Nur Ahmad Furlong

Islamic Experience Designer

Events

WordCamp Cape Town 2012 has arrived!

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I’m just about to leave for WordCamp Cape Town 2012, my favourite tech event of the year and it looks like this one’s set to be bigger and better than any of the previous WP related events I’ve attended. I’m also loving the fact that it’s being hosted at one of my favourite places in Cape Town Kirstenbosch Gardens. I’m planning on updating this post as the day progresses with my experiences. That’s the plan at least. Stay tuned!

Here’s a quick wrapup of the talks I managed to catch.

1. Open Source mxPress Plugin

Eric Clements discusses Using WP to setup a Live Mxit Based Journal of Olympics Info. Using mxPress a small team setup a live Olympic Journal Mxit App fed with updates through WordPress. The setup took around 5 hrs and within a couple of weeks they had 10 000 followers.

  • Why WordPress – Ease of content management
  • Why Mxit – Quick Easy Mobile access to large user base

http://www.mxpress.co.za

  • Quick Mxit App setup
  • Go Mobile Quickly and easily
  • Access non smart phone users
  • Great Features of the Plugin – tight WP Integration
  • Integration with Google Analytics

A suggestion from the floor was to make use of a setup like this for monitoring crime and crime reporting through a crowdsourced type setup where non-smartphone users can easily access and update the system.

Eric also mentioned that monitizing on Mxit is much easier than on platforms like facebook.

2. How to Hijack a Themeshop

Riaan Knoetze started creating WordPress themes out of necessity. He says he loves making money in his sleep and was looking for ways to establish passive streams of income. Riaan explains how difficult it is to break into the Theme sales market due to the sheer amount of players. His talk discusses how to leverage existing theme markets and develop extended products based on their products, eg. Developing WooThemes child themes.

Riaan says he’s not a PHP developer, marketing guru or Graphic design super star.

Enter – Premium Child Themes

Eg. Riaan Converted App Theme’s Classipress Classified theme to his own styled version Headline.

  • Riaan goes into Hijacking 101, the tools, skills and knowhow needed to Hijack Existing Premium Themes legally and make money off modifying them.
  • He further explains how to pick a theme shop – their themes need design improvements, functional extensions and users who want extensions.
  • Advanced Hijacking tip – make it legit and get the backing of the theme shop.
  • Cons – revenue split
  • Pros – more exposure, less overhead, support infrastructure …

Imma get myself hijacking!

3. Fred Roed, CEO of WWCreative speaking about Community & Causes

Fred’s intro was a little unconventional discussing the story of the Apaches but boiling down to the issue of Having a serious and meaningful Cause.

Quick Stat – 95% of Brands in South Africa Use Social Media

Fred impressing on the Social Media Stats but reminding us that Trust is so important in the bombardment from multiple channels. People are still interested in trusted communities and connections.

3 Verticals They Focus on at WWC

  1. Attracting Traffic
  2. Converting Traffic
  3. Maintaining

At the centre of it is Cause, something meaningful, something you want to fight for and are passionate about, something you feel for.

Citing the example of Apple, determined to develop Beautiful, Functional Technology. Something which resonates with the users. Fred goes on to cite a wide range of Causes from Virgin taking on the big guys, to Hitler to Steve Hofmeyer.

Why Causes

  • It’s Profitable
  • It’s compelling
  • It’s sustainable
  • Connects People

4. Does Social Media Affect SEO

Neil Starts off comparing statistics – correlation & causation data based on high ranking sites. The Data suggests certain important social functions seem to have some effect on Search Engine Rankings.

Neil Mentions an SEO Moz experiment asking his community to +1 a Post Ranked 16 which then Ranked 6th after many +1’s. He mentions Google Plus profiles linked on Google Webmaster Tools to blogging author page which should allow your author profile to appear on search listings, also shared his recommendation of the AuthorSure plugin to assist with this. He also showed how Google is starting to feature Social activities into analytics tools and reports. Many of the points mentioned are covered by Yoast in his latest SEO outline.

At this stage myself and a few of the guys rushed off to grab some food elsewhere and to stretch our legs, Catering wasn’t Halaal so we grabbed a steak gatsby or 2 down the road, because of which we missed the first session which focused on performance.

