Puffbox

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

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    Defra use Commentariat for food consultation

    Defra Commentariat

    Just to note that Defra is using WordPress to power its new consultation on Food 2030: a fairly straightforward use of Steph’s Commentariat theme, with a bit of Defra branding added. So nothing too clever, but as I’ve said before, I think it’s a very good thing if we’re clearly seen to be reusing the same code.

    It’s not the first Defra use of WordPress of course; their third sector blog – in ‘public beta’ – has been pumping out the posts steadily since late 08, although comments are a bit thin. Both sites look to be on the same server, but the root URLs (‘blogs’ and ‘sandbox’) are not aliases of each other.

    Oh, and I had nothing to do with either of them.

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    MPs who use WordPress

    I had a bit of a brainwave earlier, which led me to wondering how many MPs run websites on WordPress. Taking as my starting point the Total Politics directory of Parliamentarians’ blogs, I soon received a number of extra suggestions from Twitter folks… leading me to the following list of MPs whose blogs (or non-blog websites) are powered by WordPress:

    If anyone knows any more, I’d love to add them to the list. Oh, and for the record… with such low take-up (so far), my brainwave may be a little ahead of its time.

    Update: a special thanks to Danny Dagan (whose Blogminster project is in development) and PSF’s Ian Cuddy for providing a load of new ones I didn’t know about, even one or two at Cabinet level. I now count three Cabinet ministers on WordPress: Messrs Byrne, Bradshaw and Johnson… plus Nick Brown, who ‘attends’ Cabinet as chief whip, but isn’t ‘in’ it.

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    Building DFID's new consultation platform

    Consultation.DFID.gov.uk

    A few months back, I helped the Department For International Development set up an online consultation site for their white paper on Eliminating World Poverty. We used WordPress (obviously), plus Steph Gray’s Commentariat theme (with a few tweaks). The site was well received, and had close to 500 reader comments, many of them lengthy. So when a new consultation came along, into DFID’s plans to spend £8.5bn on education in developing countries, I’m delighted to say they were keen to do it again.

    This time, we’ve done it slightly differently – creating a reusable platform for online consultations, instead of just another one-off site build. Rather than use the Commentariat theme itself, I’ve built a generic DFID-styled theme to fit almost seamlessly into their corporate look and feel; but the defining elements – reverse-dated posts in categories, the floating comment box – are still there.

    And significantly, we’ve moved from ‘normal’ WordPress to a WordPress MU (‘multi user’) installation. This brings several important benefits for DFID:

    • the ability to create new sub-sites in a matter of seconds, through the WP interface;
    • centralised management of platform / plugins / themes;
    • one sign-on for all blogs on the system: OK, it’s not ‘single sign-on’ via LDAP or anything, but it’s a start!
    • varying levels of user permission: you can give someone ‘admin’ status on a sub-site, and still keep the most dangerous options at the higher ‘site admin’ level;
    • once it’s in, you can avoid all the usual IT Department headaches – DNS being a particular problem, I’ve found;
    • and yes, it’s also cheaper for them in the long run. They no longer need to hire me to set these things up for them. (D’oh!)

    Now having said all that, working with MU isn’t without its issues. Historically it didn’t get quite the same love and attention that ‘normal’ WordPress got; although to be absolutely fair, the delay between ‘normal’ releases and the matching MU releases has been cut right down. Some of its processes and language could be clearer: for example, when is an admin not an admin? When he/she’s a site admin, of course. And how do you make someone a site admin? You type their username into a text box under Options, naturally. (That took me a l-o-n-g time to figure out.)

    Coincidentally, as I’m writing this, I get a tweet from COI’s Seb Crump: ‘@simond what’s the tipping point for considering WPMU? Plans for maybe up to 3 blogs eventually, but their launches spread over next 2+years‘

    For me, it’s not particularly about the number of blogs being managed: it’s about the convenience of using the single installation. If those benefits I bullet-listed above are of interest to you, then MU is worth doing even if you’re only planning on having two blogs. Particularly in a corporate context, it means you can delegate quite a lot of responsibility to individual staff or departments, whilst still being able to wade in as and when. (And with automated upgrading now built-in, I’d say that’s a bigger issue now than it was previously.) But be warned, MU does have a learning curve. Even as a (normal) WordPress veteran of several years experience, it still beats me sometimes.

