Puffbox

Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

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    Culture builds transparency site on WP

    Nice to see the team at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport launching a new WordPress-based site this week, for the distribution and archival of their transparency data. They promise the monthly publication of financial data, with others ‘as appropriate (at least annually)’. Data is being posted as CSV, as per official guidance, and uploaded as attachments to WordPress posts – meaning it can be viewed by (hierarchical) category, and/or month of publication, or via RSS feed.

    In fact, it’s precisely the model I’ve been discussing with the Wales Office, for implementation in the next week or two… although in their case, we’ve been using categorised WordPress posts for two and a half years, integrating things like FOI disclosures into their news stream; so it’s really just following an established model.

    It’s a nice touch to see DCMS using a government-developed WordPress theme – namely, the Digital Britain/Clean Home design by BIS. The site looks to be hosted at Rackspace, like Culture’s (ASP-based) corporate site… What? WP on a Microsoft IIS7 server? Hey, why not – WordPress doesn’t have to sit on Linux, and Microsoft have been love-bombing the WordPress community recently. Having said that, I still feel somewhat uncomfortable at seeing a WordPress logo on a microsoft.com page. (If you’re determined to run WP on Microsoft, this site will be useful.)

    If you’re coming along to the Word Up Whitehall event on Wednesday, you’ll be able to ask CIO Mark O’Neill all about it.

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    Always keep hosting, domains and email separate

    A quick technical tip for my loyal and esteemed readership: when setting up a modest website, don’t buy your domains from your web host. And ideally, get your email from somewhere else too.

    One of the second-order selling points for an open-source solution like WordPress is disaster recovery. In a worst-case scenario, you can simply export your content from one installation, import it into another, and change the DNS. I’ve had to help people do this twice in the last couple of months, when relations with hosting companies have soured – once due to repeated security problems, once because of a billing disagreement. The sites were live from their new homes within a couple of hours.

    When things go wrong, you’ll probably want to turn tail and leave in a huff; and to be honest, for the amount you’re paying, most hosts won’t consider it worthwhile persuading you to stay. Transferring your DNS records to a different registrar is going to be a lengthy process, probably a few days at best. But if you’re already using a third party registrar, separate from your hosting supplier, they don’t ultimately care where your ‘www’ record is pointing. The change can be made in mere seconds.

    The same goes for email. To be honest, with Google offering its standard-level Apps For Your Domain free of charge, there’s really no reason (excuse?) to tie yourself to your hosting provider’s bundled email service… which is probably inferior anyway.

    Many hosting companies include a free domain as part of their package. Whether or not they do this deliberately, it’s a form of lock-in… and you’re probably only saving the price of a pint of beer (London prices) per year. The freedom to take your business elsewhere, at the drop of a hat, is worth a lot more.

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    Wales Office gets a WordPress refresh

    The Wales Office was where the whole WordPress-in-Whitehall thing started, back in late 2007. As a relatively tiny department whose communications were almost exclusively news-based, a blog-style website was ideal for them. But I still remember nervously going into our first meeting, conscious that we were proposing something quite radical.

    It all went remarkably well; ongoing support amounted to barely one phone call every 3-6 months, seeking advice or a quick template tweak. And of course, it sparked interest in WordPress as a platform which government could build on: you can draw a line from the Wales Office, to 10 Downing Street, to BIS, to Defra, to… well, who knows.

    Two and a half years on, the list of Things We Really Ought To Do At Some Point was beginning to grow. And with the election leading to a change of government, it was high time we made some of those changes. We pushed the rebuilt sites live yesterday, for Puffbox’s second Whitehall department ‘relaunch’ in two days (after this one). Surely some kind of record?

    The templates, originally designed to fit 800×600 screens, have been rebuilt from scratch – but hopefully, very few people will even notice. Once again, the brief has been to keep it looking almost exactly as-was… understandably, in the current conditions.

