I was thrilled to be asked to design the new Rewired State website and this week we’ve finally launched it and ironed out any bugs, just in time for next weekend’s SXSW Hack Day at The Guardian. The new site runs on WordPress with lots of magic behind the scenes to handle projects and events. There’s also a very nice mobile stylesheet to make it look beautiful on iPhone too.
We’ve just rolled out a new version of the Rewired State website which I’ve developed in WordPress. Everything looks pretty much the same – there were mainly just backend changes and migrating from the previous Rails app, but there’s a few extra touches on the frontend, such as blog posts, the beautiful new project form, and a mobile stylesheet to make it easier to browse on the go.
Everything runs seamlessly on WordPress’ Custom Post Types (including the events) and there’s some very slick admin work on the backend to bring each post type into their own element. I’m tempted to write a blog entry later this week on a few of the problems and techniques we encountered when working on the new site.
Wow. It doesn’t seem a year since I was typing up a post about last year’s WordCamp…
This year, WordCamp UK was held in Manchester, a little bit closer to home than Cardiff! Held at the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, there were three main tracks (and a fourth communal area) and the same great variety of attendees and talks.
One of my favourite sessions of the weekend was How WordPress Themes Have Changed The World by Michael Kimb Jones. My main port of call in WordPress is theme development, so I was quite interested to see other people’s take on it all, and especially where the GPL themes market is heading to. Similarly, I found Jonny Allbut’s talk on WordPress Theme Frameworks and Template Tricks interesting, and I’m very excited about the beta of the Wonderflux theme framework this week. There were many other great sessions too – particularly the sessions by Simon Wheatley and Mike Little on their latest projects.
On Saturday afternoon I helped Jonny out with the Site doctors: Let the experts help you! session along with Mike Rawlings and John Reid. That was an interesting session and I hope the people who asked us for advice found it useful. (Also, to the guy who wanted the ‘Uncategorized’ category to be changed automatically, I wrote this quickly to add to your theme/plugin).
However, I felt that this year there was a certainly different atmosphere for WordCamp. Last year, it felt a lot more community-oriented, whereas this year it felt slightly less-so, and more enterprise-oriented. This is probably for a number of reasons. Perhaps the same-level table seating arrangement in Cardiff created more of a community feel, and maybe there was more time for chatting between sessions, something that has been entirely dependent on how much of the hour a session used up. And perhaps there were more attendees who were more from an enterprise background. I have to say that this didn’t detract from the great weekend, merely an observation of what has changed since last year. Simon Dickson picked up on this a bit during his session, and referred to the difference between the first WordCamp and Cardiff being similar to this.
Finally, and I’m reluctant to comment on this, there was the heated debate about the future of WordCamp UK. It was a shame that this was only brought up at the end – it left quite a sour taste after such a good weekend. Jane Wells representing Automattic dropped the line during the feedback session that calling the event ‘WordCamp UK‘ was (in her words) “not acceptable”. Needless to say that this didn’t go down well.
I don’t think it is right for Automattic to assert their ethical policies and bureaucracy over what was a community-started event. It was organised entirely by the community – or to be more specific, the fantastic Tony Scott and Chi-Chi Ekweozor – and, after running without hindrance for three years, has recently become a registered organisation. For a company which does not even fund or help organise the event, what right do they have to dictate what we should and shouldn’t do? It feels in a way like a betrayal.
This is my sole objection at present to what was discussed – at the moment I am happy to leave the decisions about the future of WordCamp to the organisers and the Core Group. I just find it irresponsible of Matt/Automattic to effectively “change the rules” late in the game – rules which they don’t have much of a right to enforce. Yes, we could do what Matt loves to say and “vote with our feet” or something to that effect, but what does that do? Even if we were to start something like OpenCamp – which attracted some criticism on the mailing list today – we would just get the Thesis treatment from Matt and inherently the WordPress community.
