wordpress – Page 10

14 Dec 2009

e-government

dcsf, wordpress

DCSF joins WordPress trend

It’s now two years since DCSF published their Children’s Plan – I know – and Ed Balls wants to know what impact it has had on you. They’ve published a progress report, and launched a commentable website… based on, guess what, WordPress. Not the first time they’ve gone down the open source route: a year ago they launched their National Strategies website on Drupal. But I think this is their first WordPress-based site.

Hold on a second though. What’s going on with that URL: gscdevelopment.com/wpsample? Well, gscdevelopment.com is simply an account at Bluehost – a very low-cost shared hosting provider. Nothing wrong with that at all; I use them myself for experimental hosting space, although I’m not sure I’d host a government site there. Google has literally nothing about a web development agency called GSC Development. And that’s a bit of a problem. It may look like a DCSF website: but without a gov.uk address, and no way to trace who exactly is its source, how would you know it isn’t some kind of elaborate phishing scam?

Update, 16/12/09: It looks like they’ve now moved it to a .dcsf.gov.uk address, and to a different hosting provider (Every City, by the look of it); which makes me wonder why they jumped the gun?

Ironically, it was a period consulting at DfES that convinced me it was time to escape the Whitehall machine, and embrace the WordPress community. So it’s great to see them coming on board; and I’m all in favour of departments experimenting with WordPress, whether inside or outside the firewall. There are things I’d certainly have done (very) differently: I wouldn’t have used a directory name ‘wpsample’ for a start, and I’d have tried to fix some of the ~~112~~ 153 validation errors. It also looks as if they’ve overwritten the ‘default’ WordPress theme, which isn’t wise. And it’s always advisable to use pretty permalinks if you possibly can, rather than number-based query strings. But it’s another step in the right direction, and is therefore to be welcomed.
1 Dec 2009

e-government, politics

conservatives, leak, opensource, wordpress

Tories publish leaked Govt IT strategy with WordPress

You might have seen coverage in the last few days of the Government’s forthcoming ICT strategy – ‘New world, new challenges, new opportunities’ – which leaked out last week, and is due to be published next week to coincide with the Pre Budget Report. The first I saw of it was at UKAuthority.com, with follow-up coverage in places like Kable and Silicon.com. The key elements seem to be a move to cloud-based computing, a common desktop and common applications (known as the ‘Government Applications Store’, not a label I’m especially keen on); plus a restatement of policy on things like Open Source.

But here’s where it gets interesting. One of the recipients of the leaked document was the Conservative Party. And they’ve taken it upon themselves to republish it, in full, on a commentable web platform. (Which happens to be WordPress. Just thought I’d mention that.)

I’m not going to offer any comment on the strategy itself just yet: there’s something slightly uncomfortable about it being a leaked document, still apparently ‘work in progress’. But it’s a fascinating development nonetheless. We’ve seen academics and activists opening up documents like this: never a political party – although the only indication of the site’s origins is the obligatory reference in the footer. No logos, no explicit definition of who ‘we’ are, when it says on its homepage:

We have built this website to share with you a leaked copy of Labour’s report on public sector IT, which was scheduled to be published in the days ahead. … We think there’s a better way. … we believe that crowdsourcing and collaborative design can help us to make better policies – and we think this approach should begin now. This website allows you to post your comments and suggestions on this leaked Government report. We want to hear your ideas – and we will be responding to your thoughts in the weeks ahead.

The makeitbetter.org.uk domain was only registered on Friday last week; and it looks like the content was copied-and-pasted into the site during Saturday afternoon. It’s a modest build, using a plain off-the-shelf theme, and to be honest it lacks a certain finesse: no ‘pretty permalinks’, no mention of RSS, no subscribe-to-comments, etc. But it’s up there, in double-quick time, whether or not the Cabinet Office wanted it up there. And it’s a case study for how negligible-cost hosting plus free software, specifically WordPress, can change the game. As I may have mentioned here before.