    But in a 2+ year timespan, it ultimately won’t matter. It was announced in late May 2009 that ‘the thin layer of code that allows WordPress MU to host multiple WordPress blogs will be merged into WordPress’; I don’t believe there’s a confirmed timetable for it, though. That should mean that the MU elements get raised to the same level of perfection as in the ‘normal’ product: unquestionably a good thing, I’d say.

    Anyway, back to the DFID project. I’m delighted with the first site to be built on the platform: and the DFID guys have done a great job dressing it up with imagery – it makes a huge difference. But the really exciting part, for me, will be seeing the next one get built. And the next one. And the next one.

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    RSS usage on Whitehall's websites

    How many central government websites offer RSS feeds these days? The good news is that of the 20 departments represented in the Cabinet, I could only find one that didn’t. But it was a bit of a surprise to see how few offered ‘full text’ feeds, as opposed to ‘summary only’.

    I visited each of the 20 departments listed on the Parliament web page – the top result in Google for ‘UK cabinet ministers’, looking for a main RSS news feed. Here’s what I found:

    • There are explicit references to RSS feeds on 18 of the 20 sites: the exceptions are the Scotland Office and Defra. There is a Defra feed if you know where to look (namely COI); but how many would know to look there? That leaves the Scotland Office as the only department completely lacking an RSS feed for departmental news. (Its Secretary of State, Jim Murphy does have a blog, but I’m not counting that here.)
    • Five of the 20 fall back on the feeds produced by COI’s News Distribution Service. That leaves 14 of the 20 producing their own feeds – in most cases, in addition to the feeds at COI.
    • Only one, FCO, directs people through Google’s Feedburner service.
    • Only 3 of the 20 provide ‘full text’ RSS feeds – allowing people to read the full press release (etc) instantly, and opening up the possibilities for easy information re-use (ie ‘mashups’). The rest require people to ‘click through’ to a page on the originating website. This is common in commercial publishing, where on-page advertising is a key driver.
    • Of the 3 offering ‘full text’, 2 are running on WordPress: Number10 and the Wales Office, both of which I admittedly had some involvement in. The other one is DECC.
    • The Department of Health’s RSS feeds aren’t valid: the ‘link’ element quoted in the feed doesn’t include www.dh.gov.uk. A curious problem to have caused yourself, and a trivial one to fix. I’ve mentioned this before, in the context of Directgov; and of course, the two share a publishing platform. A broken one, in this case.
    • It was a pleasant surprise to see the majority of sites have ‘autodiscovery tags‘ in the header of their homepages – a behind-the-scenes way of indicating that a site has an RSS feed, which can (for example) light up an icon in the browser interface. But 8 don’t. I’m looking at you FCO, Home Office, Defra, DFID, Cabinet Office, Defence, Transport, and DCMS. Some of them have the appropriate tags deeper into the site, to be fair… but it’s a free and instant win those sites are missing out on.

    The thing is, it’s so easy to get RSS right. Ask any blogger: when executed properly, RSS feeds should be an automatic, never-even-think-about-it thing. Each time a new item becomes available on a site, it should just drop into the RSS feed, notifying people – and importantly, mechanical services – of its availability.

    And the easiest way to get RSS right is to build your news website on WordPress. Out of the box, you get valid RSS feeds for virtually any view of your site’s news content. Feeds by category / press office desk / minister? By keyword tag… or combinations of keyword tags? How about infinitely customisable feeds, based on search queries? Yes, to all of those. Probably within a couple of days, if you get the right people in. (Hint hint.)

    A lot of government websites are going to need a rethink following the next election. It’s the ideal opportunity to upgrade the news area, by moving to a system that’s been explicitly designed around the timely publication of short text articles, generally presented in chronological order. By which I mean, a blogging system. And specifically, WordPress.

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    WordCamp UK 2009: seriously good

    My session at WordCamp UK 2009

    I can’t underline enough how enjoyable, educational and thought-provoking this weekend’s second WordCampUK was: over 100 people, including a large local contingent, gathering in Cardiff Bay for two packed days of WordPress talk, a bit of food, quite a lot to drink, and nowhere near enough sleep.

    Last year in Birmingham, it felt amateur – and I mean that in both the positive and negative senses of the word. It was a bit like a first date. Fun and exciting, with some unforgettable moments, and clearly the start of something special – but acutely embarrassing in places. (Oh, and an incredibly vicious Twitter backchannel.)

