WordPress Hater: Oh, WordPress is just a Blog engine, for Amateurs. It’s soooooo not a CMS! That’s why I “heart” Drupal.

WordPress Lover: Not really. There are so many websites that have successfully implemented WordPress as a CMS.

WordPress Hater: Really? Show me!

WordPress Lover: Ummmmm….
(goes silent).

I too have had difficulty defending that WordPress is more than just another blogging engine. That’s why I decided to go see Anca Mosoiu’s presentation of a Real Life Case Study. Anca’s company recently implemented WordPress as a CMS for a Government Organization with 300+ users.

WordPress As A CMS – Case Study At Automattic Lounge, WordPress HQ.

Anca, who presented the WordPress as a CMS case study, is the founder of Techliminal, a web development company and coworking space out in Oakland. The presentation was part of the WordPress 3.0 Installfest Organized by the nice peeps at Automattic (the WordPress Company).

Anca broke the presentation down into 4 sections as follows.

1. The Goals
2. The Implementation
3. Key Features
4. Lessons Learned

I took notes from her presentation attempting to capture the key things to keep in mind when trying to implement WordPress as a CMS. Here they are, in easy to read and understand bullet points.

Goals of the Project

• Goal 1 – Improve Information Architecture.
• Goal 2 – Allow individual contributors greater control of their content outside Twiki pages.
• Goal 3 – Provide platform for feedback, blogs, and other dynamic elements.
• Goal 4 – Improve internal search results through improved content organization.
• Goal 5 – Migrate existing internal WP blogs to new environment.

Why Choose WordPress?

• Reason 1 – Simple tool with lots of customization capability.
• Reason 2 – Existing users within the organization were familiar with it.
• Reason 3 – PHP / WordPress programming expertise was present in the organization.
• Reason 4 – WordPress is an Open Source platform!
• Reason 5 – WPMU allows for more granular permissions and organization.
• Reason 6 – WP levels of access and permissions provide a great light weight work-flow for publishing content.

Implementation Details – WordPress As A CMS

• Main page had aggregate announcements, aggregate events, feeds from other tools and areas.
• Used SubVersion (SVN) for Source (Code) Control.
• WPMU Installation of WordPress.
• WP code, plugins themes, theme customization in SVN.
• Did not keep config files and uploads directory and content in source control.
• Did not look at how to manage database model in source control
• Used Thesis 1.7 (started with 1.6) for Theming / Skinning the site.
• Used WP LDAP Plugin for integrating Access Control
• Used Sitewide Tags Plugin
• Used Breadcrumbs NavXT Plugin
• Used Alkivia SidePosts Plugin after some heavy Customization
• Used FlexiPages Plugin for Page Navigation
• Used Peter’s Collaboration Emails Plugin
• Used Subscribe2 Plugin
• Used Contact Form 7 for feedback submission
• Used lot of links and link categories.
• Customized links to have sorting feature, also gave each link it’s own class.

Development and Performance Lessons Learned

• RSS Feeds (default) were slow and problematic
• WPMU you need a whole server
• Sitewide Tags plugins saved tons of time for aggregating content.
• Setting up new sites takes time.
• Bureaucratic purchasing departments (the Project Client) have hard time purchasing project stuff through paypal, thereby delaying the Project.

Matt had mentioned this in WordCamp SF 2010. In the pre-wordpress 3.0 versions of the admin panel, the dashboard menu on the left only had Akismet spam filter stats. Useful as the WordPress developers might have thought this would be, most content creators I know never clicked that link.

So now in WordPress 3.0 (thanks to Matt & team!), you will see an Updates link that has replaced the useless Akismet Stats link in your admin panel dashboard menu bar on the left.

Whenever there is an upgrade available for either your WordPress version, or for any of your plugins, the upgrade link will show you the number of upgrade that are available in the left menu bar.

After you click the updates link, you will see a list of all available updates. This includes updates to the core wordpress software (not shown in screenshot below) that you are running as well as updates for the plugins (shown in screenshot below) that are active on your WordPress site.

All you have to do now is click the “Select All” checkbox and then click “Update Plugins“. That’s it!

So In exactly 3 easy clicks, you can now keep your WordPress blog or WordPress as CMS website updates with the latest plugin and core updates and thus make it more secure. This in turn will decrease your chances of getting hacked in cases where security holes exist / existed in the previous versions of plugins or the wordpress core.

