WordUp Glasgow: Show Us How You Did That

By John | Published February 5, 2012

We ran a similar session to this at WordUp Edinburgh last year, and tried a slightly different approach this time, using a grid of 10-minute slots through the afternoon. People pre-populated this grid during the morning, and I was grateful that so many volunteered to share their knowledge.

 

Dan Frydman showed a site that Inigo Media have just built for Centotre restaurant in Edinburgh. This uses some smart features including Advanced Custom Fields to present the restaurant’s menus properly rather than as downloadable PDFs. Cool and pretty.

 

Allen Wallis demonstrated the plugin that WPScotland use to gather and archive tweets for the WordUp events. This sparked some discussion with Clarke Duncan about his SocialEnhancer tool that attempts to do something similar.

 

Ian Rankin of UK NGO Christian Engineers in Development and I spoke about our early experiments in using BuddyPress to help a dispersed voluntary organisation manage their groups, conversations and document archives: effectively to improve their knowledge management. This is very early days (Ian and I have been tinkering with BuddyPress for only a few weeks) but Ian will be piloting the approach with a small group, and we’ll report back at the next event.

 

Steve West of Graphics Co-Op spoke about the challenges of porting an old site with lots of assets and structured data into WordPress. He described a lot of the challenges faced by any data migration project, and the tip of the day was to do any data manipulation in tools that the team are familiar with (in his case, Excel).

 

Dan Roundhill of Automattic [who knew we had an Automattic person living in Scotland?] showed some of the work the Automattic team were doing on providing WordPress apps for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia and Windows Phone.

 

I gave a short demo of how I’m integrating a church rota managed in Google Spreadsheets with elements of the church website using Zend Framework and Zend Gdata Interfaces plugins. I’ve written up the technique on this site.

 

Kimb Jones described how he built the Digital Barn site in around 4 hours using an off-the-shelf Buro theme from Woo Themes.

 

 

And finally, Kevinjohn Gallagher described how, using Custom Post Types and a bit of simple CSS, he was able to build a blood bank indicator similar to that on the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service site.

 

 

 

This was a really enjoyable session and I was pleased that everyone felt able to participate. It felt like a proper BarCamp!

 

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Integrating Google Spreadsheets with WordPress

By John | Published February 5, 2012

At WordUp Glasgow yesterday I showed a plugin I wrote to integrate data on Google Spreadsheet with a WordPress website.

The Use Case

To manage rotas within Adelaide Place Baptist Church we use Google Spreadsheet which several people have access to edit and keep up to date. This works for us as it’s easy to use and (almost) everyone has a Google account these days so passwords aren’t a hassle to remember.

I wanted to reuse this information on the front page of the website, to show who is leading worship and speaking on the next Sunday.

 

How does it work?

Install the following WordPress plugins: Zend Framework and Zend Gdata Interfaces.

In a plugin (or widget), to access the data from the spreadsheet:

//specify the URL for the spreadsheet
$url = "http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/[Big Long ID for the Spreadsheet]/od6/public/values?sq=current=true";
 
//instantiate new spreadsheetService object
$spreadsheetService = new Zend_Gdata_Spreadsheets();
 
//create new listFeed object
$listFeed = $spreadsheetService->getSpreadsheetListFeedContents($url);
 
//make use of the listFeed object
if ($listFeed) {
    $this->showThisWeek($listFeed,$pageurl);
}
else {
    echo $errorMsg;
}

And then to make use of the data:

function showThisWeek($feed,$pageurl) {
    $sunday = date('l jS F Y', $this->ukStrToTime($feed[0]['date']));
    $leader = $feed[0]["leader"];
    $speaker = $feed[0]["speaker"];
 
    echo("<div id='inline_apbcrota'>");
    echo("<h2>$sunday</h2>");
    echo("<ul class='thisWeek'>");
    echo("11am - 12.15pm <br />");
    echo("Worship leader: <strong>$leader</strong><br />");
    echo("Speaker: <strong>$speaker</strong><br />");
    echo("Coffee and tea afterwards<br />");
    echo("<a href='$pageurl'>Full WT Rota</a>");
    echo("</ul>");
    echo("</div>");
}
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WordUp Glasgow 2012

By John | Published February 5, 2012

I attended the very first WordPress conference in Glasgow yesterday – WordUp Glasgow, arranged by Taryn Wallis and Martin Young of WPScotland.

