Web Redesign

Association of Collegiate Computing Services of Virginia 2012 Conference
March 14-16, 2012

Web redesign is a term commonly heard in recent years. Many universities have recently redesigned their sites, are in the midst of doing so, or are thinking about it. Since the web is constantly changing anyway, what do we really mean by “redesign” – a new template, a different information architecture? Given the possibilities of current content management systems, how deeply into your organization should a redesign reach? Can you handle content-heavy, internally-focused vs. branding-heavy, externally-focused sites within the same system? How does your organization’s website help to shape how your university community does its day-to-day work?

WordPress Coding Standards

Web 2012 – Penn State University
June 11-12, 2012

In order to help avoid common coding errors, and improve the readability of code, the WordPress community has developed a set of standards to use when formatting the code you use when writing themes, plugins and even core code. Throughout this workshop, we’ll review the various standards that have been developed by the community. We’ll discuss why they are the way they are; and we’ll run through each one in detail.

Experience Level: Advanced – Assumes a solid grasp of topic and extensive experience.

Prerequisite Knowledge: At least an intermediate understanding of PHP coding is necessary to move through this workshop. A basic understanding of WordPress coding is also good to have, but not necessary.

Skills/Knowledge Gained: Writing clean, well-formatted PHP code that fits with the WordPress community coding standards.

Writing a WordPress Plugin

Web 2012 – Penn State University
June 11-12, 2012

During this workshop, we will begin writing a very simple WordPress plugin. I will take you through the basic steps of creating the plugin file, including the proper header, and using some basic API functions available in WordPress.

Experience Level: Intermediate – Assumes basic knowledge of topic and some experience.

Prerequisite Knowledge: A basic grasp of PHP concepts will be helpful in this session. A basic working knowledge of using WordPress is also a plus.

Skills/Knowledge Gained: Attendees will be able to utilize the WordPress documentation to begin building their own plugins to add new features to WordPress.

WordPress Multi-Network

Web 2012 – Penn State University
June 11-12, 2012

WordPress is an amazing and flexible tool, and becomes even more incredible when set up in a multisite environment. For many higher education institutions, though, even multisite is not broad enough to fit the information architecture of our websites. That’s where Multi-Network comes into play. At UMW, the university website is built on a WordPress Multi-Network environment, with nearly 30 multisite setups running inside of a single WordPress installation. This session will touch on the basics of setting up WordPress to work as a Multi-Network tool, and some tips to get plugins and themes working more efficiently in this unique environment.

Experience Level: Intermediate – Assumes basic knowledge of topic and some experience.

Prerequisite Knowledge: A basic knowledge of WordPress and the WordPress setup process will be necessary.

Skills/Knowledge Gained: Attendees will gain knowledge of the way multisite and multi-network installations work, the way the databases are structured for each, and how to optimize various items within WordPress to work efficiently in these types of setups.

The 10 Minute WordPress Shortcode

.eduGuruSummit 2012
April 10-11, 2012

In this session, you’ll learn how simple it is to create a new shortcode that can be used in WordPress. As a bonus, you’ll also learn just how easily that shortcode can be turned into a widget.

Plug It In: Writing Better WordPress Plugins

Writing a WordPress plugin can be extremely simple, but in order to write a good WordPress plugin, it takes a little more work. I will walk you through five simple tips to make sure your WordPress plugin is more easily extendable, works on more WordPress installations and has a better chance of being future-proof.

Some of the topics covered in this presentation are:

• Making your plugin extendable – allowing other developers to add functionality to your plugin without having to modify the plugin itself
• Avoiding conflicts with other plugins
• Making your plugin multisite (and even multi-network) compatible
• Helping to future-proof your plugin
• Spiffying up your readme file

Form Vs. Function: Should That Be a WordPress Theme Function or a WordPress Plugin?

