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!