    All so different this year. Bigger and better presenters with bigger and better stories to tell, and a definite sense that we’re shifting up the gears, really quite quickly. And the Twitter chat was much nicer too.

    The highlight, inevitably, was the appearance of Mr WordPress himself, Matt Mullenweg. Charming, charismatic, cool and – I’m not ashamed to admit this – cute. Rather than give his almost traditional ‘State of the Word’ lecture, he took questions from the floor… and it was inspirational stuff.

    I’ll take away a few specific things from what he said. His description of WordPress as a platform comparable to Windows or MacOS, given the number of plugin ‘programs’ written for it. His perfect ease at calling WordPress a CMS. His unexpectedly complimentary tone regarding Drupal. But most of all, the purity of his philosophy, and the strength of his commitment to it. I expected to detect a sharp business edge to his remarks (cf Zuckerberg); in the end, I was relieved not to.

    We had many references, particularly through day one, to government use – and indeed, Matt confirmed that the UK and Brazil are the two countries where government buy-in is highest. So no pressure on me, then, for my Sunday lunchtime slot on the government picture – lessons learned from the number10.gov.uk launch, and the many ripples spreading out from that (which I’ll write up separately). I was my usual bouncy, passionate self, and it seemed to go down well: somebody described me as the WordPress community’s Jamie Oliver, which I’ll take as a compliment. Pukka!

    Whereas last year saw a lot of people presenting their hobby sites, this year seemed to be entirely professional examples. But it didn’t stop speaker after speaker handing over their tips and advice – to put it another way, their trade secrets. So whilst WordPress is unquestionably becoming a serious product, and a serious business, it remains a supportive community. It’s Us versus Them – with Them being different things or people at different times. (I should have made a list.)

    I’ll admit, I went to WordCamp looking for an answer to a difficult question. I’m making my living from WordPress, and I can see a proper industry starting to take shape around it: so what should I be doing about it?

    One answer was Matt Mullenweg’s hippy philosophy, without which we wouldn’t be here in the first place, of course. Betfair’s Nick Garner, meanwhile, framed it all as a commercial opportunity, with the proposal for a ‘WordCon’ spinoff event pitching WordPress (and us as WordPress experts) to corporate clients. It led to some, ahem, heated debate.

    Maybe Matt needs to grow up. Maybe Nick totally misses the point. Maybe they’re both right in different ways. My question remains unanswered, but I’m all the more convinced that it’s the right question to be asking, and the right moment to be asking it.

    Pic by Mark, @cMadMan: that’s me at the front, waving a can of Red Bull Cola at the good people of WordCamp.

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    Puffbox builds RSA's Bloggers' Circle

    BloggersCircle.net

    Some of the most fun projects come out of the blue. I’ve been following RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor’s blog for some time, and noted with interest his idea back in May to start some kind of ‘bloggers’ circle’. ‘There are too many bloggers and not enough readers so genuinely good posts can fall between the cracks,’ he wrote – correctly. So he suggested a ‘club’ whereby members would circulate their best posts, and would commit to writing about other members’ contributions.

    Then I got an email from Taylor’s ‘old chum’ Matt Cain, asking if I could help them build a website for the project. Matt sent me a logo, a rough set of wireframes – and a very tight deadline. We managed to turn the website around within a couple of days, and it went live today at bloggerscircle.net.

    It’s built on WordPress. OK, you didn’t need me to tell you that. But it’s got a couple of clever little touches, which probably won’t be immediately obvious.

    • When people sign up to join the circle, we need their name, a website URL and a contact email address. And when you’ve built as many WordPress sites as I have lately, that combination of form fields says only one thing – comments. So that’s how we’re handling the registrations, as comments on a (dummy) page. Using the built-in functionality, the coordinator receives an alert email each time someone signs up (ie submits a comment); and like any comment, it’s a one-click process for him to accept or reject.
    • There’s an RSS feed of ‘highlights’ from the Circle, which we’ll be running through Delicious, but I also wanted to offer a feed of each signup. We’ve done this, rather cheekily, using a custom page template containing a custom comment loop. It calls the comments (for a different page, incidentally), and presents the comment author’s details into an RSS template, rather than an HTML template. The title and content of that page aren’t wasted; we use these for the feed’s channel info.
    • And then, just to complete the Automattic connection, we call that same custom comment loop to generate the ‘rogues gallery’ of Gravatars that appears at the top of each page. In these early days, a lot of people don’t have Gravatars associated with their email addresses; but we hope they’ll see the good reason to do so.