It’ll be fascinating to see what kind of comments it attracts. (Here’s the site’s comment feed, if you want to follow it.)
24 Nov 2009

politics

bnp, buddypress, social, socialnetworking, wordpress

BNP's BuddyPress-based social network

The Conservatives won plaudits for the MyConservatives social networking platform they launched at their annual conference; and now the LibDems are slowly getting their own Act together (ho ho). Labourspace remains a bit of a joke. But one UK political party has been quietly developing its own social network for a few months now, with a membership now well in excess of 4,000 – and impressive open-source technology to boot. It’s the BNP.

There was some amusement across the political divide a couple of weeks back, when the BNP unveiled a new website design bearing more than a mild resemblance to BarackObama.com. But I haven’t seen any reference to the addition (or perhaps more accurately, the increased visibility) of its social networking functions based on BuddyPress, the free WordPress add-on often described as ‘Facebook in a box’.

To date, the site has attracted 4370 members – not necessarily party members, as it’s an option (defaulting to ‘no’) on the sign-up form. And as its RSS feed shows, it’s a fairly busy site. Once you’ve joined, you can sign up to any of the 225 groups which attract your interest, many of which have memberships in the hundreds. You can fill out your member profile, as site admin Simon Bennett has done. And just like Facebook, you can look at his friends, the groups he’s joined, and what else he’s been up to on the site. (There’s also a live chat widget on the profile page, if you want to watch site members conversing in real time.)

Looking beyond their politics, if you can, it’s impressive stuff. The BNP’s web activity has long been cited as several times more popular than the other mainstream parties; and if you put any faith in Alexa rankings, it still leaves them for dead. Indeed, Alexa currently ranks the BNP’s site as the 753rd most popular in the UK. There are many possible reasons for this – the BNP’s lack of mainstream media exposure, the inclusion of those social functions within the main party site, possibly also deliberate efforts by party members to boost their rankings. But that doesn’t take away from the achievement.

The fact is, they’re building and nurturing an active online following, which will inevitably help them mobilise – and raise money – come the election. If the mainstream parties could boast such statistics, we’d be talking about a new media revolution in politics.
30 Oct 2009

news

pressassociation, pressoffice, wordpress

WordPress to power new Press Assoc network?

The Press Association is the engine which powers the UK news machine. In effect it’s a cooperative owned by the UK’s regional and national newspapers. It has noticed that, as funds get tighter, its members have stopped reporting on local democracy – council meetings and the like. And it’s working on a proposal to fill that gap in the information provision market by providing the content itself, free of charge online… if the public purse cares to pay them £15-18 million to do so.

It’s a very interesting notion, and – considering the potential public benefit – a not inconceivable price-tag. But the line in Robert Andrews’s piece at PaidContent which really caught my eye was this:

“It will probably be delivered initially through a WordPress (blog) site, but it will be delivered with RSS feeds spinning off it and not as a primary site of interest.” Johnston showed a mock-up of PA content in a blog wearing an out-of-the-box default WordPress theme.

In fact, it’s a concept I’ve proven myself. A couple of years ago, I did some work with a small business information consultancy to move their (relatively tiny-scale) news publishing mechanism over to WordPress. Stories were being written in an existing workflow management app: but when it came to distributing these stories, we simply dropped them into a WordPress build – and let WP’s remarkably flexible RSS functionality do the rest. Stories were tagged according to subject area and clients; feeds were generated; and content got syndicated to wherever it needed to be, in an easily-republishable format. There was no front-end website at all: just the feeds coming off it.

So yes, I can heartily endorse this proposal. If it’s an open-access site, requiring easy authoring and easy syndication, WordPress should be perfect. And since it already does all the feed stuff, out-of-the-box, the project could be up and running as quickly as the reporters can be recruited.

