WordPress encourages you to assign categories and tags when writing a post. If you’re just getting started with WordPress, it can be difficult to understand the difference between the two and their intended usage.
November 28, 2014 — 0
Optimise your website for better search placement with WordPress SEO by Yoast
The aim of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is to boost your websites position in search engine result pages. Coming up before the competition increases the chance of a visitor choosing you over a competitor. Directly effecting how many people get the opportunity to complete your sites chosen conversion goal, such as making a sale.
Optimise your website for better search placement with WordPress SEO by Yoast
March 20, 2014 — 0
The amount of code is far far less, hence its name!
This is a post written for the iWeb blog battling the misconception that Less is “just another thing invented to make something that was once simple more complex… technical developers like to attempt to solve problems that don’t really exist”. The post looks at why CSS preprocessors are useful and includes a quick write-up of an interesting project John Cotton presented at WordCamp Lancaster UK 2013.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the language used to define the layout of web pages. The language is fairly simple, you target an element using a selector and then define how it should look with the available properties. It’s an approachable language which has it’s advantages in terms of opening up the web to those without a background in computer science…
March 3, 2014 — 3
WP Contributor Day, Manchester
I spent my Saturday at the first WP Contributor Day. Sold as “An one day event where anyone & everyone contributes to WordPress”. The event, held at TechHub, Manchester was setup and organised by Jenny Wong following a discussion at WordCamp London 2013.
Often, knowing where to start is a challenge. And WordPress is no different. It’s a giant project and for me, I saw this day as an opportunity to push me to finally get involved. It was kicked off by an introduction from Jenny, followed by talks from WordPress co-founder Mike Little and web accessibility expert Graham Armfield.
Following the talks, we split into groups. Mike Little introduced Vagrant, and in particular the Varying Vagrant Vagrants (VVV) project. The setup gives developers a kickstart in getting WordPress running locally (without the need to upload files to a hosting account).
Feeling pumped and definitely over-confident, already having used a VVV setup for a while, I sat with a group of developers and looked through Trac for a suitable challenge to tackle. I felt a bit lost to be honest. There were four unclaimed “Good First Bugs” (which taking a look after the event, I see that they all remain unclaimed). I had the same issue Mike experienced earlier during his introductory talk. Reading the history of each ticket lead to a dead end, either the ticket had been actioned or it was questioned whether a fix was even required.
I felt like I was missing a step in between and quickly jumped ship, joining up with a group lead by Graham Armfield looking at accessibility in WordPress. This proved immensely useful. Graham guided us through Trac, looking at a number of issues he’d raised. He shared and demonstrated some of his vast knowledge of the world of accessibility followed by an introduction to his SVN workflow, downloading and applying patches to his local copy of WordPress to test whether an issue had been resolved. Unfortunately, none of the patches could be applied! Despite the fact he’d picked out the tickets in advance, the WordPress codebase moves so fast that all the patches resulted in merge conflicts. However, it was potentially more valuable to see Graham go through a less than perfect example to see the process. In this case, Graham updated the tickets, asking for the patches to be refreshed.
As someone who generally needs a push to get involved, a contributor day is a daunting prospect. However, I got into the flow and found my feet. The day was relaxed and everyone very welcoming and friendly. I look forward to future events and getting involved in WordPress development.
Could future events be even better for people like myself? I guess it comes down to the intended focus, contributing to WordPress or spreading knowledge and introducing beginners into the loop (there’s a WordPress pun in there somewhere). I believe we can have both. Perhaps future events could use more structure. A system of buddying beginners with more seasoned developers, with more “Good First Bugs” or a selection of Trac tickets reviewed beforehand, giving beginners a chance to get stuck in.
Overall the day was enjoyable and there were wins for WordPress. I believe Jenny has been roped into organising another Manchester contributor day and she’s keen for the model to spread to other areas to get more passionate people involved in contributing to WordPress.
Thanks again to the event sponsors, WP Site Care, Delicious Media, Sergey Biryukov, Pressware and especially Human Made who I believe also supplied the pizza! Also, thanks to Tom J Nowell for this post’s featured image!
For more ramblings, follow me on Twitter.
February 25, 2014 — 0
Launching a WordPress plugin
This is a post written for the iWeb blog after launching iWeb’s first public WordPress plugin. The snappily named Background Update Notification Email Address plugin is not only iWeb’s first public plugin, but also my first plugin published on the WordPress plugin repository. In the blog post I discuss the problem solved and the process taken to get the plugin published. Rather than take the Ronseal naming approach, I must try harder next time and come up with something a little shorter!
Last week, we launched iWeb’s first plugin to the official WordPress plugin repository. At iWeb, we manage hundreds of WordPress sites, providing backup, updates for WordPress core and plugins as well as other maintenance tasks. Background Update Notification Email Address is our plugin aimed at those who, like us, manage WordPress on their clients behalf…
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