    The main new function is an automated Photo Library, exploiting WordPress 3.0’s image handling. The Wales Office team have always been very good at adding photos to their press notices; but thus far, they were manually resizing them for on-page display. Now they can upload the highest resolution available, and let WordPress resize accordingly. And we can present a set of paginated search results listing all uploaded images, linking to those high-res versions, for media to re-use if they so desire.

    It all lives in a WordPress 3.0 multisite (and multi-language) setup, including my first step into theme and plugin internationalisation: the same theme creates both the Welsh and English sites, with WordPress dropping in any Welsh translations from a .PO file. We’re using the somewhat outdated Welsh language pack available from automattic.com; late in the day, I discovered a new translation based on WP3.0, but integrating it (and undo’ing my workarounds) was too much to take on by that point.

    And because we’re in multisite mode, it’s an easy job to move all the material from the previous government into an explicit archive site – keeping it all searchable, unlike the National Archives copy.

    It’s been interesting to revisit what was my first major WordPress project: a milestone by which to measure both my own development, and WordPress’s. Some of my more, ahem, ingenious workarounds can now hand over to proper, core WP functions; but with features like the Photo Library, I feel we’ve pushed things just a little further again.

    A hearty ‘diolch’ to Dean at Eduserv for the server-side stuff; and to the Wales Office team, who keep letting me play with their material.

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    Defra relaunches corporate website on WordPress

    This morning saw the launch of a new website for Defra, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It looks remarkably like their old one, which was placed in suspended animation after the election. Almost identical, in fact. But behind the scenes, it’s a completely different story.

    Thus far, Defra’s website has largely been managed manually, one page at a time, using Dreamweaver. They started using WordPress two years ago: first a blog, then a Commentariat-based commentable document. Puffbox got involved about 12 months ago, helping develop a couple of microsites. And internally, they’ve been running a few pilots, notably with their press office. It’s all been building up to this morning’s unveiling of a new corporate website structure built on a WordPress 3.0-based multisite install.

    The ‘top level’ consists entirely of pages (rather than posts) – a fairly modest number to start with, but all thoroughly reviewed and re-edited. Beneath this will be a collection of subsites, of which only one is in place so far, but it’s probably the most significant one – News. There’s a parent theme plus one child theme; most of the presentational elements are defined either in the parent theme, or the ‘top level’ site’s settings. But of course, the subsites also feed content up to the top in some places, such as the News area of the top-level homepage.

    It feels like we’ve pushed WordPress to its limits on this one, or certainly closer to its limits than we’ve ever gone before. Files and images are uploaded and managed through WP’s interface, allowing us (for example) to generate and summon thumbnails of multiple sizes for the homepage, whilst storing the highest-resolution images for unspecified future use. 😉 We’re making heavy use of WP3.0’s new ‘custom menus’. We do intend to use comment functionality, although not for ‘conventional’ commenting. And of course, the whole concept is based on WP3.0’s multisite function: I wouldn’t have been comfortable building this on pre-3.0 MU.

    Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we have multiple load-balanced servers, and all sorts of WordPress caching magic – which, although it doesn’t sound exciting or glamorous, is what really lifts this project into the realms of serious web serving. Hopefully by now, you won’t be in any doubt that WordPress can do plenty – but the question often arises, can it do it at scale? Yes it can – but it’s much, much more involved than simply installing a plugin or two. (And sadly, I’ve seen too many instances lately where developers without much WP experience haven’t appreciated that.)

    There’s so many other little things I could mention: a quick custom plugin to do X, a little widget to display Y, a dash of jQuery to do Z. And then there’s the other things we’ve built, but haven’t used or activated quite yet. In fact, to be honest, it’s a little frustrating that so much ‘cutting edge’ stuff is concealed behind a year-old front-end.

    Mere words are not enough to express my gratitude to Simon Wheatley, whose genius was only exceeded by his dedication on this one. The Defra gang have been fantastic too: they’ve done great work over a long period to reach this point. And they gave us more freedom than we would be entitled to expect, to do it ‘our way’. Thanks, everyone.

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    Civil service managers' salary details delayed

    The coalition’s Programme for Government stated that, as part of the government-wide transparency and open data initiatives: ‘We will require public bodies to publish online the job titles of every member of staff and the salaries and expenses of senior officials paid more than the lowest salary permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale’ – namely £58,200.