    Having just come out of the longest project in company history, it was a real delight to take this on, and turn it around so quickly. I’m quite pleased with the presentation, particularly the way the membership itself is the focus of the page; and it’s always fun to do things with WordPress technology that it wasn’t ever really meant to do. A few rough edges have appeared since launch – inevitable given the sheer lack of testing time, but nothing we can’t handle.

    Taylor – whose blog really has become excellent reading – is frank about the project: ‘We are starting small and maybe we won’t succeed but it’s always worth having a dream.’ But he continues: ‘Imagine if there were hundreds or even thousands of amateur bloggers signed up.’ Well, er… if that happens, that design will have a few problems – but as they say, they’ll be nice problems to have.

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    Puffbox's social intranet for government

    Last week, we finally completed the longest-running and most ambitious WordPress-based project in Puffbox history. Back in February, with snow on the ground, we started developing the concept of a self-contained ‘social intranet’ platform to be used by staff across government – DFID, BERR (as was), FCO and elsewhere – involved in the many facets of trade work. And with temperatures soaring at the end of June, we finally saw the site get off the ground.

    Maybe I’ve just been unlucky in my career, but I’ve never seen an intranet I didn’t dislike. So the opportunity to design one, based on the experience of the 2.0 Years, was quite appealing. Inspired in particular by the work of Jenny Brown and Lloyd Davis at Justice, we based our thinking on the notion of an RSS dashboard. Since the biggest problem with most intranets is that they aren’t reliably updated, we thought, why not build an intranet that updates itself? So at its heart, the site is a huge RSS archive – pulling in news releases and media commentary from UK government, international organisations, expert analysts and humble bloggers. And since it’s all sitting on top of a WordPress MU installation, it’s easy for us to make each item commentable – on the platform itself, rather than at the originating site.

    starredOf course, there’s a risk of information overload. So we’ve built a ‘collaborative editing’ function – along the lines of Google Reader’s shared items, but done as a group thing. If you read something which you think your colleagues ought to see too, you click the star icon, and it gets promoted to a ‘daily highlights’ list on the site homepage. Then, at the end of each day, there’s a Daily Email which rounds up all the ‘starred items’ – so even if you never look at the website, and we’re realistic enough to accept that some won’t, then you can still get the benefit from it.

    We’ve used various WordPress plugins to add calendar functionality; to allow users to upload (non-restricted) documents; to put their faces against their contributions, making the place feel a bit more human; and even to allow senior staff to blog on the site via email. You could probably accuse us of throwing the entire 2.0 playbook at the project, and you’d be absolutely right. But apart from the core aggregation and recommendation functionality, everything else uses off-the-shelf open-source plugins, installed and configured (generally) within a few hours. So if they don’t work out, what have you lost?

    This project has taken up most of my time for the past four months; working with my regular co-conspirators Simon Wheatley and Jonathan Harris, we’ve pushed the boundaries of the technology, and tested the limits of the civil service mindset. Although many of the individual elements have been tried before in government, I believe it’s the first time anyone’s tried to do all of it, all together – and crucially, all on an in-house system, which opens up some very interesting possibilities. (And yes, as ever, you might be pleasantly surprised by the price tag, too.)

    So is this finally an intranet I like? I’ll offer a provisional yes for now, but maybe it’s better to ask me again in a few months. Since it’s a closed system, there’s limited scope for me to demo it… but if it’s something you might be interested in, ask me very nicely, and I’ll see what I can do.

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    Telegraph moves its blogs to WordPress

    It’s a sign of how far WordPress has come, that I find myself noting the Telegraph’s transfer of its blogging platform to WordPress purely because I feel I should… and not because it’s especially exciting. I mean, if you were going to set up a large-scale public blogging community, why on earth wouldn’t you use the world-leading, zero-price tag product?

    The newspaper media group’s new blogs editor, Damian Thompson is buzzing with excitement at the potential which this move opens up. Among the ‘immediate benefits’ he highlights: faster operation, easier commenting, better integration with the wider site, even a Twitter element. (I’d add a few others myself, all available instantly with a bit of URL hacking.) But he’s right to recognise that the switch won’t be immediately popular – and guess what, the majority of the 200+ comments on his introduction post aren’t positive. Yeah, we’ve all been there.