The all-day event was held in the IET Teacher Building in St Enoch Square right in the centre of Glasgow and was a great venue – particularly the well-appointed lecture theatre with power sockets at every seat and good AV facilities. The staff were extremely helpful, and the sandwich lunch was tasty and plentiful.

The sessions have been well described by Kimb Jones and Heather Burns. So here is my take on the day.

WordPress for a Family History Archive

The slides from my talk on family history are available. I’ll try to blog about some of the key plugins as that generated quite a lot of interest.

Hand Drawing WordPress – Jim Convey

Jim showed his flair as an artist as well as a WordPress designer, and showed how art can be used to give a different, more personal touch to a website. He also gave a great tour of some sites with very interesting art-driven user interfaces.

EU Cookie Law – Heather Burns

Heather’s talk was a really interesting walk through the EU Cookie Regulations that will come into effect in the UK on 25 May, only 110 days time. She gave the clearest explanation that I’ve heard on what the regulations are and how they will affect website owners (and us as site designers). Some WordPress cookies are exempt as they’re “strictly necessary for the provision of a service explicitly requested by the user” (for example the dashboard login cookies), but others (such as comment cookies that remember the user’s identity for a year) are included in the legislation.

This is a poorly thought out set of regulations, and the feeling in the room is that most people will ignore them. Heather compared the legislation to the fact that Buchanan Galleries use mobile phones to track footfall of individuals visiting the shopping centre!

The Government Digital Service are also considering how to implement these regs, and have blogged on how the new single government domain will handle the problem. The best example in real life is South Ayrshire Council, and definitely not the ICO!

Site Doctors: improve the WPScotland websites – Taryn & Martin

This started off as a discussion on how to improve the web presence of WPScotland, but turned into a really useful debate about how to foster a community of WordPress users, designers and developers in Scotland. Around half of the people at WordUp Glasgow had not been to any WPScotland event before, and we need to listen to them to improve the community.

It was during this session that we discovered that WordCamp Edinburgh UK has been given the go-ahead by WordCamp Central!

The Emperor’s New Clothes – Kevinjohn Gallagher

Kevinjohn tackled the issue that besets any technology community – the fact that we hype new things and don’t always take a balanced view that includes our end users. I particularly liked these ones:

  • Responsive Design is Irresponsible
  • Free is too Expensive
  • Open Source in the Enterprise is like a Mail Order Bride

Some of these issues are really pertinent in UK Government IT at the moment, and I would hope that Kevinjohn’s messages could get an airing within the IT Profession.

How WordPress WON! – Kimb Jones

Kimb gave us a good walk through eight reasons why WordPress dominates the CMS market at the moment:

  1. Open source
  2. Saturation
  3. Ecosystem
  4. Credibility
  5. Themes
  6. Plugins
  7. Automattic
  8. Community

Show Us How You Did That

I’ll blog separately about Show Us How You Did That, as I thought it worked really successfully this time.

Summary

Overall, I thought the WordUp Glasgow event went really well, and I was pleased that so many new people turned up. Once again, Taryn and Martin did a great job to co-ordinate the event, and we have great support from both local WordPress experts and travelling supporters like Kimb.

As always at WordPress events, there is a truly friendly atmosphere with no commercial back-biting that often goes on at conferences. It was a real pleasure to spend a day with so many interesting people.

See you all in Edinburgh in July?

 

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WordPress for a Family History Project

By John | Published February 4, 2012

Here’s the slides for my talk at this morning’s WordUp Scotland.

WordPress for a Family History Archive

View more presentations from johnthegeo.
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WordUp Edinburgh 2011

By John | Published October 23, 2011

photo credit @dmwmartin

Yesterday was the first ever WordUp Edinburgh meeting, bringing together WordPress bloggers, designers and developers from across Scotland (and a few from northern England too). The event was really well organised by Taryn Wallis and Martin Young, who ensured a wide range of speakers and topics.

What did we talk about?

There were a wide range of talks and discussions. All the session materials and related tweets are now on the Content page (well done to @wpscotland for doing this on the day after the meeting!)

Jim Convey started off the day by telling us how he had used WordPress to learn CSS. He used the Artisteer tool to experiment, but also as a way of rapidly developing a good looking site with minimal effort.

