO many heavy rocks, you’ve most definitely heard of.

Their most recent offering is a service called KnowMyRankings.  What is it? It’s a nifty service that does one thing well. Tell you where your site ranks today  with Google and where it ranked previously for the keywords that matter most to you. Keyword rankings affect how many people visit your site. KMR is a simple, easy-to-use, tool that you can use to track keyword rankings movement. Obviously you can do this for your own site properties, or, optionally, you can create a ‘White Label’ report for your clients. Oh and they have a nifty WordPress Plugin, too: http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-rank-tracker/

Right there I could end this post. But I’m not done. Because Soflyy is behind another little tool. Maybe you’ve used it before. It’s a lil’ somethin’ called WP ALL IMPORT, the Swiss Army Knife of Import tools. WP All Import can import files from xml feeds or from csv files into your WordPress powered sites. You can import standard blogs and posts; you can also create affiliate stores, or update store inventories for your WooCommerce powered ecommerce store. The plugin is SO deep, that you literally get to pick exactly how YOU want to imported data to appear and where. There’s also add-ons for WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields and more. I’ve transferred content from one CMS to another with the tool. It’s truly one of the best thought-out plugins out there and has been indispensable to me and my work. Oh, one other cool thing, is that you can use xpath to filter on the content you’re importing so you get only the data you actually want. Amazing!

Let’s thank the good folks at Soflyy for helping WordCamp LA and making it happen.

You folks are awesome!!!