It’s saddening that this controversy shrouds what was a really good, well-organised event. Once again, I met a lot of new and interesting people, but it also gave me the chance to catch up again with the fantastic people I met last year and have kept in contact with since. Whatever happens between now and the next WordCamp event in the UK, I’m sure the next time will be another good show.
The latest release of data from the Government highlights the costs of Government websites from April 2009 to March 2010. It gives a somewhat-detailed breakdown of the costs of 47 websites, along with the number of visits for the same period of time.
There are some sites there which have cost the taxpayer shocking amounts of money – including Business Link, which cost over £6m just for planning, over £4m for building and £4m for testing! On top of that there was £15m content provision costs and a staggering £4m per year to host – all for just 16m visits. Compare that with the WordPress-based Number10.gov.uk website, which receives almost as many visits – just short of 12m last year – but costs only £86k a year to host. Another WordPress-based site, Bis.gov.uk, received just over 1m visits last year, yet cost a measly £5k to host. Just to put that into perspective, you could host the BIS website at those costs for 1,250 years – over a millenium – and it would not even cost as much as it did to just plan Business Link!
Compared to the large Serco-made mess of the Business Link site, WordPress is clean and efficient, and doesn’t require a large infrastructure to run well. I suspect a large part of the Business Link £4m hosting fund is down to MS server license fees. The fact that WordPress comes with a user system and content management cuts out the costs of developing these too (which aren’t usually done too well, anyway). Using WordPress across the government keeps things consistent, and would keep training costs down in the long-term, as website staff won’t necessarily have to undergo much training if they’re moving from updating a WordPress website to another WordPress website.
There are many smaller WordPress sites within the Government, however no others are big enough to have been covered by the dataset released. Hopefully in the future they will be.
In the new age of budget cuts it will soon become clear that, inside Government, sites which have a smaller footprint when it comes to infrastructure, along with smaller initial development costs will survive the axe – which is soon going to fall on sites which have ridiculously large budgets and hosting costs.
UPDATE: Turns out the BIS site is not using WordPress anymore. It was doing last year, probably was just an interim site.
Grab ‘em while you can. Early Bird ticket sales end this weekend, and if you only even have a small interest in WordPress, you need to be there. The conference last year was amazing and I met so many fantastic people who were also very interested in WordPress. So what are you waiting for? 
It’s been in beta for a while (and, yes, I admit, I’ve been using nightly builds on here for a month or so), but WordPress 3.0 is finally out. Now includes some great new support for custom post types, menu management (originally by WooThemes) and the merge between WordPress and WordPress mu.
The new custom post type support could really do well at duplicating Tumblr functionality – although it’s still a bit strange because it’s dependant on at least the theme supporting it, and I’ve not really seen anything thrown about the community yet as to which post types should be considered standard for ‘tumblelog’ themes – obviously this is something that’s pretty important, because if you decide to change your theme and it defines differently-named post types (or misses a type out completely), you’ll ‘lose’ those posts somewhere inside your post table.
I think that WordPress still needs to raise its game in regards to multi-site functionality – it should work out of the box with something akin to ExpressionEngine’s Multiple Site Manager add-on – but it’s understandable that it’s early days. All in all, those who have been using Mu no longer will have to endure the delay between an update’s release and it being available to Mu, and presumably they can now also automatically install updates.
It’s all really great stuff in the build-up to WordCamp UK 2010 – which is taking place in Manchester in the middle of July.
Well, it’s been a week or two since BuddyPress 1.2 was released, and so I decided to take another look at the platform. The last time I used BuddyPress was a pre-release version running off trunk, and it was missing quite a few core features. It also required WordPress MU, which is a hassle to upgrade without having to worry about BuddyPress too…
This time round, BuddyPress doesn’t require MU, and you can install it as simple as searching for it in the plugin browser of WordPress. This also simplifies updates as it can be upgraded automatically through the Plugin Manager. bbPress Forums come packaged out of the box within BuddyPress for groups, and the BuddyPress developers have put together a tool for easily adding compatibility for BuddyPress to your existing theme.