Andy Gilpin and Martin Young spoke about the challenges and opportunities of WordPress in the Enterprise. They threw out challenges to the WordPress community about how to better support enterprise deployments:

  • separate security from functional patches
  • trusted repositories for themes and plugins – quality assurance and checking – community resource?
  • support for legacy releases to slow down release cycle (e.g. Ubuntu model)

Taryn Wallis is a member of the WordPress Theme Review Team, and gave us an overview of how the disciplines and principles set out by that team can help in developing custom themes.  In particular, the Twenty Eleven default theme is a great exemplar to learn from.

photo credit @dmwmartin

One thing that really impressed me was the level of discussion from the whole audience, and this livened up the day. The panel discussion on WordPress in the Voluntary Sector (with Alex Stuart, Mike Little and me) lasted 90 minutes and covered a really wide range of topics. The key point for me was wondering how we as a WordPress Scotland community could offer more services (commercial and volunteering) to voluntary organisations, that could really make a difference. (Funny, no-one mentioned the Big Society!)

We also ran a How did you did that? session, similar to the one I tried at WordCamp Portsmouth UK in July. Advance warning gave the opportunity for a few people to prepare, and I particularly enjoyed the presentation by Heather Burns on incorporating high volume mapping.

Donncha Mac Gloin‘s prediction is that the number of websites will increase (more single-issue or ephemeral sites) and that, rather than managing a few sites, we might end up managing hundreds of sites in one place. Donncha gave some advice on how to prepare and build to that scale.

We’ve all heard of Responsive Design but some of us would find it hard to articulate what it means or how to build a responsive site. Ian MacKay gave an in-depth presentation on both responsive and adaptive design, explaining how this would work with WordPress. In my opinion, this was the best talk of the day.

And, last but not least, Kimb Jones provided an overview of the history and current state of the WordPress theme marketplace, which has dramatically evolved over the past couple of years.

And the buzz?

The whole day again goes to show what we’ve found at WordCamps: WordPress people are friendly, open to learning and open to sharing their experience. People ranged from one of the WordPress founders to people who use WordPress as a personal hobby, and the organisers catered for everyone. One gap – it would be good to hear more from people who are using WordPress for personal rather than commercial reasons. I’ve already thought of a few content ideas for the next one.

A suitable venue?

The venue at Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh was excellent. We had a room in the relatively modern conference centre (next to a glass-fronted room where they carry on teaching autopsies, apparently). The projection facilities were good, as was the wifi. This is definitely a suitable venue for a future WordCamp UK.

And finally…

Many thanks again to Martin and Taryn for their organisation of the meeting, and to all the sponsors for making it possible. Let’s do it again. Soon.

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Cloning with WP Twin

By John | Published July 31, 2011

At the “So, how did you do that?” session at the recent WordCampUK in Portsmouth, someone mentioned an interesting tool for cloning WordPress installs – WP Twin.

I had a chance to test this out recently. I wanted to take a copy of a live WordPress install, so that I could test a new plugin. It only took a few minutes to clone the site onto my development server. WP Twin moves all the files and database from the cloned site, and sets it up in a new location, re-pointing all the links to the new site.

As anyone who has ever moved a WordPress site before will know, this is much simpler than the manual steps FTPing all the files, backing up the database, editing the database and then iterating through checking that everything works.

Neat tool. I’ll use this more in the future.

 

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WordPress in the Enterprise

By John | Published July 17, 2011

We ran a panel discussion on WordPress in the Enterprise at the start of WordCamp UK. Thanks to Kimb Jones, John Read, Dave Coveney and Martin Beeby for their great contributions to the discussion.

The slides from this session are on slideshare:

WordPress in the Enterprise, WordCampUK 2011

View more presentations from johnthegeo

The discussion covered three themes:

  1. How do people use WordPress within organisations?
  2. What are the challenges of deploying WordPress within an organisation?
  3. How can WordPress evolve to be more effective for internal use?

This is a short summary of the discussion at the session (as far as I remember it) and further discussions throughout the weekend. Do feel free to add your own notes in the comments.

How is WordPress used within organisations?
We reviewed a number of cases where WordPress has been used within organisations. For example I have some experience of using WordPress within a large organisation, particularly to try to foster internal discussion around technology issues. WordPress is a great choice to manage this as it has inbuilt commenting, ready-made themes and is relatively easy to set up and manage.

We also discussed the WordPress-SharePoint interface, and how organisations need to work out how they can use both applications in a complementary way.