During installation, if you have unchecked the option that allows search engines to index your site and boost your blog’s visibility online, then wordpress will display a “search engines blocked” link prominently on your wordpress dashboard.

I think this is another great feature in WordPress 3.0. The developers seem to have given a lot of thought to user behavior. Almost always, when I setting up a new WordPress site, I block the search engines. Although at first, blocking may seem counter-intuitive to any wordpress blog or website that is going live to be seen and experienced by the world, to me, doing so at the time of install serves a single main purpose

Permlinks (the permanent links / URLS to your blog, website pages) could undergo changes at the initial stage. So if search engines were indexing your site from the beginning, then you run the risk of having broken links in the search index, which in turn could cause 404 Page not found errors.

So I always disable search engines in blogs and websites using both wordpress privacy settings and robots.txt initially, and then when I am satisfied with the link structure and have tested it out, only then do I enable search engines again.

The caveat with this approach of blocking search engines at the beginning is that you may – as I have done more often that I’d like to recall – forget to re-enable the search engines again when everything is good to go.

Not any more!

By prominently displaying the search engines status and also giving you a very easy way to update it  - in just 2 clicks – the wordpress developers have made it hard for you to “forget” to turn on this critical piece in your blog’s lifecycle.

I guess that still leaves the ROBOTS.TXT…. Oh well, may be by WordPress 10.0, Matt would’ve figured out a way to automate that also

You can now pick the admin user’s password right during the installation itself. This is a significant improvement over the previous version wherein you were given an obscure system generated GUIDish looking password. You would have to copy-paste that and keep it somewhere safely, then login as admin and change it.

Not only can you set the admin password during setup, you can also pick your own admin username. For example, gagabooty in this case. Besides being fun and feeling powerful to be able to pick your own admin user name, this is also a subtle security upgrade. You can add one layer of protection from hackers who might be trying to infiltrate your blog, by having a unique username instead of the standard “admin” admin user name which everyone knows is the default admin user name for a wordpress blog / website.

Finally, in the 2nd step of the installation, the admin password is hidden and the screen simply tells you it is the password you picked. An even subtler security perk in that no one else can actually see the password in your physical vicinity.

Hope you are as excited as I am!

Tristan is the Co-Founder of Apture, a revolutionary context search plugin for bloggers and content publishers. Tristan was ranked #16 in Inc Magazine’s 30 Top 30  – America’s Coolest Young Enterpreneurs (2009). Steven Kan is the Vice President of Operations and Marketing at Apture.

Founder Tristan Harris with the Apture Context Search Plugin at WordCamp SF 2010

The Apture plugin seeks to improve your users’ experience on your site and enrich their experience by present rich media in context search results all without leaving the main page.

Tristan gave me a detailed demo of the Apture Plugin and later shared his thoughts on the value Apture is providing for bloggers, publishers and the site visitors.

Interview With Tristan Harris – Co-Founder of Apture.com

Let’s just start with your product. Tell me a little bit more Apture.

Tristan: So we started the company, Apture, to build products that allow for a frictionless experience of getting more information and sharing information.  We’ve created this way in which readers, once you install the Apture plugin on your site, like a WordPress plugin or a Blogger plugin, it’s just 1 line of code, and what it does is let readers come to the site and select anything they want to know more about on the page.  They just highlight with their mouse and then they can click ‘search’ And the search is done on the page, instantly.

So, instead of leaving the page or opening a tab and finding and opening 20 tabs on Google, the user can get all the answers they want from your site.  So, basically, it really increases the amount of time that they spend on the site and it drops the bounce rate out to Google again.  So, you can open up movie trailers, you can open up LinkedIn profiles, you can come across an actor’s name and you can get photos of the actor, you can see who they’re dating—you can keep going as deep as you want, but you never leave the page that you’re on.

Okay, and if I’m like a professional blogger, or someone who’s trying to make a living off of niche topics or a news website and I have affiliate accounts and such, how does the plugin help me?