But still, it’s a startling moment to be receiving the endorsement from the biggest player in UK news distribution. And it’s yet another reason, as if we needed it, for anyone working in news to look at what WordPress could do for them. If we could get every government press office on WordPress, for a start…
27 Oct 2009

company, e-government

bis, consultation, nationalstudentforum, wordpress

New site for National Student Forum

Today sees the launch of the latest little site we’ve built on behalf of – or more accurately, in collaboration with – BIS, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. It’s a pretty straightforward WordPress build for something called the National Student Forum: a panel representing HE students’ interests, whose latest annual report was published this morning.

It started out as a fairly simple project, to do the ‘commentable document’ thing around the new Annual Report. But it soon became obvious that, for various practical and structural reasons, the only sensible thing to do was to remake the Forum’s entire site. (Er, all half a dozen pages of it.) And although it’s still a fairly small site, it’s been built with future flexibility in mind, should it ever be needed.

I’ve put a lot of work into the visual aspects this time: it’s a big, bold design drawing heavily on the style of the printed publication. There’s a cute little routine which allows you to specify the header image for a given page. We’re using Scribd.com to host the PDF files, allowing us to embed them back into our pages with Flash; but I’ve used a bit of Javascript to hold it all back until it’s required. The site will use comment threading, which isn’t (yet?) the norm: I’ll be watching to see if the users are comfortable with it. And all turned round in less than a week. A fun job.
13 Oct 2009

e-government

careandsupport, consultation, health, wordpress

We care a lot

One of my bigger projects this year has been the website for the Care And Support green paper, aka The Big Care Debate. Basically, the country is in desperate need of a new funding model for long-term care of the elderly and disabled: and in July, three funding options were put forward for consideration. And we’ve been trying various things, online and offline, to engage people in the debate.

When the green paper was published, we did a Commentariat-style ‘commentable document’; there’s also an interactive on-screen questionnaire, with or without a ‘face morphing’ app which shows what you might look like when you’re old. (I can’t claim any credit for that last element btw.) Meanwhile, in the real world, there have been a series of ‘roadshows’ for public and stakeholders – as shown on the clickable homepage map. You’ll also note, if you click on places like Peterborough, Derby or Coventry, that the team have taken a digital camera with them, and are posting snaps on Flickr. Then there’s the Campaign Monitor email list, the Twitter account, the Facebook activity (official and unofficial)…

The response has been huge, and often angry. The site has received more than 3,500 user comments, the majority of which have been to a single page of the commentable document: there’s clearly been a concerted campaign among interest groups to make their opposition known. There’s also been a healthy volume of comments on the campaign’s blog, written – you’ll note – in the name of the lead official, rather than a politician (although that hasn’t stopped people constantly raising the issue of politicians’ expenses claims).

In truth, on occasions, it’s been too much. At one point, we feared the site had been hacked: in fact, we’d just hit the limit imposed by our hosting company on outgoing emails. (Turned out, it was too many people asking to receive email notification of follow-up comments.) If you don’t count Downing Street petitions, it must rank as one of the highest volumes of responses to a government consultation exercise.

Now let’s be honest: most of the feedback has not been complimentary. There are a lot of people who think the changes are designed to cut their current benefits; and anything the Government tries to do at the moment is being met with disillusionment, cynicism and antipathy. So is it a bad thing to have received so many defensive, angry, confrontational comments? Personally, I don’t think so. Negative feedback is still valid feedback. It highlights the areas where there have been problems, if only communication problems. And it gives you a mailing list of people you need to contact, to make your case.

We’re now into the final month of the consultation, which – for some people, I dare say – is a relief. By any volume metric, I’m confident the process will be counted a success. But of course, the only meaningful measure of success is whether or not it yields a workable proposal with general public approval. In the current political climate, I fear that may be too much to ask. Still, I hope the web element has done its bit.
18 Sep 2009

company, politics

libdems, lifestream, lynnefeatherstone, puffbox, wordpress

Presenting the new website for Lynne Featherstone MP

We’re proud to unveil our latest creation: a new website/blog for Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone (or try this link if the DNS hasn’t rolled over for you yet). It’s taken a good few months, and has thrown up challenges on a scale I haven’t had to tackle before. But equally, it presented several opportunities for cheeky innovation, and as you’ll know by now, I can’t say ‘no’ to those.

