thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Many of you know that I have been very busy working on #wordcampnz for the past 3 months. We just hosted 110+ of you at Unitec in Mt Albert on all things related to WordPress and the users.

These are my personal thoughts however a version of this post will soon be over on the WordCampNZ.

As one of the organisers and the Auckland based host thought I’d give a bit more background on what we are doing here & where it might go to in the future.

Background

First up thanks for all the feedback – offline and online about – everything related to #wordcampnz.

On content of presentations can we say that we haven’t done our our jobs right if you don’t hate some of the presenters / presentations – because at the very same time others in the audience are loving it. It is a user generated conference and each user has a slightly differing perspective.

There is really only a problem if everyone likes all presentations. That means we are being mediocre and playing it way too safe.

This year we picked wordcampnz speakers that we thought would enlighten, engage, inspire and surprise and we expected some of them might even push some other buttons. These people are just like bloggers.

Wait – they are bloggers – and all of them blogging in one way or another. Like them you can have a blog in 30 seconds and away you go. Join the revolution any time you want.

“There are over 25 million WordPress publishers as of June 2010: 11.4 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 13.8 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.”

See usage stats for WordPress over here . This is all great but core contributors are in the low hundreds and as a community -we need to do better and get plugin & theme developers paid. Many plugin developers give away 95% of their plugins with no donations at all and that is just plain wrong.

This is not a beat up (just quietly) but a reality check is needed on many open source projects, not just the WordPress one. We all need to make more donations to developers and hire them for bigger projects when we get the chance. So please do check out those speakers.

While talking with the local WordPress community we did also come across a few awesome developers & contributors who are a tad burnt out & sadly couldn’t make it this time.

Last year we did the first #wordcampnz users event in Wellington at the Mt Vic Bowling Club. Around 110 locals and others attended including Matt Mullenweg

The really cool thing about #wordcampnz 2010 is that 90% of you were not at Wellington last year.

And its not because you are WordPress newbies. Once again we are awestruck by the talent & sites we’ve seen. Just at random check out Sam at Boolean Gareth Price – WorkWorkWork Lee at leetewal who all made it and Slamxhype who couldn’t be here.  Adam from Slamxhype started in Grey Lynn & is now huge in London, Tokyo, New York and all around the world.

TED Blog is on WordPress – see the showcase details over at WordPress.org.

What is Next?

WordCampNZ is all voluntary with a core group of trustees plus volunteers who all helped out on the day. We registered a charitable trust and we need some accounting and other resource to keep all of that sweet. Thanks to all of those who did help.

I know some WordPress developers are working up to 18 hrs a day on keeping their clients happy. Often they are the very same people who help out on wordcamps and the like.

Many of us work on low budget projects cos we like them but that doesn’t cut it with the bank manager or the accountants so (as a community) we do need to get better organised.

Juggling passion and business is a balancing act. This morning my daughter asked me how much $ I make in my job and I did my best to explain that it is not always about the $. That for me and many of us with families we plan our day around being able to be there for them as much as possible. Being with your family and being “present” when you are there is not always easy but it is extremely rewarding.

Many of the #wordcampnz community are highly action oriented. For my own business I love working with non-profits and causes because they are highly focussed.  They don’t have the big budgets so they need to make every media interaction and contact work.

If you came along to #wordcampnz 2010 and didn’t get enough (technical) detail please be aware that the speakers & presenters do need to get paid for their hard won IP at some time. We will put up some slides from this years event however some of the slides will be slightly different that what was presented for that reason.

No one is complaining. However…

It would be great to get some new trustees & share the workload a bit better. Anthony is now living in Melbourne. To put it in perspective he was 18 when he co-organised WordCamp Australia in Nov 2008. Hats off for that. Dan’s company Instinct is sitting on a rocket ship with more than 500,000 downloads of the wp-ecommerce plugin. So Dan is way busy. I have some adventures of my own that I’m excited about and so it is a good time to get wider community involvement on the organising side. To help with that we will get a work list out.

We are extremely grateful for our corporate sponsors Unitec, MagnumMac, DPS, Sitehost, AllGoodBananas and others like TweetTwins, Vaughn Davis, Catherine Arrow, Fraser at BrightMindLabs, Idealog Magazine.

