Philip John

New WordPress plugin: Restore Admin Header

Philip John — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:39:18 +0000

WordPress v3.3 removed the header from the admin interface, merging it with the admin bar.

This meant that the link to your site’s front page was taken away and you now have to go through drop down menus to get to the link.

Instead, this plugin puts that link back onto your admin interface.

Download now!

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Hiding bbPress topics from logged out users

Philip John — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:49:23 +0000

I just spent hours figuring this out so I thought I’d try and save others the bother by sharing it here.

The basic aim was to hide the contents of topics in a bbPress 2.0 forum from any users not logged in. This makes for a nice private forum.

I found suggestions about making forums hidden, private and so on but none of them really worked as they hid them for logged in users too.

My final solution was to make bbPress ‘dumb’ when it comes to logged out users. I.e., it could either be clever and say “there are topics, but you’re not allowed to see them until you login” or it could just say “there are no topics”.

The following code does the latter, dumb version by hooking into the forums, topics and replies loops.

function pj_hla_logged_in_topics($have_posts){
    if (!is_user_logged_in()){
        $have_posts = null;
    }
    return $have_posts;
}
add_filter('bbp_has_topics', 'pj_hla_logged_in_topics');
add_filter('bbp_has_forums', 'pj_hla_logged_in_topics');
add_filter('bbp_has_replies', 'pj_hla_logged_in_topics');

I simply placed this within my theme’s functions.php but you could just as easily wrap this in a plugin.

The Walled Garden

Philip John — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 09:30:32 +0000

Thanks to my involvement in Lichfield Live I discovered earlier this year a project based out of Woodhouse Community Farm in Fisherwick, near Whittington.

The Walled Garden is a community-supported agriculture project set mostly within the listed walls that once stood part of the Fisherwick Hall Estate. Jess and I joined in July and for our £38.80 per month we get a box full of vegetables every week which I collect on my bike.

It’s a great project where we chip in as well and there are some exciting developments ahead. I also wanted to help by offering my skills as a WordPress developer and so I built a web site for new and existing members.

The aim was to create a site which informed potential new members about the project, allowed them to sign up online whilst also distributing updates to current members which would be available online for anyone interested to see.

Here’s how I did it;

Starting with a simple WordPress site I modified a newsletter to create the welcome page which outlined what The Walled Garden is all about and why it’s such a great idea!
I’d already created a video tour of the place for Lichfield Live, which I embedded on another page for all to see.
Then, using the most excellent Gravity Forms plugin (a must have plugin) I built a sign up form. Using pricing fields it automatically calculates the price to pay based on the size of box you want and the membership fee.
When submitted the form does a number of things. It;

sends Annamarie at Woodhouse an e-mail with the details of the new member
creates a new WordPress user account for the member for future use

Adding a user account was also crucial for the next step; sending out updates by e-mail. This is my favourite bit! Instead of sending out e-mails to all the members each week, Annamarie now creates a new post in WordPress and once published, the post is automatically e-mailed out to all the members, using the Subscribe by Email plugin. Now anyone visiting the site can even see what they’ll be getting each week!
Lastly, I wanted to make sure that the whole system wasn’t overcomplicated for Annamarie. WordPress can be quite daunting, especially if all you need to do is add a new post. So I’ve used the excellent Easy Blogging plugin to present a really simple, streamlined interface.

I’ve taken screenshots of the site, including that simple dashboard, which you can check out below.

Think open data is just the realm of geeks? Not in Lichfield…

Philip John — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 08:30:36 +0000

This is partly the reason why I love Lichfield so much. Our council CEO recently joined Twitter and was last night tweeting (much revered) webmaster, Stuart Harrion;

@pezholio #MonmouthshireCC #Welovelocalgov #opengovlicence http://t.co/9Mfjk7cx. Want to know of other councils who use it for www too.

November 6, 2011 8:51 pm via Twitter for iPhone ReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ninadawesldc

Nina Dawes OBE

Where else do you get a council chief exec tweeting her webby on a Sunday evening about the Open Government License?!

Fantastic!

Northcliffe’s Local People: It’s not working, let’s shift the risk

Philip John — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 08:30:29 +0000

Good news! Northcliffe has realised that it’s Local People network model is flawed and has decided to try and shift the risk onto naive entrepreneurs instead.

Maybe I’m just being optimistic given my well-known loathing of Local People but it’s as if Northcliffe have decided that receiving £7k for each new Local People site is much better than forking out £6k for a ‘community publisher’.

In launching a franchise “opportunity” the Local People network is now much more like the About My Area and The Best Of networks. Does this then mean that the network is not so much competing with existing grass-roots hyperlocal sites anymore?

Either way, if this represents a slowing down of the roll-out of Local People sites that is a good thing for communities everywhere as far as I’m concerned. The less glorified discussion forums we have threatening the existence of Northcliffe’s own papers the better.