Because WordPress is such a flexible platform, it’s extremely easy to add features through many different avenues. Just because you can, though, doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

I will briefly explain the difference between the functions.php file in a WordPress theme; a regular WordPress plugin; and a WordPress “Must-Use” plugin. I will then lay out some guidelines to help you determine which avenue you should take when adding a new feature to your WordPress installation.

Duct Tape & WD-40: A Manager’s Toolbelt

As higher ed professionals, we’re all in the business of project and personnel management; whether we want to be or not. I will share two tools to use when dealing with people and projects.

• If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
• Project Management – In our professional lives, we have a tendency to get bored with things the way they are. However, we need to make sure that the things we’re changing really need to be changed; and to ensure that we’re actually fixing a problem rather than just changing for change sake.
• Personnel Management – As perfectionists, we have a tendency to want to go back and change things that aren’t done the way we’d do it. As a result, we end up taking on projects that other people are fully capable of handling. As a manager, you need to be able to recognize when to let other people do the jobs they can do, and step back to get your own work done.
• You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken
• Project Management – We need to be sure that we’re fixing the things that need to be fixed. You need to set up some solid metrics and measurements to track the things that are and are not working well on your website. Use A/B or multivariate testing, user testing, analytics data and more to figure out what isn’t working the way it should. Then, concentrate your efforts on those items rather than spinning your wheels on something that is working well.
• Personnel Management – We often encounter the same issues when managing personnel; and they can, in many circumstances, be exponentially more frustrating. Our personality types tend to direct us to ignore things that frustrate  us, and to just keep plugging along in our own little world. This is a dangerous mindset, though. If someone is doing unsatisfactory work, or is doing something that is negatively effecting your productivity, you need to make that person aware of it. As the topic implies, you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. If the person with whom you’re working isn’t aware of the fact that s/he is impacting your work, s/he can’t do anything to make it better.
  This is especially important when you are responsible for managing employees. Most institutions will perform annual performance reviews. However, if you are doing your job as a supervisor effectively, nothing on those performance reviews should ever be a surprise to your employees. Any positive or negative things that need to be discussed should be discussed when they happen, not written down and filed away until the review.

Don’t Settle: A Guide To Choosing the Right CMS

When I was at Lord Fairfax Community College (LFCC), we issued four unsuccessful RFPs for a new Web Content Management System (CMS). After we realized the RFP process wasn’t going to work for us, we reviewed our desired features and began building our own. Now, almost three years later, even after leaving LFCC, I’m confident that we made the right decision for that institution.

This session will explore the process of building a good list of wants and needs for a CMS and successfully evaluating whether you want to buy an enterprise system, modify an existing open-source solution or build your own. I will briefly review some of the pros and cons of building a custom solution. During this session, I will use examples of the process we used when I was at LFCC and the lessons we learned throughout.

The bottom line is that you have to choose what’s right for your institution.

The intended audience for this session would be both Web developers and the decision makers of the institution. Although I will discuss some technical aspects of the process, I will not be presenting or discussing any in-depth code, just general concepts.

Much of the time, if a new feature seems to fill a considerable need for the community or if we find that we are implementing the same features over and over again, we will release the new code to the community through the WordPress plugin repository.

You can view information about our plugins and keep up to date with new developments on the Ten-321 WordPress plugins website.

We are also currently in the process of developing a barebones parent theme for WordPress. At this point, the Ten-321 Framework has been used as the backbone of two public projects (Tooth Town Pediatric Dentistry and M-SPAN), and will most likely be continuously developed and used in many future projects.

You can keep an eye on the development of the Ten-321 Framework, too. If you want to experiment with the framework, or are interested in contributing to it, you can download the latest development version from our code repository.

However, I feel like I should qualify that affirmative answer a little bit. While WordPress is almost completely capable of being an enterprise WCMS, there are a few caveats that go with that.

First of all, WordPress will not be an enterprise-level system out-of-the-box. You’re not going to be able to use the famous 5-minute installation and leave it at that if you want it to do everything you need it to do. You are going to need to be intimately familiar with the WordPress APIs, and you are going to have to get your hands dirty with some custom code. There are definitely a lot of plugins that can help you along the way, but there are still going to be holes that you’ll need to patch yourself.