Sessions I Missed – Performance, Speed / Load Time

Basically the performance/speed related sessions cover using CDNs (Content Delivery Networks), Caching using built in and Plugins, Controlling which resources get served from your site and which get served from external servers and which versions get served. This includes being wary of the amount and type of plugins used, minifying and compressing some of your sites reosurces and lastly the server you host with. All of these elements work together to drastically improving your site’s performance, user experience and nowadays your site’s rankings based on Google’s new inclusion of major speed factors in their ranking system.

Implementing these enhancements help cut down on the cost of running high traffic sites as well.

5. Optimizing WordPress on the frontend

Byron Rode tackles the subject of performance from the front end side of things after the previous discussions centred around what can be done on the admin and server side. For those who are not able to spend the money needed to have dedicated servers or enhanced server side optimisations and are running on shared hosting there’s alot that can be done as to speed up your site’s load time as well.

Some suggested Plugins

  • W3 Total Cache – Might cause problems when developing and caches are not cleared – old files showing
  • WP Minify – Might not work with certain plugins
  • Using Image Sprites to reduce the amount of loads

Discussing WordPress Transient API – WordPress way of caching Database Queries for serving cached queries later saving on reloading repeated queries.

Byrone makes no apologies for saying that he seriously dislikes plugins due to the various aspects of site performance they negatively affect.

3 Minute Pitches

One of the interesting features of this year’s WordCamp are the 3 minute elevator pitches delivered by some of the microsponsors.  The most interest of them so far for me was Blink Tower, who assist entrepreneurs in getting their messages out there by developing short video messages to help them articular and illustrate what they offer. Most of us could do with some improved articulation of what we do.

Other Pitches centred around raising funds for DARG, animal welfare organisation

https://twitter.com/Ane_vJaarsveld/status/253847381811027968

a mobile testing platform and I forget some of the others.

Panel Discussion – Getting “Started Up”

A Group of 5 Tech Entrepreneurs Discuss how they Succeeded and how others could take their startup ideas forward.

As you can see I’m getting very tired and most likely won’t make it through the last of the presentations. In general it was a good day, some of the content was a little disappointing as compared to last year’s WordCamp. The networking was the best part of the event getting back in touch with some of the familiar faces in the community and meeting a few new ones.

MemeBurn has a writeup of the event to fill in some fo the gaps I’ve left and you can search #wcct on twitter for tweets form the event.

I Must Be getting Old

I was unable to see the entire event through to the end due in part, to some tight deadlines and lack of sleep over the last few weeks.

I’m super disappointed I missed Matt Cohen’s Presentation about Shifting the WordPress Mindset. See his slides below. From what I hear it was great and took the audience on a trip down memory lane from the early days through to where we currently are and into what lies ahead for WP.

My Recommendations:

Coming soon!

All in all it was a very well organised event, though I feel presentations may have not been relevant enough for everyone attending. Last Year’s split focus, publisher vs developer seemed a better configuration and I think this would be the best way to go going forward considering the split focus on the WP community. Those who attended seem to have benefitted in general, I couldn’t find a negative comment apart from one or 2 newbies being baffled by some of the tech talk.

Ashley Shaw & the Lightspeed team have done a fab job this year, thanks a ton again to them!

WordCamp Cape Town 2011 Presentation – WordPress IS a CMS

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You can View the full extended presentation website at WordPress IS a CMS

Let me know what you think of the presentation and if there’s any specific areas you feel I should fill in on the presentation site.

Also read my brief Interview with Lightspeed on the topic of WordPress training.

I will be conducting various WordPress training courses covering the very basics of WordPress Content & Site Management, Basic WordPress Theme Development and Intermediate Theme Development. For more info on this visit www.wpbedouine.com

12 Hours at WordCamp Cape Town

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Just about recovered from what was the biggest WordCamp Cape Town has hosted to date. You heard me, 12 hours. I was one of the first to arrive and left just before the after party hit, which makes me think, there’s a few people who would have been there for more than 12 hours. WordPress Geeks no doubt.

Congrats to Ashley Shaw and the team at light speed for pulling off a spectacular event. Many of the top designers & developers were there including some people I’ve only interacted with via the interwebs. I finally got to put a face to quite a few names and got to meet a few guys I’ve personally worked with on projects but never met in person. I was absolutely stunned at the amount of sponsors who came to the party.