    Most of the work, I understand, was done by the Telegraph’s in-house team, with some assistance from my fellow WordCampers (and technically, I suppose, competitors) InterconnectIT. The firm’s director, Dave Coveney says they’re already working with another newspaper group and a magazine publisher. He’s clearly seeing the same momentum I am; there’s certainly no shortage of interest in WordPress just now.

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    Innovative & skilful: it's The Business

    New BIS website

    On reflection, if you’re going to put two of the most forward-thinking people in e-government into the same department, great things are probably to be expected. BERR (as was)‘s Neil and DIUS (as was)‘s Steph put their heads together on Monday afternoon, and on Wednesday, they launched a new corporate website for the newly-created Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. It’s based on WordPress, with a bit of RSS magic, and the help of a few (free) web-based tools. And it’s brilliant.

    Steph documents the work with characteristic modesty:

    It won’t win any design awards, and the downside to Heath Robinson web development will no doubt be some quirks in reliability. But happily, we can say we haven’t spent a penny on external web development or licencing costs, and we got something up within 3 days. Compared to the static, hand-coded site DIUS had for the first 18 months of its life, it’s a start, and a little bit innovative too.

    Actually, I like the design: it’s forcibly simple, but that’s no bad thing, and is something they should try to maintain in the long run. There may be quirks; but that doesn’t make it any worse than some of the £multi-million CMSes in Whitehall. Yes of course it’s work in progress, but isn’t everything – or rather, shouldn’t it be?

    I can’t think of a better case study for the power of open source, web tools, pretty much everything I bang on about here. And if my work for the Wales Office was any kind of inspiration, I’m delighted to have been a part of it.

    Oh, and just for the record… that’s now the Prime Minister’s office and the Deputy Prime Minister First Secretary of State’s department running their websites on WordPress. I’m just saying… 😉

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    Making bbPress speak proper English

    Today’s focus has been mostly on bbPress, the discussion forum cousin of WordPress. I’ve played with it a few times in the past, but never yet had cause to use it properly or professionally. But when a call came from a client last week, asking to forum up an existing WordPress-based site, I ignored the advice of Tom Loosemore and set to work. Not feeling brave enough to use the v1.0 release candidate, I downloaded the latest stable v0.9.x version, and had it up and running in next to no time.

    As it’s my first time building a bbPress theme, I’ve restricted myself almost entirely to CSS, and letting bbPress fall back on the default PHP code templates. As with WordPress, if your theme doesn’t include a file for a particular purpose, bbPress uses the equivalent from the default theme (‘kakumei’). But if you do that, you’re reliant on the peculiarities coded into those default templates… including, as it turned out, their Americanised spelling.

    Unlike many forum apps, bbPress doesn’t have many bells and whistles – overall, that’s a good thing in my book. But one of the few extras it does offer is the ability to mark certain discussions as a ‘favorite’. You can view these as a ‘personalised homepage’, or follow their updates with a unified RSS feed. Fantastic, except if you’re building a site for a UK audience – who would much rather save some favourites. So for a while this morning, I found myself unexpectedly creating a new language pack for bbPress. This consisted of:

    • Downloading a .pot file from Automattic.com’s servers. This is effectively a big list of all the individual system messages used by the software (in the default US English).
    • Installing the open-source poEdit for Windows, which shows you all these messages in a big list, and asks you to enter equivalents in the foreign language of your choice (in our case, ‘en-gb’) alongside. I ran a search for ‘favorite’ and changed all matching messages to use the proper spelling. 😉 Watch out for phrases with more than one use of the word.
    • When you save your amendments, you’ll end up with a file called en-gb.mo. If you’ve only changed the references to ‘favorite’, it’ll only be 2 or 3 Kb in size. You’ll need to create a languages folder within the bb-includes folder of your bbPress installation, and put the .mo file in it.
    • Then you’ll need to edit the bb-config.php file at the root level of your bbPress installation. Look for a line that says define(‘BB_LANG’, ”); and add en-gb in between the second pair of quotes.
    • And that should do it. When WordPress tries to produce a page based on the default templates, it will scan through your en-gb translations list, and in the few cases where it finds a match, it’ll replace the Americanized default with your Queen’s English alternative.

    This reminds me of an idea I had a while back, to produce a ‘corporate English’ language pack for WordPress, replacing blogger jargon with text which might be more familiar to press officers, marketing people, journalists, or whoever. It might still be worth doing; although in the meantime, the word ‘blog’ seems to have lost its overwhelmingly negative connotations.