WordPress for Family History by John Adams

A very personal story from Mr John Adams (@johnthegeo) which turned out to be a plugin tour de force. John has managed to put together a great site which tells his family story going back over 100 years with some great features like geo-locations, timelines, multiple authors and custom meta.

Some of the awesome plugins he used were:

• Category Custom Fields
• Default Sort Ascend
• Widget Logic (a must have on any site)
• Custom Post Types UI
• Post Type Converter
• Authors Widget / User Photo
• WP Geo (by one of my WordCamp buddies Ben Huson)
• WP SIMILE Timeline

Hand Drawing WordPress by Jim Convey

Jim gave another quite personal and passionate talk about art, blogging and the use of hand-drawn elements in web design.

One quote which stood out was:

Drawing difers from photography in that it requires imagination and shits the emoptional balance of the viewer to their personal experience.

Jim also went on to predict that in future amateur artists will invade the web and introduce more decorative content to sit alongside the classic text/photo blog postings which currently fill the tubes.

EU cookie legislation by Heather Burns

I was really looking forward to this because no matter how many times I have visited this subject it gives me a headache.

Heather started at full speed with some advice about how this new law effects ALL website owners and then went onto display a LOT of text which outlined what the EU Cookie law IS and is NOT.

The whole thing kicks off in 110 days when website owners (all of you) need to start informing visitors about the info you are storing on their computers. This even includes Google Analytics code so will hit pretty much everyone in the room here today.

Heather then went on to explain that certain cookies are exempt from the law. These include ones that keep you logged into admin panels and ones for online banking. However, certain eCommerce ones that are NOT seen as being required for the shopping experience need to be highlighted.

Here is a great example of how notifications could work from South Ayrshire Council:

There was a lot of talk about privacy, Facebook, the government and the snails pace like speed that the law is currently taking to get anything started and quite a bit of ICO bashing.

As for WordPress – the core team won’t be adding this as a core feature but there are some plugins already available that will help get you started but are NOT the only thing you need to do in order to be complaint.

Heather finished off with some warnings about money-making seminars, ineffective ‘compliance-izing ‘ code being sold online and a final warning about how the goalposts are already being moved making a lot of work already being done moot.

Site Doctors: improve the WPScotland websites by Taryn Wallis, Martin Young

A typical group session with the noble aim of improving the ever-expanding WPScotland website.

AND NOW…. LUNCH

The Emperor’s New Clothes by Kevinjohn Gallagher

The most hated man in WordPress takes to the stage! To talk about a crapload of subjects in a blunt and humorous way (he’s the speaker not the slide BTW).

This was an incredibly informative and pretty awesome. Here are some of the topics covered:

• Drink Often. Swear more. Code Less.
• Responsive Design is Irresponsible
• Why Free is too Expensive
• Browse Crappy
• Why you have to be High to use HTML5?
• Justified: Why you’re the client from Hell
• Basic != Standard
• Development Platforms, Processes and Purgatory
• Open Source in the Enterprise is like a Mail Order Bride.
• Good developers don’t automatically make good Jedi Knights.
• You weight 300lbs. You are not a ninja.
• Shop Smart. Shop S-Mart.
• Exit stage left: How we failed the world with CSS3
• Upgrades of Mass Destruction
• You are a Mogwai. Remember the 3 rules
• Lies, damned lies, and Open Source Statistics

Yeh, I know – LOTS to take in. Thankfully he’s speaking at The Digital Barnnext weekend so I get a 2nd chance to digest all this awesome info.

How WordPress Won! by Kimb Jones

Um, this is me. Here are my slides:

Not very informative without context – will blog the points when I get chance.

That’s it!

I will do a follow up when I get home.

The event takes place at the Sheffield-based GIST Lab and all WordPress-ers are welcome!

Xmas SYWP!

So if you have nothing planned for Tuesday the 13th of December (about a weeks time!) why not pop over to Sheffield for the Xmas SYWP where I will be personally be doing a shorter version of my popular ‘WOW Plugins‘ talk titled ‘Mini-WOW Plugins from 2011‘.

Sheffield + WordPress + The GIST Lab = Awesome

For those new to this event, here’s the brief: Each month we try to bring together a mix of WordPress Q&A, general WordPress advice, a bit of hands-on and some project insights.

There is generally a structured time-line but we throw in an open forum at the end and best of all the PUB after for any follow-ons

Book your South Yorkshire WordPress goodness for December 2011  now!

I’ve tried to be as informative and honest as possible in both. They are also pretty brief so no excuse NOT to read them then check ‘em out:

1. WonderThemes Interview

A quick breakdown of the WonderThemes WordPress Theme Marketplace project with some insight into how I built it and where its headed in future.

2. WordPress in Enterprise Interview

In this one I talk about using WordPress to power NHS-solutions like the Barnsley Hospital website which has been running on WordPress since 2008.

It goes without saying that this years WordCampUK was amazing, the best yet! I was honored to sponsor it with WonderThemes and met a bunch of really great folk (more on this when I get chance).

