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.

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.

The slides from this session are on slideshare:

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:

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.

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.

The new home page layout directs visitors to the area of the business they are most interested in, and each area of the business has a slightly separate visual identity (different colours, logos and headers). We’re also working on improving the content and making the site more useful to guests, nursery parents and events co-ordinators.

The key design and technical features of the redesigned site are

• Child theme of Twenty Ten. The theme folder only contains five files plus two CSS files, and uses a lot of the features of TwentyTen including header images and menus.
• Featured images are used to drive the different header images for the different business areas.
• All menus (including those in the sidebar for the different business areas) are controlled by the WordPress 3.0 menu system
• Gravity Forms has proved invaluable to develop simple, usable contact forms for the different business areas
• Introduced some more interesting fonts using font-face declarations (I will one day update to use Google Fonts but I couldn’t find the font I was looking for in their limited list).

I’d be interested in your comments on the design. Fire away!

New CED site, built using WordPress

Previous CED site design - HTML only

The key challenges in this project were:

Getting the design right
The design went through several iterations, as expected. But to be honest the most difficult aspect was working with the charity’s insistence on using a strong blue (#0000BD since you ask) for their logo, and trying to balance this relatively harsh colour with a more muted modern palette. However the client had some clear design ideas based on other sites they liked and it was straightforward to develop a custom homepage template to accommodate their ideas. We found the use of personas to be useful in adapting a very inward-looking site to appeal to a wider audience.

Timescale
The process took a bit longer than I had anticipated, for a combination of reasons. In particular as both I and the person I was working with have demanding day jobs there was a lot of time spent waiting for diary slots. Although elapsed time was longer than expected, the actual time working on the project wasn’t as inflated, but there a definitely lessons to be learned for the next time.

WordPress 3.0
I started developing the site on WordPress 2.9.2 but WordPress 3.0 has been in the margins for a while now. I’ve launched the site on 3.0 RC1 as that means I can make use of some of the out-of-the-box features such as the new Menu system (although it’s not quite 100% working in my theme yet – prizes for who can spot what’s wrong).

Other 3.0 features would be really useful, in particular the use of Custom Post Types to allow the charity to update specific metadata used for their development projects (at the moment they’re using Custom Fields which is a bit cumbersome for someone not that familiar with WordPress). But these will have to wait for the next iteration.

Hosting
I also advised the charity on moving away from their existing host (1and1) to a host that provides a greater level of support (including familiarity with WordPress). The choices I presented them were Dreamhost, Xilo and Bluehost (thanks to the wordcampuk mailing list for advice). Bluehost was chosen on the basis of previous good experience and price.

Managing the move was very straightforward – I used Bluehost’s SimpleScripts installer to install the basic WP site (was offered 3.0 RC1 which was a bonus!), imported from the test site, made a few config changes, and the client updated the nameservers for their domain. All done in around an hour.

So, a few lessons learned from this project, but interesting to work with a team who are clearly passionate about what they do. The next challenge for them is to build up more of a social network within the organisation (geographically dispersed, working in small virtual teams). I’m already thinking BuddyPress…

Widget Logic

Alan Trewartha’s Widget Logic plugin adds a control to all widgets allowing you to use conditional tags to control which page the widget appears on.

This is really useful if you want to add particular widgets to certain pages – the alternative is to have different widget areas in different templates, but that can get incredibly complex.

Usefulness index: 5/5

Sub Page Menu Widget

The sub page widget is useful for displaying sub-pages of the current page, and a link back to parent pages.

Usefulness index: 4/5

Query Posts
Justin Tadlock’s Query Posts widget is a complex widget that allows you to define the structure of the query_posts() function within a widget. Used in combination with the widget logic plugin it allows powerful control over lists of posts within certain page or post contexts, without resorting to editing or creating lots of new templates.

Usefulness index: 4/5

Extended Category Widget

The Extended Category widget gives much greater control over the categories that can be listed in the sidebar. For example, I want to show only a particular subset of categories on the Projects page, leaving out all the News categories. This widget makes it possible, again without resorting to editing template files. And used in conjunction with the widget logic plugin.

Usefulness index: 4/5

The site design is by Harrisment. I particularly like the colours and the crystalline shapes of the logo text.

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.