Secondly, you will need to establish a clear list of features that you need in your CMS. Probably about 80-90% of the time, you’ll be able to get WordPress to match that list of features, but there will be occasions when it simply won’t cut it.

What It Doesn’t Do

For instance, if you need deep, integral asset (images, documents, etc.) management, that’s not going to be easy to achieve with WordPress. Images, documents, etc. are handled on a post-by-post or page-by-page basis in WordPress right now, and there is no concept of revision management with attachments, either. For documents, you can certainly test Ron Rennick’s Document Repository plugin (which was developed initially for us at UMW), but that might not do everything you need in the way of asset management.

Likewise, if you require a standardized workflow setup, that’s going to be a little complicated with WordPress. There are a few plugins that can help along the way, but they might not do it all.

What It Does Do

The good news is, though, that WordPress can be integrated with LDAP or Active Directory pretty easily. There are a couple of plugins that will let you integrate your login/registration procedures (of course, if you’re using Active Directory, I’d recommend Active Directory Authentication Integration). You can even pull lists of Active Directory users and display them on your website with a plugin like Active Directory Employee List.

Apart from the plugins that can help you get WordPress where it needs to be; the WordPress core, itself, does a great deal of what needs to be done in content management. The system has made giant leaps in the field of content management over the last year or two. Pages are fleshed out better than they’ve ever been; custom fields are simpler to use; custom post types, custom navigation menus and post formats are major innovations; and much more.

Are you using WordPress as an enterprise-level content management system? What plugins are you using to make WordPress work better for you? Are you running a single-site WordPress, multisite or a multi-network setup?

In the past, Grymala developed three custom Web content management systems (WCMS), including the full-featured, enterprise-level WCMS used to manage the Lord Fairfax Community College websites. He also developed multiple plugins for previous versions of YaBB forum software and was briefly involved in the official support and development team for the project.

Grymala now devotes much of his time to developing new themes and plugins for WordPress, both through his position at the University of Mary Washington and as the main developer for Ten-321 Enterprises.

In addition to publishing articles occasionally on the Ten-321 Enterprises blog, Grymala writes articles regularly for HTMLCenter, and has occasional features on CenterNetworks and Entertainment Connected (formerly ZuneSpring).

You can find more information about Grymala’s professional experience, specialties and associations on LinkedIn. You can also follow him on Twitter @cgrymala.

The process we follow is:

1. Perform a complete backup of the site (this includes the whole database and all files on the site/server – even tables and files not directly related to WordPress). Under most circumstances, we will use the WordPress EZ Backup plugin to perform the backups. However, some servers do not support the tools necessary to use WP EZ Backup, so we have to run a manual backup.
2. Update all plugins with available updates, checking to make sure nothing on the site broke after each plugin is updated.
3. Perform another complete backup (so that we can revert to the version with updated plugins if the core update fails for some reason).
4. Deactivate any plugins that are known to cause conflicts or errors when updating the core.
5. Perform the core update.
6. Ensure that any cached pages (we use WP Super Cache on quite a few sites) are cleared out.
7. Reactivate any plugins we deactivated prior to performing the update.
8. Review the entire site to ensure no errors or issues popped up after the update.

So far (knock on wood), we have not encountered any issues updating to WordPress 3.1. We have updated single-site installations, multi-site installations and even multi-network installations with no issues.

Many of the sites we maintain utilize the Multiple Post Thumbnails plugin, which is listed among the plugins that cause compatibility errors with WordPress 3.1. However, in each instance, we have deactivated the plugin prior to the update and then reactivated it after the update is completed. In all instances, WordPress and the Multiple Post Thumbnail plugin seem to work just fine.

Have you upgraded to WordPress 3.1 yet? If so, did you encounter any issues? Were you able to correct any issues you encountered?