If you wanted to overdose on WordPress enthusiasm WordCamp would have been your ideal opportunity.

The speaker schedule was quite varied with both a publisher(non dev) track & a dev track for the hardcore guys. I was slotted in on the last minute to stand in for a cancellation. That was 2 days before the event, so the run up to WordCamp for me had a couple of sleep deprived days on coffee overdose which left me in a semi twilight zone type state on the morning of the event.

I arrive around 7am, still not 100% done with my presentation and only second to one of light speed’s interns from the Netherlands, a newbie to WordPress, but like with many others grabbing onto it quickly.

The Lineup for the Day.

The WordCamp website was a really excellent piece of communication and I think the most outstanding part of it was the schedule, designed to put the spotlight on the main attraction, The Talks.

WordCamp Cape Town Schedule 2011

WordCamp Presentations I Attended

Jason Bagley – Responsive Web Design

First up on the developer track was Jason Bagley of whitespace focusing on the ever popular topic of responsive web design. His slick slides are viewable on slideshare and he’s also put together a cool list of resources at http://responsive.jasonbagley.com

I watched jason’s presentation while finish off mine.

Byron Rode – Improving Ease of Use with the WordPress Admin Dashboard

Next up was Byron Rode, a developer I’ve hired for some tricky customizations in the past and someone who openly speaks out against the overuse of plugins and unnecessary features. His Presentation was about only giving your clients what they need in their dashboard and ruthlessly stripping out everything else.

Byrone mentioned a plugin at his talk which helped with some admin customizations and has shared it here.

Dan Milward – WP-eCommerce

Dan’s présentation focused mainly on the growth of Instinct’s wp-ecommerce plugin, it’s growth from the very early days of being the first WordPress commerce plugin, of hacking the core to make it work, on the process of finally going GPL and the attention that brought to the project. I’ve used wp-ecommerce some time back to develop a software product site which earned my client 1 million Rand in it’s first 6 months in new product sales. Back then setting up a site using wp-ecommerce was a slight challenge, but the project has come a long way and with WordPress’ new custom post types Dan & his team have completely repurposed the plugin and made a really powerful yet easy to use and mostly Free product.

Dan also discuss some of their other projects form an Arcade style game builder running on WordPress to the drag & drop WordPress theme builder they’ve been delving into pushing WordPress to it’s limits to produce some really amazing solutions. Another proof for me that WordPress is truly a CMS, and in many cases it could even be used as a base Application Framework.

After Dan’s presentation I had to take a little break and escaped the presentation rooms until the lunch break, took a breather, did my mid day prayers and prepped myself for my own presentation. I had only just finished adding some bits and pieces to mine the morning of the event.

My Presentation – WordPress IS a CMS

Presenting about WordPress using WordPress

There’s been a debate on the go for as long as I’ve been using WordPress about whether it’s a true Content Management System(CMS) or not. In fact at the last WordCamp in Cape Town which I believe was held 3 years ago the same issue was discussed.

Generally those who use WordPress have been satisfied that it is a true and in many cases superior CMS for the majority of today’s web needs, though some development die hards and other old-school non WordPress users still argue the point.

There’s also been a ton of articles, presentations & talks been given around the world on using WordPress “as” a CMS. I wanted to make a case for putting the final nail in the coffi.

Jeff Pearce – Using WordPress as a development framework

@jeffikus gave a very exciting, though somewhat technical presentation on the merits of using WordPress as an application development framework with an example of a Task Management App which completely bypasses the regular WordPress admin. We’ve seen the rise of quite a few application style implementations of WordPress and I believe this is only the beginning.

Most Memorable Presentation

Adii Pienaaar – The Business of WordPress: Making Money in more ways than one

The presentation which stood out the most for me was Adii’s WordPress Ecosystem. Not that Adii’s in need of any more ego boosting if you know what I mean, but really we have to give credit where it’s due.

Adii is a really interesting character, someone who can only be admired for what he has achieved in the last few years. It’s clear when you listen to him speak he’s got a business brain. I’ve seen Adii rise up through the WordPress ranks from the time he was selling his first theme and have to admit I sometimes feel really lousy about myself for not taking the same kind of chances and putting in place the same kind of strategies to achieve something more significant.