A bit of background. Lynne started blogging in October 2003, making her one of the first MPs to do so – although she wasn’t an MP at the time. And in fact, she specifically credits her website as a factor in her winning the Hornsey and Wood Green seat in 2005 (on a 14% swing). She was also the first MP to use Twitter, more or less. And she’s in charge of the LibDems’ online campaigning strategy. No pressure then.

We had five and a half years’ worth of blog posts in Blogger, with over 2,000 user comments, to be migrated to WordPress. Oh, and 2,000 hand-coded press releases from the local party branch, to be integrated too please. Plus accounts on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. And what about her contributions to other websites? Not to mention her activity in Parliament?

So the grand concept of the site is the use of a tabbed ‘lifestream‘ as the homepage. The initial view lists her last 10 actions, no matter where they happened – including Early Day Motion signatures, which required me to write my own scraper. Then, if you want to see her activity on one of those specific areas, you just click the appropriate tab. It’s all driven by RSS; the tabs are powered by ajax; the lists are generated by a cron for obvious reasons.

We’ve also made some first steps into Facebook integration. If you’re going to comment on the site, you can sign in with your Facebook credentials: this will pull your name and profile photo into the comment, and give you the option of adding an entry to your Facebook news-stream. I’ve used the official WordPress plugin, but it needed more tweaking than I probably expected, and didn’t always work reliably on all browsers. Let’s just say I’ll be keeping a close eye on it.

I’ve also used Ordnance Survey’s OpenSpace API to create a clickable map of the wards which make up Lynne’s constituency, with the precise boundaries marked, and map detail down to individual building outlines. I shouldn’t need to explain why this might prove to have been an – ahem – interesting move. It’s ready, but we won’t be activating it immediately.

The effort that’s gone into the issue and ward pages probably won’t be evident on the front end: you get a short summary, plus the latest posts tagged accordingly, plus any ‘blogroll’ links, plus – where relevant/available – the latest posts from other related sites or blogs, again pulled in via RSS. But crucially, all of this is done using standard WordPress functionality, in such a way that Lynne and her team can create new pages instantly. No (deep) tech knowledge required.

Naturally, it’s got all the sorts of functions you’d expect from a WordPress blog: sidebar widgets, paged comments, RSS feeds, decent SEO, etc etc. We’ve done pretty well in maintaining addresses from the old site: 50 to 60% of the URLs, at a guess, accounting for the vast majority of site traffic. And if you ignore the issues with Facebook’s custom markup language, everything (I think) passes HTML validation. Hooray!

There’s so, so many people to thank on this one. Jonathan Harris, who happens to be a constituent of Lynne’s, for the design work. Matthew Somerville for tweaking something for me within TheyWorkForYou, plus a couple of people within Parliament who tried to help me with EDM RSS through the proper channels, but ultimately couldn’t. Ex-LibDem tech supremo Mark Pack. Lynne’s staff and councillor colleagues for their early feedback. And Lynne herself for trusting me in the early stages, and encouraging me in the later stages when I didn’t necessarily trust myself.

Every site I do, I always try to do something innovative. This time, there are just so many things that I’ve never done before myself, or that I’ve never seen on a website in the same field. It’s been exhausting, occasionally terrifying, but great fun to do. And I can’t wait to see what happens next.
17 Sep 2009

e-government

bis, defra, wordpress

New sites at Defra and BIS

Two major departmental website changes (that I’m aware of?) today – a completely transformed website for Defra, and a new look for BIS’s corporate site.