Tristan: So, we have a configuration where you can set up your Amazon affiliate code, and so whenever users discover or navigate to Amazon content, we’ll give them the full experience of Amazon—you know, the product reviews, the summary text, they can open up the book-cover, like a wide, nice full-screen photo of the book-cover.  And the most important thing is when they click “Buy Now” it uses your Amazon affiliate code.  So, all the times in which someone comes to your site—and say you write about movies all the time and someone copies the name of an actor, they hit Control+C and they open up a tab and they go to Google, but when they do that, Google and Amazon make money, not you.  And so what this does, you can actually see, when I highlight “The Hurt Locker” and I hit Control-C it actually does the search right here. And if there’s an Amazon result and people buy, you’ll make money.  So the blogger gets to earn the revenue from all of the transactions.

Okay, Awesome! And is the search real-time?

Tristan: The search is real-time, yes.  It also searches your site, all the content from your site and from around the web.  It’s like Google plus everything else.  It’s like people can navigate Wikipedia articles, they can get Youtube videos, they can see images about movies or people or anything they want and it searches your whole site.  So whenever you have a match and you’ve written about that topic, we’ll actually recommend it to the user in real-time.

Great! How much does all this cost?

Tristan: It’s free. And you can got to Apture.com to get it for your site.

Okay, and how do I install it? Is it fairly quick and easy?

Tristan: Sure, we have one line of code that you just copy and paste into your site template. It should go in the footer HTML so that it loads after your page code loads.  And the plugin loads really fast and it just gets people access to all the information they want, so they never need to leave your site.

“As a publisher, the second you fail to provide the information to the reader once, they’re going to leave your site, because it’s so easy for them” – Tristan.

So I can use it on pretty much any blog.  Like, it’s not restricted to WordPress only.  Can I can use it on Blogger, tumblr and others?

Tristan: Yeah, any site—Blogger, MovableType.  We have some really large customers like the New York Times and Washington Post and we have a bunch of small blogs that use it as well.

This Time Magazine’s bar you are showing here for the demo,is it customizable?

Tristan: Yes, you can customize the apture plugin. So part of the new product is this bar that you can put on the top of your website, and it’s branded.  You can set up the color and the design so you can go to Apture.com, there’s a button that says “Design A Bar Now“. And you can upload a logo so you can have a site logo—you can do that.  You can set the color and the style of the bar to match your template.  And it only comes in when people want to search for more information or when they scroll down the page.

Can you tell me a little bit more about your company, too?  Like, when did you guys come together and how long you’ve been doing this?

Tristan: Yeah, we started the company about two and half years ago, and we were originally Stanford graduate computer science students who stopped out of school to start the company.  And we were working with this group of journalists called the Knight Fellows of Stanford, and these are like kind of distinguished journalists from around the world, and we wanted to come up with a better way of doing online story-telling—just being able to present media and create a more interactive way of doing story-telling and communicating information on the web.

And we came up with all these sort of integrations with these different APIs—these different media services.  So when people want photos and videos and Wikipedia, today they always leave the site to go get that information.  And, as a publisher, the second you fail to provide the information to the reader once, they’re going to leave your site, because it’s so easy for them, it’s just so easy for them to open a tab.

And so what we’re trying to do is say, let’s make it so that whenever readers want more information, you get to provide it for readers.  And so we started off working primarily with news organizations and then we’ve kind of expanded to blogs and product sites and just letting people get information—anything that they want.

And where are you guys based?

Tristan: San Francisco—downtown San Francisco near the BallPark.

How long did you say you’ve been doing this?

Tristan: Two and a half years.

Great! Good Luck and thanks for the interview. It was nice meeting you and Steve.

Tristan: Nice to meet you! Thank you very much!

What Are Custom Post Types?

If you have used Tumblr, you would be able to relate to this more easily. In tumblr, there are different post types by default in the dashboard.

Tumblr Dashboard with Custom Post Types.

So when you click the Text icon in tumblr, your post menu will show boxes and menu options specific to a text post, whereas if you click the Photo icon, the post menu will change, and show you menu options specific to a photo post, like a browse button to upload the photo, a click-through URL box for the photo and a caption for the photo.

Now, in WordPress 3.0, you will have the ability to create such Custom Post Types similar to Tumblr. Of course it will require some (not too much) PHP coding, so if you are a site owner or designer who needs this feature, but do not want to write code, ask your theme developer about this feature!

Here is Konstantin’s details blog post discussing the new custom post type features, practical applications, and how to code it into your theme.

According to Lloyd Budd, the WordCamp Genius Bar came about when he and other WordPress participants felt regret for not being able to answer all of the questions that people were stopping him and others in the hall for, at the first WordCamp in 2006.