His dissection of the WordPress Ecosystem was such an apt metaphor for the way the WordPess community operates, which reminds me of a similar talk given at Heavy Chef on the New Media Eco-system. Same concept on a much wider scale.

Adii unpacked the various spheres where people are forging niches and tapping into the economy of WordPress, making a living or a killing in some cases.

Some of the Interesting People I chatted with at WordCamp

Sorry if I left anyone out. I know I did, not intentionally, there were just so many cool conversations.

Everyone seemed to be really inspired, not only by the technical workings on our favorite web publishing platform, but by the sense of community which resulted in such an exciting event. Others were just there to show their absolute obsession with their favorite publishing platform.

I Love WordPress

Experiences

For me the presentations were secondary to the networking & connections. No doubt what was presented was inspiring and created lots of energy and ideas in many directions, but those connections made, putting faces to names, establishing potential partnerships was the most beneficial part of the whole thing.

A few moments stood out for me. I managed to catch up with some people I’d never met in person but have had some meaningful interactions with via the web.

1. I had a really good conversation with Fred Roed, someone who I’ve interacted with only via the web and twitter. We discussed our own challenges going forward in our businesses and social contributions towards improving society.

2. I finally got a chance to meet Dan Milward who I’ve known online for a few years and we had a coffee just after the event with some really good conversation both on issues of WordPress and community and outside of that. Justin Slack joined us for a bit. What was so interesting for me was, I was leaving to escape the after party as a non-drinker, when Dan caught me and asked me where I was going, suggesting we have a quite coffee. I really appreciated that gesture. We spoke about some potential working together on one of his projects. Dan is a really nice guy and very forward thinking.

3. Last but not least, Matt Geri(wpgeeks.com), who I’ve been working with online for a while now and who I’ve only ever spoken to via Skype was there and we got to speak in person and get to know each other a bit better. Matt’s gt some really great WordPress dev skills and

What I took out of it

We’ve come a long way. I went on a bit of a nostalgic hunt for some info on some of the very first WordPress meetups we had in Cape Town even before WordCamps hit our shores and found the following article I wrote on the success of the 3rd WordPress Meeting in Cape Town which I hosted back then.

http://www.techleader.co.za/nurahmadfurlong/2008/05/29/wordpress-meet-3-was-huge/

You’ll see some of the same faces were attending back then, including Host of this WordCamp, Ashley Shaw who spoke about BuddyPress back then. We have to go back to the source and thank Callum Macdonald who came to Cape Town on his still continuous World tour with a bag full of WordPress and the clothes on his back quite a few years ago and instigated the very first WordPress Meetup.

A bit about that meet up here – http://www.nomad-one.com/2008/02/18/first-wordpress-meetup-post-mortem/

WordPress Meetup, Feb 2008

It just shows, with enough positive energy and enthusiasm and a community spirit, we can take things a lot further, and with people committed to making things happen, it benefits everyone around them. We’ve come a long way in Cape Town, and this year’s WordCamp is something we can all be proud of.

Once again thanks go out to Ashley & The team at Lightspeed.


WordCamp Cape Town coming very soon

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It’s been a while since the local WordPress obsessed have gotten together to talk shop and share their latest thoughts on their favourite CMS. Ashley Shaw who runs Lightspeed has done a superb job, no doubt a tough one, in getting tons of interest going. I know personally when attempting to organise another meeting about a year ago it was really tough getting support at the beginning as everyone is just so busy.

I’m attending WordCamp Cape Town 2011!So 15 September at the Atlantic Imbizo V & A Waterfront is the day.

As far as I can tell from the event site it’s a sell out with no more spaces for speakers or attendees. There’s going to be some really interesting presentations covering a raneg of topics in 2 Tracks for users and for developers which should be interesting.

I’ve scored a ticket for FREE by being the first person to signup for the event via Facebook, it pays to be a geek sometimes yes.

I hope to see you there as well, the facebook page has 116 likes and I believe way more are attending so it sounds like it’s set to be a winner. Check out all the details at http://2011.capetown.wordcamp.org

WDC2014 taking Cape Town Design onto the World Stage

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You may not have heard but there’s a City down South, at the very tip of Africa that’s been buzzing with the sound of creative innovation for some time. It’s a really beautiful place like none other, almost laid back and extremely friendly and hospitable. It recently hosted thousands of International visitors as part of the Soccer World Cup and is about to make an even more ambitious Bid to launch itself into the creative psyche of the globe. You guessed it, yes, Cape Town, the place I currently call home.