What are the challenges of deploying WordPress within an organisation?
The choice of architecture is key. Externally hosted WordPress sites generally run on a full LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL), but introducing this within a Microsoft-based organisation means that the IT operations staff may not have the skills, experience or confidence to support (“What if it falls over at 3am on a Sunday?”). One possible solution we discussed (and was elaborated on in a later session by Andy Robb) was how WordPress could be run on a Windows environment. There are a number of options for this, including the use of the XAMPP distribution (good for development servers) or the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

Another crucial challenge is user authentication. The common model used by Active Directory plugins is to generate a new WordPress user for each person logging into the WordPress site. This may give rise to maintenance issues when users change role or leave the organisation and their records (including created content) is not cleaned up. There are various theoretical solutions for this, but not many concrete plugins. We therefore wrote a small plugin to identify users from their Apache REMOTE_USER property (linking Apache to our Active Directory domain and groups through directives in the httpd.conf) and this enabled us to recognise people from their Windows logon. This is an area for further work.

Multi-site or single instances. The consensus was that a multi-site instance would be useful for a family of similar sites, although single instances can provide an opportunity to provide a different experience from this standard.

Some plugins are hard-wired to operate within an Apache server environment. We need to build a community of trusted and tested plugins that solve enterprise problems.

Although WordPress 3.2 stopped support for IE6, it is still used by a large number of public sector organisations in the UK (according to The National Archives, 54% of government users in the UK compared with 1% of the general public).  .

Environments. In order to maintain a well-controlled and stable live service, enterprises use separate Development, Test and Live environments, and this is good practice for any WordPress installation. However, as content and configuration are not physically separated within the database, this adds some additional work. A plugin such as WP Twin (mentioned in a later session), or a more rigorous approach to source code control of the plugins and themes directory may help in this area.

WordPress core has regular patch releases but these are too frequent for many enterprises to cope with. Although some enterprises operate a continuous integration model for their own software builds, regression and integration testing of external packages takes time and effort, and most organisations could only cope with a major upgrade every 18 months or so. Could this be alleviated by splitting functional and security releases?

What needs to change?
We discussed that there were three areas where change is needed:

How could WordPress change?
As discussed above, a different approach to releases, maybe separating critical security patches from functional upgrades.
How could the enterprise change?
Be less nervous about adopting open source packages such as WordPress; mitigate risks by using architectural approaches that match the internal infrastructure and applying enterprise disciplines to WordPress adoption.
What about the supplier ecosystem?
There are only a few suppliers offering services directly to enterprises, and there is certainly no “sales support network” that comes with major proprietary software packages. Should suppliers develop this ecosystem offering a relevant level of support to enterprise customers (a bit like the Red Hat model)? Such suppliers could also invest in the support and training materials needed to help customers adopt WordPress.

Follow-up from WordCamp UK
Since the session at WordCamp UK, the conversation continued throughout the weekend. Gareth Thompson has now created a site to help us manage that ongoing conversation.

Ben Balter is also working on a Google Summer of Code project to develop a document management plugin for WordPress. This introduces versioning and checkin/checkout functionality to document management using custom post types. Worth keeping an eye on.

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Where’s my iPhone?

By John | Published April 20, 2011

I’ve just used Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan’s app to interrogate my iPhone location records.

This is fascinating. You can see I spend a lot of time travelling up and down to London on the West Coast Main Line. I’ve also had a few days holiday in North Yorkshire. But, unsurprisingly, most of my data is from Glasgow and East Kilbride. At that scale, no big secret.

Some anomalies though – I’ve not been to Worcester, Wakefield, Perth or Hull recently. The data isn’t terribly precise, as it uses triangulation rather than GPS. Or at least that’s my story…

However it is worrying that my iPhone is recording and storing this information without my permission or knowledge, and without adequate protection. Maybe I’d be geeky enough to want this information, and for me it’s not that important if people know where I’ve been, but for anyone in the public eye this must be a security nightmare. I’m glad we know about it now.

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Eating my own dogfood

By John | Published April 17, 2011

Part of my day job at DFID includes a bit of responsibility for publishing data under the government’s transparency commitments. In common with other UK central government departments, DFID routinely publish spend, contract and HR information. But unique to DFID is the publication of all aid projects.

In January this year DFID began to publish details of every aid project in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard XML schema. There are now a set of XML downloads referenced from the IATI Registry covering countries, regions and multilateral aid activities, all delivered through a RESTful API, and refreshed every month with up-to-date data. DFID also publish a more human-readable version of this information on the Projects Database on the DFID website.