    In a letter to all government departments on 31 May, David Cameron stated that these should be ‘published from September 2010‘. Well, we’re now into October, and said data hasn’t emerged.

    I’m not entirely surprised to hear from well-placed sources that whilst the mechanics of releasing such data are fairly straightforward, the practicalities haven’t been. It would be very, very easy indeed to pinpoint exactly how much even relatively modestly-ranked individuals earn – so it’s no surprise that it has caused some, ahem, ripples. (It’s still happening though, as I understand it.)

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    Why we needed the Open Gov Licence

    My post on the new Open Government Licence prompted a quite reasonable question from Carl Morris: ‘I’m looking for a reason why they’re launching a new licence rather than just using straightforward Creative Commons?‘ Perfectly reasonable question.

    So I was delighted to see a response from Beth Brook at the National Archives – late on a Friday evening, I note, explaining precisely why. It’s such a good answer, it deserves a post in its own right.

    As you’ll see the OGL is a very similar to Creative Commons and Open Data Commons, as we felt they really good models examples to work from. We did look extensively at adopting Creative Commons licences and worked with Creative Commons through the process. However, we developed our own licence for a number of reasons, and I’ll try to cover the main ones below:

    – We needed the licence to cover both copyright and database rights – Creative Commons covers copyright only and Open Data Commons covers database right. Having two licences apply side by side to a large proportion of the information being published by the public sector would be overly complex for the user and for the public sector doing the licensing. The OGL is one licence which covers a wide range of information and content types protected by copyright and/or database right, including source code.

    – We needed a licence that can cover all jurisdictions in the UK, including Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland – the Creative Commons UK licence is still forthcoming.

    – We wanted the licence to be a simple as possible under one set of terms and conditions rather than having a simple summary on the surface and lengthier, more complex conditions underneath this. The OGL presents summary examples (in the ‘You are free to:’ section), as well as the more legal necessities in just one licence document.

    – We have ensured that the OGL is compatible with Creative Commons and Open Data Commons attribution licences.

    Further proof, not that we need it, that the National Archives team really are on the side of the angels on this one. I’m so delighted that sheer simplicity was a good enough justification.

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    New Open Government licence

    Way back in January, I noted OPSI’s commitment to replace the Click-Use Licence with something closely resembling the Creative Commons ‘by’ licence. Following its early introduction on data.gov.uk, it’s now been formally launched  – and already, departments are altering their terms & conditions to reflect it.

    Officially named the Open Government Licence, it states in remarkably straightforward terms that ‘you are encouraged (!) to use and re-use the Information that is available under this licence … freely and flexibly’. It has been defined to be legally ‘interoperable’ with the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, sharing a certain amount of its language – and even bears a mild visual resemblance to it, which is a smart move in itself.

    As I’ve mentioned before, it doesn’t legally move the goalposts very much, I don’t think: but so much of this is in the presentation, and the culture change that it hopes to deliver. ‘Crown copyright’ sounds a lot more scary and protective than it really ever is/was. Even just the name ‘open government licence’ changes the whole tone.

    There’s quite extensive guidance on the National Archives website, which should help departments appreciate what it all means: including, I’m delighted to note, some sample copyright statements.

    The implications are perhaps best demonstrated by the brevity of the first few answers on the FAQ page:

    Do I need written confirmation to use information under the Open Government Licence?

    No. The Open Government Licence is an implied licence. By using information made available under the licence you indicate that you have accepted its terms and conditions.

    Do I have to register for an Open Government Licence?

    No. There is no need to register or formally apply for a licence, unlike the previous Click-Use Licence. Users simply need to ensure that their use of information complies with the Open Government Licence terms.

    Are there any fees for using information made available under the Open Government Licence?

    There are no charges for using information under the Open Government Licence.

    How long does the Open Government Licence last?

    Unless you breach its terms, the Open Government Licence is a perpetual licence.