One concern is that pricing a hyperlocal site at £7k has the effect of bringing the hyperlocal bubble that I fear we’re seeing in the US over to the UK. While there is still no clear business model for successful hyperlocal, pumping £7k into such a site with no clear route to a return is surely suicidal.

Of course, this franchise model could see Local People go the way of About My Area and The Best Of and become much more business-oriented and far less about the news. Not that they carry much quality news at the moment anyway….

WordPress Author Bio Shortcode v1.2 plugin released

Philip John — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 15:21:04 +0000

I finally got round to updating this quick-release Author Bio Shortcode plugin. The main changes are background stuff and making sure it’s compatible with the latest version of WordPress (v3.2.1 as I type).

One important feature is that I’ve locked in compatibility only to v3.2.1 and older. If you’re using a version of WordPress prior to 3.2.1 you won’t be able to activate. Upgrade!

Secondly, while the original version only allowed you to place the bio of the current post’s author (i.e. it would print my bio here because I’m the author of this post), you can now specify an author using one of three methods.

Here’s some examples…

Show the current post author’s bio:

[author_bio]

Display the author bio of the author with user ID #4:

[author_bio id="4"]

Display the author bio of the author whose username is ‘bobby’:

[author_bio username="bobby"]

Display the bio of the author whose e-mail address is me@example.com:

[author_bio email="me@example.com"]

This is really useful for creating a “team” page on your site.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback, leave them here or on the WordPress.org forums.

If you use it and it works, please leave a rating and mark it as working on it’s WordPress.org plugin page!

WordPress Plugin: Author Bio Shortcode

Philip John — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:37:59 +0000

I’ve just written a quick and simple plugin. It provides a shortcode which, when inserted into a post or page, will print out the bio of the author as provided in their profile.

You can download from WordPress.org now.

Any issues/requests, use the comments below.

A quick rant about Local People

Philip John — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:21:48 +0000

Yes I’m biased because I run Lichfield Live which is obviously a competing service but I’m still gonna whinge about Local People.

This week Lichfield Live launched a business directory, in part because the alternative is so out of date!

Today I’m annoyed because they’ve decided to be all community-hugging and have the residents of Lichfield vote for their favourite pubs.

Number 9 has been shut for years (see screenshot below)!

Not only that but this is supposed to be a local media web site. In that case, what are “Best UK Pubs Ltd”, “Crown at Lichfield Ltd” and “Lloyds No One”?

I’ll tell you – they’re the legal names of the place known locally as Samuel’s (or Sammy’s), The Crown and Gatehouse.

Great work, “Local” People network.

WordPress – can it cope to power a whole council’s main website? | The Albert Memorial is still there

Philip John — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:38:05 +0000

Thanks for writing this up, Simon!

Seeing as I work with the folks at WPMU DEV (who make the Network Theme) I can answer the licensing question… It’s GPL licensed so once you’ve downloaded it you can do as you please within the confines of the GPL, just as you can with WordPress itself.

For me the big takeaway from that session is that there is a desire to use WordPress, given the complexity current systems represent and the amount of time soaked up by even the seemingly simplest of tasks. What’s stopping mass adoption is security and scalability.

You made a valid point about the WordPress.com setup. I can tell you that Edublogs (also owned by Incsub, who I work for) – the biggest Multisite after WP.com – runs off three servers and hundreds of databases.

In the session I mentioned a few plugins they’ve released which have a lot of the functionality so others can do the same. Multi-DB allows you to use up to 4096 databases. Something else that was mentioned was combining sites across a network so I talked briefly about post indexer and global site search which helps to unify all sites under a network – useful for content strategy.

There was also a conversation about branding in the session. Each sub-site in a network can, as you will know, have it’s own theme but it’s possible to use different domains too with multi-domains and domain mapping. I already know of one council using domain mapping.

Hope that doesn’t sound like an advert! As I said in the session, I don’t think many people realise just how powerful WordPress *can* be and those plugins do help to show what’s possible.

Of course if anyone has questions about using WordPress I’d happily answer them.

via star-one.org.uk

Filming Council Meetings: For and Against

Philip John — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 11:40:06 +0000

At yesterday’s LocalGovCamp I led a session which attempted to come up with a good round-up of the arguments for and against filming of council meetings.

We did a good job and there’s still room for more additions. I’ve used the excellent wrangl.com to show what we came up with and allow the debate to continue.

Big thanks to John Popham who video the session:

John rather nicely interviewed me about the session as well!

Philip John

New WordPress plugin: Restore Admin Header

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Hiding bbPress topics from logged out users

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The Walled Garden

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Think open data is just the realm of geeks? Not in Lichfield…

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Northcliffe’s Local People: It’s not working, let’s shift the risk

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WordPress Author Bio Shortcode v1.2 plugin released

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