We have seen quite a few people seeking assistance in fixing errors that occurred after the update, but have not experienced any of those issues ourselves.

We updated the Ten-321 Enterprises network of sites and blogs this evening. As expected, the update was extremely simple and painless. Most of this is due to the great work the WordPress team is doing, but some credit also goes to Site5 for doing such a great job configuring their hosting accounts to work so well with WordPress. We have dealt with quite a few other hosts and found that some of them make it nearly impossible to keep WordPress up-to-date, and even harder to keep it secured properly.

With that said, we’d like to thank the WordPress team for their unwavering commitment to security and their consistent work to improve and harden the system.

Are we implying that our services cost less than those of our competitors? Yes and no. A lot of that depends on who you qualify as our competitors. Ten-321 Enterprises is not the least expensive (financially) company you’ll find on the Web; but we do offer the best value for your money.

When you choose to work with Ten-321 Enterprises, you can feel confident that you will receive service above and beyond what you would expect for the price. We are not a fly-by-night organization, nor are we taking on projects simply as an attempt to gain experience or notoriety. We are an established, experienced organization that provides top-notch work to our clients.

Therefore, although you may find that the cost of our services is generally higher than some other firms in the short-term, you will undoubtedly realize over time that the long-term costs are considerably lower. When you work with Ten-321 Enterprises, you’ll get a professional website that’s easy to maintain, allowing it to remain relevant and effective for much longer than many other firms.

We are firm believers in the idea that “you get what you pay for,” but we also believe in providing great value. We hope you’ll agree.

The portfolio itself is comprised of individual posts created in WordPress. The posts are part of a custom post type created specifically for the portfolio. Each of these posts include a WordPress featured post thumbnail. A little bit of CSS3 is used (in standards-compliant browsers) to add rounded corners to the screen shots, and to create a smooth transition when hovering over each image.

There are a few, though, and they seem to work rather well.

Twitter

My favorite plug-in for sending blog posts to Twitter is, as I’ve mentioned in the past, the Twitoaster plug-in. It’s a simple, no-nonsense plug-in that’s easy to configure and does exactly what I want. You sign into Twitter, authorize the Twitoaster plug-in, then let it do its thing. As long as you have it set to automatically tweet your posts (which is the default), you don’t really have to do anything else. Every time you publish a new blog post, the title of the post and a link to the post are sent to Twitter automatically.

Facebook

As far as I can tell, there are only two or three plug-ins that claim to allow you to publish your blog posts to Facebook automatically. I investigated a few of them and decided that FT FacePress II is the best one for my purposes. This plug-in utilizes the mail2fb (publishing wall posts on Facebook via e-mail) feature to automatically publish the title, a link and optionally the excerpt of your post to Facebook.

To set up FT FacePress II, simply install and activate the plug-in. Then, go to Facebook and make sure you’re logged in.

Publishing to a Personal Profile

If you want to publish WordPress posts to your personal Facebook wall, start by going to the “Account” menu (as of this writing, that’s in the upper right corner of the page) and choose “Account Settings”. Then, click the “Mobile” tab at the top of the page and click the “Go to Facebook Mobile” link.

There, you will see a series of boxes. One of them will say “Upload via Email”. Inside of that box, you will see an e-mail address that ends in “m.facebook.com”. Most likely, that is the correct address to use for mail2fb function, but in my case, that same e-mail address was showing up for my personal profile and two of my fan pages; so that obviously wasn’t completely accurate. Therefore, I would recommend having Facebook send the correct e-mail address to you.

To do that, near the bottom of that box, you’ll see a link that says “Send my upload email to me now”. Click that link and choose the e-mail address to which you want your unique mail2fb address sent. Then, click the “Send email” button. In a moment, you should receive an e-mail message from Facebook with a unique e-mail address included in the body of the message.

Copy that e-mail address and go to the “FacePress II Admin” page in your WordPress administration area (found under the “Settings” menu). Paste that e-mail address (which should be a unique username “@m.facebook.com”) into the first text box on the settings screen, which should have a label of “Facebook PROFILE personalized upload email address:”.