Talking of themes, BuddyPress’ new theme is awesome. A lot easier to customize using child themes, and the theme itself has a lot more scope for customization with a large header background image (similar to the WordPress TwentyTen theme) and a slick transparent admin bar.
There’s still a few things I’d like to see put into it – one of the big features it’s currently missing is Photo Galleries – and I’m sure that on the backend, several settings pages could be moved over to templates rather than being hard-coded 
I strongly recommend you check it out, and I’m anticipating several big-name WordPress sites possibly integrating some of BuddyPress’ community elements into their themes soon.
P.S. If any BuddyPress developers happen to drop by, please could you get this filter added into the bp-groups package?
Well I’ve just about recovered from a superb weekend down in sunny Cardiff for WordCamp UK. It was interesting, to say the least, and I met up with loads of amazing people who I have a lot of respect for in the industry!
Having booked the hotel at the last minute, I headed down early Saturday morning, made it down in about four hours. The morning started with a quick introduction session, going around the 130 people in the room, each giving quick overview of themselves and something they do with WordPress. I thought this worked really well and showed off the many interests and uses people have for WordPress. Surprisingly, it seemed that over half of the room make some living from WordPress too.
One of the notable sessions I attended was Jonny Allbut’s presentation about the WordPress site development process. It was really interesting and quite detailed, and named quite a few useful plugins. Another interesting session was Simon Dickson’s talk on WordPress being used in the government, and the controversy surrounding the launch of Number10.gov.uk on WordPress.
The evening social on the Saturday was really good. It was great to chat with people and I could put names to faces of people I’ve known for quite a while on Twitter and the like! I also had some time to chat with Matt Mullenweg, who was really interesting and called me a ‘natural’ with David Coveney’s camera
There was quite a bit of heated discussion in the wrap-up session when it was suggested that an enterprise-aimed event along the lines of WordCamp should also be run. Personally I don’t like the idea that much because I fear of it alienating the community and taking away the community spirit from WordPress.
However, on the whole, the weekend was a great success and I am looking forward to WordCamp UK 2010, which has been penned in at 17th-18th July 2010. However, I’m sure I’ll see a lot of you around before then, if not in conversation online! Thanks to everyone who organized, presented at, and attended the event!
Jordan
UPDATE: Can’t believe I forgot about the highlight of the weekend – the free bricks mints given out by the hotel. Oh we had a lot of fun with those
Thanks to Mark Steadman for setting up the WordCamp UK Blog. It has a useful feature of WordPress where any Technorati posts tagged with “wordcampuk” will show up in the ‘Buzz’ section.
So if you’re blogging about WordCamp, or if you’re putting up any type of social media in fact, stick the tag “wordcampuk” on it so we can find it and group them all together!
>Jordan
UPDATE: Thanks to Mark (again!) for pointing out my late-night typo! It’s actually “wordcampuk”. We haven’t got the Technorati feature up (yet), but trackback to a blog post and Mark will try and get you on the Buzz section.
Time is running out if you wanna go to WordCamp UK! There’s only until 12pm Friday (GMT+1) to sign up on the WordCamp Wiki if you’re interested. If all goes to plan, it should take place somewhere in Birmingham on the 19th and 20th of July 2008. And with any luck, Matt may show up (unconfirmed, just a hope).
Many thanks to the fantastic Tony Scott for proposing this idea! If you’re interested, post your name on this wiki page and I’ll see you there! For more info, see the WordCamp UK website.
You can also subscribe to the WordCamp UK Mailing List. For the many WordPress bloggers out there in the UK, it’d be a great help to WordCamp if you could trackback/blog our event soon so we can get as much publicity out there as possible!
I’ll post some more info as it’s decided!
UPDATE: Well, it appears that the attendees list has not closed (yet), so while it’s still open head over there and put your name down!