Creative Cape Town communicates, supports and facilitates the development of the creative and knowledge economy in the Central City of Cape Town.

The WDC2014 Initiative is aimed at getting Cape Town voted as the “World Design Capital 2014″ as a recognition of the advances in use of design to enhance society. Seoul was voted the 2010 World Design Capital and Helsinki for 2012.

What is WDC2014?

This prestigious status is designated biennially by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) to cities that are dedicated to using design for social, cultural and economic development.

Also View some of the Case Studies posted on the official website to see how the vision outlined above is coming to life

Visit the Following 2 Websites which are currently spear heading the initiative to find out more about the why and how of the project.

Cape Town’s World Design Capital 2014 bid concept, “Live Design, Transform Life”, focuses strongly on socially responsive design. – www.capetown2014.co.za

Join the Facebook Page and become part of the effort to get Cape Town recognized on the World Design Stage

Grab your supporter’s badge and be part of the team

Now go out there and slap some design on The Mother City! And don’t forget to share!

New WordPress site for 2010 WorldCup Fan Accommodation

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I’ve hardly slept over the last week bashing my fingers against my keyboard trying to get this site out as quickly as possible. The site is called fani.am, (That’s Fan i am), which is a 2010 World Cup Accommodation site. This one really challenged me with some of the intricate post associations I had to string together, and with the addition of a couple of extra plugins to add some key features I’m really excited about this one.

Take a quick look Design and I’ll explain a bit about what’s under the hood of this one.

Homepage of the fani.am fan accommodation site
Homepage of the fani.am fan accommodation site

I really enjoyed designing this one and also trying out a few CSS3 features like rounded corners & Text Shadows. IE6 users, there’s a special treat for you as well. 🙂

Custom Fields

The most hectic part of this site by far was the wordpress wrangling which takes place in the background. Using loads of WordPress custom fields, some for data and some for associating certain post types like matches, with accommodations and with the teams playing the matches, we were able to weave separate categories of posts into an intuitive mixture of information. Custom field have been managed entirely by the flutter plugin’s write panels, which helped make this site extremely easy for novice user to populate with content.

Fan i am Team Facts sidebar widget
Fan i am Team Facts sidebar widget

Conditional Statements

Using WordPress conditional statements, as well as some conditional Custom field statements we were able to easily pull the correct set of posts for each team, venue or accommodation. The sidebar also gets populated with related widgets displaying content for each type of page you arrive on.

Picture 71
Associated Matches, accommodations & attractions

Dealing with images

I was a little disappointed about the current state of the built-in WordPress gallery system. You’re still not able to easily pull individual images based on their order in the gallery and can only really pull an entire gallery. The attached image plugin helped pull the first gallery image which was great. Flutter’s image management and upload functionality was ok but could do with the auto generation of thumbs & other sizes which the built in WordPress image uploading performs. Flutter’s image crop & resize functionality just doesn’t work at the moment, though the rest of it’s functionality, mainly write panels played a hige role in this website’s configuration.

This site relies heavily on plugins for various features, which is one of the great things about WordPress. I know some geeky developers who swear they never use plugins, and that’s fine with me, though I or one love the fact that so much freely available functionality is just lying around ready to take advantage of.

Plugins I’ve used & abused Include:

  • Flutter – custom write panels
  • Live Coundown Timer – counting down time to the Kickoff
  • My Favourite Posts – allows user to add their favourite accommodations to a sidebar bucket
  • Send to a Friend
  • Tweet News – Footer feed of tweets about FIFA
  • Google News – feed of news about the world cup from google
  • Twitter Widget Pro – Worked better than Twitter Tools
  • IE PNG fix – no need to fiddle with code
  • Sidebar Login – check the login panel top right
  • Cforms II – contact & booking forms
  • DISQUS – Advanced commenting system
  • WP Table Reloaded – Check the Match Schedule (quick & easy manageable tables)

So far it’s been a really great project and Phase 2 promises to include some even more exciting social media additions. What do you think of this one?