The Hewlett Foundation are the second organisation to publish in IATI format, and others are following on close behind.

Eating my own dogfood

Owen Barder blogged recently that organisations publishing data should be forced to use that data on their own websites – so that “eating their own dogfood” would drive up quality. As I don’t get the chance to do this at work, I’ve been having a play with the IATI data in my own time. Just for fun, you know.

Here are a few initial prototypes. I will blog implementation details in the next few posts, and include code.

Charting using amCharts

I first saw the amCharts charting tool in ForeignAssistance.gov, the US aid portal. The tool takes XML or CSV data and generate Flash or Javascript charts – pie, column/bar, line, bubble and so on. The tool is very straightforward to set up, and data can be set up using XSL transformation of IATI XML data.

These sort of charts would be useful to:

  • get an overview of what a donor is doing in a country
  • use as a widget on a site dedicated to aid in that country
  • (if aggregated across donors in a country), provide an overview of what activities are considered important
  • show past and future aid flows for a country

There are still some challenges – for example aggregating the sectors (health, infrastructure, water) rather than the very granular sectors listed.

See with the charts in action. Use 2-letter ISO codes to look up a country you’re interested in.

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is a tool that enables manipulation of internet data feeds using a set of pre-determined tools. This pipe retrieves the country file for, in this case, Uganda (UG), filters for currently active projects, and produces a list of aid activities matching those criteria.


Note: the IATI schema needs to have the XML directive added at the top to enable it to be read by Yahoo! Pipes.

These tools would be useful to:

  • aggregate information for a country from different sources (for example through the IATI Registry)
  • mashup using connections between aid projects and other indicators
  • transform or filter the data without using XSL

Go on, have a play.

WordPress Country View

In the WordHack at last years WordCamp UK, the WordHack team developed a prototype to import aid data into a WordPress custom posts structure. As the WordHack was based on non-IATI XML, I’ve adapted this for IATI data.

In short, openaid.org.uk allows an import of IATI XML data for a particular country into a WordPress instance, creating a new Custom Post from each IATI activity (aid project), and dealing with DFID’s hierarchical project/component structure. The code regularly checks the data source for updates and creates new versions accordingly.

This could be used by a Civil Society Organisation (CSO) in a developing country to:

  • aggregate all donor activities for their country,
  • allow citizens to add comments on each donor activity using the WordPress commenting capability, and
  • keep track of the changing nature of the projects through regular updates.

Here’s the example site with a very few test projects.

Next steps

These are just a few initial ideas and prototypes. Please add your ideas below, or, if you’re really keen, visit the new IATI Support forum and send in your ideas.

Disclosure: Although I work for DFID, these prototypes were developed in my own time and using my own equipment. Yes, I’m a geek.

Posted in International Development, Portfolio, Transparency, Visualisations | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

APBC redesign

By John | Published March 6, 2011

Following quickly on from the Adelaides redesign, I’ve was able to update the Adelaide Place Baptist Church site yesterday. Like Adelaides, this was a long-running design and it took a few iterations to get to a design I was content with.

Key features of this design, learning some lessons from the Adelaides work:

  • Again, the design is a child theme of Twenty Ten. In fact there are only four files in the child theme: header.php, homepage.php (home page template), functions.php and style.css.
  • The slider on the front page is Dynamic Content Gallery. I’ve used this in a few sites before and it works well for me. I did have a look at a couple of other sliders (and may update this one) but it is functional and easy to configure through the admin screen. I’m displaying a single Category (unsurprisingly called “Featured”).
  • I used Gravity Forms for the contact form again. Liking it a lot.
  • And this time I got to use Google Fonts. Very straightforward to incorporate in the site.

And I found out that it is possible to turn on page excerpts in WordPress 3.x by putting the following line in functions.php

add_post_type_support('page', 'excerpt');

The next stage in the evolution of this site is to concentrate on the content and refresh that to say something more about the personality and activities of the church. Now that more members of the church can “see” the design, they are better able to suggest improvements. We’re also hoping to keep the information dynamic by including a “grid” (sorry, some ideas are just too good to leave to gov) to be reviewed by the leadership monthly so that we can prepare material in advance.

Most of the photos on the site are by Jonny Ferry, who has a real eye for detail.

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