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.

I spoke at WordUp Edinburgh last year and it was a great success and a good laugh too. Huge respect to Martin and Taryn for sorting this out!

For the full inside track on the launch check my post over at the Evolve blog which details some of the new features and what had to be cut in order to launch on time.

So it turns out Ben Folds is running a fan memories contest on Facebook. I’d love to enter, but my prized Ben Folds possession was lost a few years ago, here is the story:

Bottled Ben

Back in the 1996 Ben Folds Five toured the UK. They played the Sheffield Leadmill and I went along with 2 friends. It was a great gig by all accounts, in fact, the 3 of us still look back at it fondly today because on the way home our car broke down and I was left having to walk 1/2 the journey home – good times

Anyway, back to the gig – anyone who’s been to the Leadmill will know it has a very open stage area. You can, for most shows, walk right up and grab the feet of the band (it used to be great for stage diving before all the new health & safety laws banned it).

Because of this layout I was able to get really, really, really, close to Ben’s piano. And for the final couple of songs, while being crushed down the front, I spied that he had taken a few swigs from a bottle of water and left it by the side of his piano leg (it was a baby grand).

After the show when the audience died down and the lights came up I seized my chance to jump on stage and grab the 1/2 drank and pretty messed-up bottle as a souvenir! I now owned some of Ben Fold’s spit! Pretty cool no?

Well, some may say weird (a few did) but I thought it was great (I’m sure some Elvis fans have done weirder things). I kept the bottle on my shelf in my teenage bedroom for many years until it came time to move out to my own house about 10 years ago, this is when the story takes a turn for the worse because during the move, the bottle was lost

I was devastated when I couldn’t find it, my last memory of it is on my CD shelf at my mums old house still 1/2 full of a mixture of spring water, spit and sweat – a magic combination.

I can of course imagine how it ended up being lost. After all, it was an old, battered, 1/2 drank bottle of water and someone would have seen it as junk and probably threw it out with the rest of my teenage memorabilia (posters, magazines etc).

So that’s it! Needless to say, if I had kept hold of my magic Ben-bottle my chances of winning the competition would be pretty high.

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 spent most of today volunteering for the GO ON Barnsley campaign. Basically wearing a rather fetching t-shirt and badge (see above photo) and bestowing the wonders of this new fangled ‘internet’ thing to anyone who would listen.

It was a lot of fun and I’ll be doing the same again twice this month. I even helped out designing the ‘Barnsley’ version of the GO ON logo:

The GO ON Campaign, getting people online

Screenshot

Last month I did a presentation on all the different types of CMS tools that are now available at the South Yorkshire WordPress (#SYWP) meetup. You can find the notes here which were awesomely written by Chris Witham.

The rise of the micro-CMS

Some of the popular items were Unify, Perch and Cushy which fall into the category of ‘micro’ CMS applications.All of these are designed to be easy to add to any flat (static) HTML/CSS site. They have no jazzy dashboards/backends to speak of and all pretty well supported.

Pretty Forking Good

Out of all the other CMSs mentioned Fork was the one which got the most interest from the group.

It has a beautifully designed website and a simple, easy to follow dashboard and theme/module system. Everyone in the room commented on how this CMS could go far given the right attention.

All comes back to WordPress

Of course, this was a WordPress meetup and as deliciously inviting as some of these other CMS tools looked my ultimate point was I/we always come back to WordPress for a few solid reasons:

1. Plugins – Need WP to do something? Find a plugin, if you can’t find it, hire someone or hack your own – no other CMS has this many available features.
2. Releases – This sometimes puts people off WordPress but we should all be thankful. WordPress releases are quick and easy to implement and there are no horrible version splits and upgraded sites generally work pretty well with new versions without much worry. (YES I know its not that simple but its better than Drupal with version 6, 7, 8 and even 9 on the horizon all being used and supported).
3. Popularity – Just check the figures. WordPress is now a synonymous CMS brand.
4. Community – WordCamps, meetups, online news forums, the community is not only large its well organized and passionate.

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).