The Defra site feels like an incremental improvement of what went before. Gone is the blocky layout and earthy (and somewhat apt?) colour palette, replaced by the de facto standard tabs and colour gradients, and a slightly esoteric colour scheme. It’s clear a lot of thought has gone into site structure, particularly at the upper levels: a friendly homepage highlighting good feature content, and meaningful tabs.

I like it. But it’s a bit disappointing to learn that ‘[they’ve] had to change the web addresses for most of [their] information’ – and I think they’ve missed a trick by not at least trying to redirect some of the key pages.

For example, when you search Google for Defra, you get a list of eight key pages as well as the site homepage – ‘bringing pets to the UK’, ‘animal health & welfare’, ‘your questions answered’ and so on. Only two of these eight links lead anywhere still meaningful. It should only take a minute to add a few ‘301 redirects’ manually. And there’s still no RSS on the site. Grr. These days, I have to say, I think it’s a must-have. Even a reference to the feed generated by COI’s NDS-generated feed would be a help, guys.

BIS meanwhile have changed the design of their ‘pulled together in 3 days‘ corporate site: it now looks much more serious, considered, and dare I say it, conventional. I don’t mean that as a criticism; but the previous incarnation felt so much more agile, innovative even, and I’m going to miss having it there as a wonderful case study. Sniff.

The great news is, it’s still running on WordPress. So in fact, it’s probably just as useful a case study: proof that WordPress can do ‘conventional’ too, if that’s what you want. And with the volume of content in the new site structure, it looks like it’s there to stay for a bit longer, too. Steph and Neil have a bit more to say, including details of some interesting things happening behind the scenes: and fair play again to Steph for open-sourcing his coding work.
26 Aug 2009

company

opensource, plugin, robots.txt, wordpress

WordPress plugin: Robots.txt Reminder

I’m sure we’ve all done it. You’re creating a new WordPress installation, and for a bit of privacy whilst you build the thing, you choose not to ‘allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati’. But in the rush to get the site out the door, you forget to switch the setting to make it ‘visible to everyone, including search engines’.

So I’ve created a laughably simple WordPress plugin called ‘Robots.txt Reminder’, which adds a notification message to the top of all Admin pages if it detects that (a) your blog is set to block search engines, and (b) your user capabilities allow you to make the change. It’s kinda hard to ignore, but that’s kinda the point.

Click here to download robotreminder.zip, then – assuming you’re using one of the more recent versions of WordPress, and are able to do automated updating – upload the zip file as-is, by clicking on Plugins -> Add New -> Upload.

It’s not the first plugin I’ve ever coded, but it’s the first plugin I’ve ever ‘released’ like this, so please be gentle. 🙂
11 Aug 2009

e-government

birmingham, pressoffice, wordpress

Birmingham council: not all bad

Last week, I shared the general sense of shock around the blogs at news about Birmingham council’s new website: 3.5 years late, and costing £2.8 million. But last night, to my great surprise, I came across BirminghamNewsroom.com – a WordPress-powered website for the council’s press office, launched a couple of months back.

It’s based on iCompany – a ‘premium’ theme costing $80, with only minimal customisation; and by sheer virtue of choosing WordPress, it comes with a remarkably rich feature set, not least its offering of RSS feeds (and email alerting via S2). And that’s before we get on to its integration of Twitter, Flickr, YouTube/Vodpod, etc etc.

The domain was registered in March this year, and the site is hosted by justhost.com – who appear to charge a jawdropping £2.95/month for unlimited disk space / bandwidth / MySQL / domains, cPanel based, plus a free domain name. In other words, the perfect antidote to an over-running, over-spending web project. And with no immediate evidence of Big Consultancy involvement.

There are a few odd things in the build; I’ve written previously about why I don’t like using off-the-shelf themes; and if I wanted to be exceptionally cynical, I’d be concerned that the Press Office had felt the need to go out and build this site: what, the £2.8m site can’t match WordPress? But instead, I’m going to say ‘well done Birmingham press office’. I’ve always said WordPress would make the ideal platform for a press office, and this kinda proves it.