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?

Adverts used in the Metro

I was able to help in a couple of ways:

• Helping them to set up the survey in SurveyMonkey. This was fairly straightforward, and setting up the survey in SurveyMonkey early enabled us to visualise the user’s journey through the survey, and to run some early pilots to iron out (most of) the inevitable “eh?” questions.
• Creating links and link pages in the BiG website, including setting up a new domain for use in print media – www.glasgowspiritualitysurvey.com.
• Designing a postcard and a set of adverts to be run in the Metro over a 4-day campaign period. (I didn’t take the pictures, they’re all from Kim and Gerd, two friends who’ve given permission.)

Survey Postcard

If you live or work in Glasgow City Centre, and would like to complete the survey, there’s still time!

Business in Glasgow (BiG) is a Glasgow-based charity helping people make connections between work and spirituality. BiG is run by two Glasgow city centre churches and aims to support office workers in the city by providing monthly seminars along with individual and group support.

The Challenges

BiG is a charity run by voluntary donation, and the key challenges are:

1. Make the site visually appealing with a clean uncluttered appearance.
2. Using the WordPress Posts to support monthly talks (including in advance).
3. Find a way to use the WordPress Authors facility to give detailed speaker biographies.
4. Enable non-geeks to be able to edit and manage the site.
5. Finding a way to manage monthly newsletters in a visually appealing way.

The Solution(s)

Of course, the main solution is WordPress. I had hand-crafted previous incarnations of the BiG site but the WordPress back-office structure and ease of management was a natural fit. Installation on our existing hosting platform was trivial, as usual.

I wrote a completely custom theme with a Homepage template for the front page design that particularly highlighted the upcoming events and occasional features. At present I use a text widget in a front page widget area to manage the regular Feature of the Month. No doubt this will become cleverer and use a specially categorised post soon.

The visual design was influenced by the excellent photograph sourced from Flickr under a Creative Commons licence, and formed the basis for the use of warm and friendly purples and pinks. My initial visual design had lots of businesslike blues and greys, but that came over as much too corporate for the type of organisation.

To enable the future events to be displayed I usee WP_Query to build my own dataset for the Loop. I also used the User fields and description to drive the Speaker pages without using any additional plugins, just using the template tags.

For monthly emails I like Mailchimp as this provides full list management, scheduling and inline WYSIWYG editing. There’s no integration with WP but I don’t think this is necessary at this stage.

I designed and built the first website for APBC in 2002, and the site has been through several iterations since then. The latest version is on WordPress, and uses a modified Almost Spring theme which (I’ve just found out) isn’t available any more from the WP theme directory.

As the site is a church, some customisation was required – in particular to support weekly rotas. I couldn’t find a plugin to do this, so at the moment this is custom code from previous versions of apbc.net called from within individual pages with a custom display in the sidebar, but I’m in the process of converting it to a proper WordPress plugin/widget combination.

The other thing I’ve not been able to find yet is a good calendar plugin to allow us to publicise events well in advance. We’re therefore experimenting with a hosted service from churchupdate.co.uk.

I’ve also encountered some people challenges – in particular encouraging non-geeks to take responsibility for content management and updating information on the site. This has taken a lot longer than I’d expected.