Publishing to a Fan Page

If you want to publish your WordPress posts to a fan page instead of a personal profile, you’ll need to take a few slightly different steps to find your mail2fb e-mail address. Start by going to the page management area of Facebook.

Then, click the “Edit Page” link for the page to which you want to publish your updates. On the left sidebar, you will see a link that says “Mobile”; click it. Then, you will see a page displaying a mail2fb e-mail address. As mentioned above, in my case, that e-mail address was exactly the same as my personal mail2fb e-mail address, so I knew it wasn’t right. Therefore, I would recommend clicking the “Learn More” button and then clicking the “Send the upload email for my page to me now” link. Then, choose the e-mail address to which you want your mail2fb address sent.

Once you’ve clicked that link, check your e-mail messages; you should have a new e-mail from Facebook with your fan page’s unique mail2fb address in the body of the message. Copy that address and paste it into the second text box on the FacePress II Admin Options page in WordPress (the label for that box should be “Facebook PAGE personalized upload email address:”).

The Rest of the Settings

First of all, if you want your blog posts published to your personal profile and to your fan page, you should have the first and second boxes completed. If you only want your blog posts sent to one or the other, make sure the other box is empty.

Once you’ve entered (and optionally tested) the appropriate mail2fb e-mail address(es), scroll down the page a bit and make sure the post format is set up the way you want it. If you just want to send the title and a link, use “%TITLE% %URL%” in the box. If you want to send the excerpt, too, then you will need to put “%EXCERPT%” in the box, too. In my case, I chose to send the title, then the excerpt, followed finally by the link to the post, so I used “%TITLE% %EXCERPT% %URL%” as my post format.

If there are specific WordPress categories you do not want published automatically to Facebook, make sure to enter the numerical IDs (separated by commas) in the next text box.

Note: I do not recommend checking the “Use Shortened URLs” checkbox; as there seem to be some bugs associated with it (at least with version 2.1.0 of the plug-in). First, once you check the box, the only way to uncheck the box seems to be to manually modify your database. No matter how many times I unchecked the box and saved my settings, each time I went back to the settings page, the box was checked again. Secondly, when I tried to use the shortened URLs (with the Twitter-Friendly Links plug-in installed and configured), the domain name was not sent as part of the URL, so it did not link back to the website.

Once you’re done configuring the options, click the “Update Settings” button to save your FacePress II options.

FacePress also allows each WordPress author to optionally publish their own blog posts to Facebook. To set that up, they will need to follow instructions similar to those I described above, except they will click the “FacePress II User Options” link under the “Users” menu in WordPress instead of the “FacePress II Admin Options” link.

LinkedIn

Getting your blog posts published automatically to LinkedIn is extremely simple; but it’s not something you configure within WordPress. Instead, you have to set it up within your LinkedIn profile.

To start, go to LinkedIn and make sure you are signed into your account. In the menu bar at the top of the page, hover over the “More” option. Then, click the “Get More Applications” link in the menu. When the page loads, you will see a “WordPress” application (shown in the screen shot below). Click on that and enter the URL (Web address) for your WordPress blog.

Once you’re done, click the “Save” button, and your recent blog posts will automatically appear in your profile.

Conclusion

Once you’ve installed and/or configured these three plug-ins and/or applications, you will be well on your way to sharing your blog posts across your social networks.

As always, if you’d like to connect with Ten-321 Enterprises through the various major social networks, please feel free to do so. You can check out the official Ten-321 Enterprises Facebook page, follow Curtiss on Twitter or view Curtiss’ profile on LinkedIn. You can also use the Wibiya toolbar at the bottom of every page on the Ten-321 Enterprises website to see what we’re saying and what’s being said about us on Facebook and Twitter, to share our various blog posts and website content on any of your favorite social networks, subscribe to our RSS feed and even search our website.