The Genius Bar at WordCamp SF 2010

This is how the Genius Bar works. A group of subject matter experts – WordPress in our case – are stationed at a Kiosk / long desk with their laptop and gadgets, ready to help anyone who had questions about or problems with their wordpress installs. Along with troubleshooting wordpress, the Genius Bar team is also highly experienced and equipped to give you suggestions and recommendations for your various needs and big ideas.

Say, for example, you were looking to sell T-Shirts or mugs on your wordpress site, then they could give you recommendations on the best wordpress plugin to use for e-commerce, what the pros and cons are, how to setup and configure it, what payment gateways you should activate and so on.

WordCamp Genius Bar SF 2010

The Genius Bar this year featured over 35 wordpress experts.

Judging by the number of people getting advice at the Genius Bar, as well as the long line of people waiting in line at the Genius Bar, I think this years Genius Bar was a BIG HIT!

So  please don’t kill this great service at WordCamps and do keep up the good work peeps!!

Matt looked like he could go through his material blind-folded. Not only that, Matt also had very interesting slides and photos to go with his presentation and really engaged the audience by asking questions, taking instant polls.

I have already learned a lot just by watching Matt speak. Still, I came across this video that Matt put together on his blog, where he gives some tips for public speaking.

What is not mentioned in the video, but which resonated with me completely was what he said in his blog post that was a preface to this video. And that is…

Know your material down COLD!

4 Public Speaking Tips from Matt (from the blog post and video)

1. Take a few deep breaths before going on stage.
2. Learn to relax a little bit before you speak, so that you can speak slower and people can understand what you are saying.
3. Remeber that the people are there to see you do well! They are rooting for you. If you mess up, they will laugh with you, not at you.
4. Know your material down cold!

Developers familiar with object oriented programming will remember that abstraction is one of the strong pillars of OOPS.

Mitchio created YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) and HookPress, which opens up your wordpress blog hook system to remote scripts.

Why should you abstract your code?

1. You can move servers and not end up breaking code.
2. You can reuse your code in other code.
3. If your client/customer hires a new coder, you don’t want him to unable to understand your code.

What does abstraction mean?

• Thinking about the more general problem (what is the eventual intent for the code?)
• What will result from this code that you and others can reuse?

What are some Tips to abstract your code?

1. Think abstractly. Produce “functionalities” not a monolithic projects.
2. Write each functionality as it’s own plugin.
3. Name functions and variables by functionality, not by the project.
4. Even interrelated code can be modularized.
5. Introduce new hooks and filters with do_action() and  filters.
6. WordPress gives abstrations. Use them.
7. Never talk to MySQL database directly. Use the set_options() not the database.
8. Use get_posts() not direct SQL Statements.
9. Use wp_read_post() not curl.
10. Be mobile – make sure you code runs on different servers etc.
11. Be classy- Use Object Oriented Programming, the perfect choice for abstracting functionality.
12. Write your functions as a class with some deaults. easy to extend.
13. Make for clean legible code.
14. Always prefix CRUD, great example of this is PushPress.
15. don’t hard-code project names, copyright string, email bodies, etc.
16. Keep things to the bare minimum; declare constants in  a separate config file.
17. Ideally create an options screen for your themes and plugins. This is not as hard as you think.
18. Read other people’s code.

What are the Benefits?

You code is less likely to break, when you move machines or upgrade

1. your code is easier to maintain
2. your code is easier to build.
3. your code is easier to (re)use elsewhere.

What is the Bottomline?

1. Abstract your code
2. Client gets modular future proof software
3. There is Less headaches for your and your team
4. Open source your customizations
5. Clients can contribute
6. You become famous!

The Do’s of “Playing Nice”

1. Do use core WP functions when ever possible
2. Do use nonces in authenticated forms
3. Do add caching for expensive processes
4. Do make use of actions/filters
5. Do send in patches to core if you find something lacking.
6. Do add your own actions/filters
7. Do minimize DB row for options, use unique names for options to avoid name collision
8. Do use the WP Ajax hooks.

The Dont’s of “Playing Nice”

1. Don’t re-include the already existing wp-config.php / wp-load.php / wp-blog-header.php files.
   
2. Don’t create new tables. Most (if not all) functionality can be achieved without custom tables.
3. Don’t re-create existing core WP features (especially caching).
4. Don’t ignore the core WP options and always look in the core first.