Turns out the hack was pretty a sneaky malware re-direction that it only kicked in when a search engine query directed the user to the site.

This is especially sneaky as it means that the site owners who probably had the site in favorites or just typed in the domain would most likely never find the hack until it had been lurking for a while.

Investigation

The first thing I did was check the .htaccess and index.php files on the site. The .htaccess file looked fine, see:

So, I moved on…. I checked the database, nothing, the theme, all clean, the plugins, all the plugins, they were all clean. So what was it? I checked for malicious hidden files in the FTP folders I double checked the data I looked for anything  and everything and nothing came up.

Google was no help either, this hack seemed to have been reported many times but it had many different solutions and none of them relevant here.

So a few hours into the investigation I went back to the start and checked the .htaccess file again. My plan was to add my own scripts to replace the default WordPress mod_rewrite code and see if it gleaned any results.

Doh!

Upon checking the main .htaccess file a 2nd time I noticed something that wasn’t obvious before:

GAH!! That’s it. The hacker had done the simplest of things to cover his tracks! By adding a few 1000 lines of whitespace and indenting the code in the .htaccess file it was hidden from view! I didn’t even think to scroll around the file the first time around!

So here it is the hack in all its glory:

A very simple hack but very sneakily done.

Fix

After removing the code the site now seems fine. How did it get there?? I really don’t know. The site isn’t hosted on any of my servers and I’m not contracted to find this out, the server tech can deal with that one. And I’m not even sure if its a WordPress-related hack, I mean, the rest of the site was clean. Only the .htaccess file had been messed with.

So if your site is sending you to malware portals or fake virus scanners then check your .htaccess file and please, dig around a little. Don’t waste 2 hours looking for something that isn’t there

The WonderThemes WordPress Theme Marketplace has have 1 micro-sponsor ticket and 2 standard tickets on offer for this years WordCamp UK in Portsmouth. Winners will also get a WordCamp UK t-shirt and a very cool WonderThemes t-shirt as well as some other cool swag at the event.

You also get to meet me which is always a bonus.

To be in with a chance of winning just check out this blog post over at the WonderThemes site.

Fly over to WPCandy TODAY and throw a vote on their really cool Theme Madness competition my new virgin theme marketplace WonderThemes is up for vote right now so vote for us here!

This follow up meeting was just a little more organised and just a little more focused than the first one with actual topics and subjects which (hopefully) enriched the experience of everyone involved. I personally learned a lot about blogging and creative writing from this session – actually, I learned sort of what I already know, it takes a lot of work and there are no shortcuts.

Other topics were the usual plugin recommendation, a healthy discussion on recommended reading and tips for new users and finally a quick chat on the potential for a fully-fledged WordCamp South Yorkshire to grow out of the meetup which will potentially happen early in 2011.

A WordCamp for South Yorkshire

Since WordCamp UK a few months ago there has been a change in the landscape of UK-based WordPress gatherings. Essentially the overlords at Automattic are keen for the userbase to break away into smaller, cosier and more local events rather than just a single large event.

This allows for more than 1 UK-based WordCamp per year (yey!) and encourages local WordPress gurus to build local communities whilst simultaneously promoting and evangelising the WordPress platform.

This sea change has already led to a number of smaller planned events such as WordCamp Whitehall which will hit London October 13th and is organised by Simon Dickson, the man who helped WordPress get into Number 10.

What about WordCamp UK?

I have yet to comment on the negative fallout from WordCamp UK (which is summed up excellently here by Dave Coveney), but here goes.

Because of the distance involved the USA model for WordCamps is very different to the UK model. Also, the sheer number of WordPress users in the United States vastly outnumbers the small pocket of WordPress consumers we have over here in the British Isles. Therefore the current USA model cannot (yet) be achieved in the UK but there is potential for middle ground.

I fully support the idea of ‘local’ WordCamps – in the UK and anywhere else – but I also really, really, REALLY see a strong need for a central event where visitors and organisers of ‘satellite’ events can congregate and provide a larger and perhaps more professional setting to help serve the entire UK community.

Take a look at WordCamps such as WordCamp New York and the MASSIVE and ever growing WordCamp San Francisco – these events are notable for their size and stature and with a little more time WordCamp UK will rise to this level.

This model allows for WordCamp UK and smaller WordPress-meetups/camps to co-exist in the same universe. We won’t lose the excellence of WordCamp UK but we will (hopefully) gain a new more diverse insurgence of WordPress-related gatherings.

WordCamp South Yorkshire is something the South Yorkshire WordPress User Group will be building up over the next couple of months. It will understandably be in Sheffield because of the existing infrastructure and support network provided by the team at the GIST Hub.

For more information keep an eye on Twitter and the #sywp hashtag.

Click for large version (flickr image)

Photo credit cmadman

He’s also lead developer of the Wonderflux WordPress Theme Framework which you should also check out new BETA dropping soon.