    It’s precisely the kind of brain-dead simplicity we’ve needed in this field. Innovators simply don’t want to wade through pages/screens of legal-ese, just to know if they’re allowed to play with your material. (Instead, they’ll probably go off and innovate with someone else’s.)

  • WordPress as bug-tracker

    We’re heading into the final furlong on one of the biggest projects Puffbox has ever been involved in. All being well, we should be able to talk about it in a week or so. Trust me, it’s significant.

    The stakes with this job are higher than most; so I wanted to take testing and bug-tracking a bit more seriously than usual. I had the idea the other evening to use WordPress as a centralised bug-log: and my initial thought was to use the Twitter-style P2 theme, by Automattic themselves. To be honest I’ve never really liked it, but I can appreciate its extra functionality – front end authoring, ajax comments, etc; and I’m sure we could have made it work.

    But maybe someone had done a proper bug-tracking application on top of WordPress? One quick Google later, I found that yes, within the last month someone had… and it’s truly fantastic. One of the most inspirational pieces of WordPress work I’ve seen in months.

    It’s called Quality Control, and it does everything you’d want it to do. Installation is a little bit fiddly, but nothing too onerous; set up a page to act as the ticket creation screen, define a few ‘states’ and ‘milestones’, and you’re away. Once it’s up and running, you shouldn’t ever need to look at wp-admin: everything is front-end. And as you’d expect, it’s all comment-able and feed-able, with email notifications, etc etc.

    There’s a live online demo – so rather than me explaining how it works, go and try it for yourself.

  • Stott announces retirement

    Appropriately enough, Andrew Stott has announced his retirement from the position of Director of Digital Engagement via Twitter.

    He’ll be leaving in December, to be replaced* by Katie Davis – who recently returned to the Cabinet Office following a three-year stint as Executive Director of Strategy for the Identity and Passport Service. In her previous period with the Cabinet Office, she was Director of the Government IT Profession.

    * Update: interestingly, Kable reckon she’s taking over on an interim basis only.

    I’ve never come across her personally; but looking at her background, it all seems to be in ‘big IT’ rather than the smaller, more agile stuff that you might associate with the digital engagement role.

    For reference, I captured the role’s job description here. Stott will be leaving the position after only 18 months, so we can’t really assess whether he met the objective of seeing that ‘the use of world class digital engagement techniques should be embedded in the normal work of Government’ within two years.

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    DFID's blogs feed new Guardian site

    With the kind assistance of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (I think he used to be big in computing or something), the Guardian has launched a new (sub)site dedicated to global development. And quite remarkably, it features regular contributions by UK civil servants.

    In fact, it’s feeding (literally) off the DFID Bloggers site, built by Puffbox nearly two years ago (!). It pulls in the latest handful of stories from the DFID site’s RSS feed, and displays them in a cute little animated box. Pretty much what the DFID homepage itself does…

    … except that the DFID homepage does something a little bit cleverer. As you’ll see, it carries not only the title and description – typical of any RSS feed; but it also shows the author’s face and job title, neither of which are standard RSS elements. It also turns the blogger’s name into a link to their personal blogging archive. Cool, eh? – dead easy, actually.

    We do this with the aid of a little WordPress magic. The author photo is uploaded into WP using a plugin called User Photo; but Simon Wheatley and I worked on a ‘meta plugin’ to ensure these photos would be square, and hence more predictable to work with. And before you ask, yes, the meta plugin was indeed made available at wordpress.org… and has been downloaded over 3,700 times as I write this.

    (The job title is an additional field added to the user profile; at the time, we did that with a custom plugin, but now I’d probably use this code by WP guru Peter Westwood.)

    We then call this extra info – where available – into the RSS feed with a custom function, using the rss_item hook. (It’s all formatted using the standard MediaRSS extension, originally by Yahoo.) And so, each time a new post is added to the DFID Bloggers site, the DFID homepage can extract all the data it needs from the RSS feed, and slot them into the appropriate box.

    … which is a very roundabout way of demonstrating that, contrary to what you may have read lately, there’s plenty of life in RSS yet.