The person who bought in the chocolate cake deserves a medal

Berend de Boer says on twitter

“#wordcampnz was very political, far too many greenie causes, and even someone running for political office, potentially a $60,000 job.”

“A #wordcampnz was quite different from a #drupal event, far more for wordpress users than wordpress developers”  on twitter

But wait – the cake came from one those political greenies and was a really nice thing to do.

Thanks also Berend for the compliment about the event being more for users. That is exactly why so many “regular” non-developers use WordPress. But with a full day of tech related sessions in room 2 (also for designers) we did cover most of the development stream. There were also 2 open source developers that we had hoped could make it but in the end they didn’t.

We did have a couple of sessions that could have been swapped over e.g Security should have been in tech room and Dan’s e-commerce presentation was probably more general. However security is an important topic and we wanted to pay close attention to that.

In my personal view having content with a cause or causes makes it real and passionate people make better speakers. My personal highlights were Courtney Lamberts oprah exercise and Justin & Sam from Vitallink. Richard from Dept of Doing all made my top 3 but everyone was good.

Content anywhere and especially online is really hitting the spot when it gets people off their butts and prompts them into action.

With your permission we would like to send out a monthly email to keep the #wordcampnz conversation going.It would also be really useful if we can implement BuddyPress and use that locally in NZ and Australia to link up the WordPress communities here.

GigaOM Pro is the kind of BuddyPress site that we should be able to use and develop in ANZ

We will keep up the social media and there are well advanced plans for two wordcamps in Wellington and Melbourne in about 6 months time.

More about that later but the general plan is to combine resources for ANZ so we can cover more territory and get you some speakers from the US, UK and elsewhere.

Thanks again. Please let me /us know your comments. Keep in touch as we will load up photos, slideshows and other resources as soon as we can.

As always let me know what you think in comments here or via twitter.

One of the key value points that WordPress offers to its users is a seemingly inexhaustible function library of mini – applications or programming shortcuts.  There is now such a huge supply of plugin extensions that making sense of which WordPress plugins to use can be a challenge for new and even experienced users.

These plugins allow you to extend the core system in any direction without needing to be a coder or rocket scientist. This puts WordPress firmly into the hands of business managers rather than leaving it with the tech staff.

A huge part of the appeal of WordPress for me is the ability to be able to prototype various sections and leverage scripts that have already been road tested by the community.

Imagine you want a slideshow for photos (NextGEN Gallery 1,865,952 times), an events manager, an ecommerce system (WP e-Commerce) or a snip of code that automatically shows related content  (Yet Another Related Posts PluginDownloaded 465,626 times)  just to highlight some of the popular and well known ones.

Chances are all of those functional needs and questions have been considered  before.  In fact for some of the more popular tasks it may be as simple as using the add new plugin button inside the dashboard and searching then auto installing something that looks to be in the right user function zone. However many plugin developers don’t appear to do even the most simple of searches before they re-vinvent the wheel by doing yet another slightly different plugin.

So far so good but at last count on the main plugin repository there were 9,096 PLUGINS, 84,520,662 DOWNLOADS, AND COUNTING. This makes the search and selection process somewhat more complicated.

Having a vast list of plugins is a good quick way of testing out concepts and approaches. what it won’t say there on the counter page is that the vast percentage of plugins were developed to “scratch an itch” by technical problem solvers.

This means that maybe as many as 80% of the plugins have somewhat limited value to most users. And depending on the scale of your site they may very well be ideal for what you need but if you have a larger site your developers might want to look more closely at custom building functions into your theme or custom plugins – whichever is most optimal for fast performance and security.

There is an intriguing discussion over on Alex Kings blog about whether WordPress is a platform or a product As Alex says

“Another challenge with WordPress as a product engagements is managing expectations in regards to 3rd-party plugins and themes. In most cases we will try to budget time to code-review any plugin we include in one of our builds to make sure it is secure and will scale to client’s needs. This can result in us advising the client not to use the plugin or theme they had intended, or require additional time and cost investment in addressing shortcomings of the plugin or theme. There is also the issue of fixing functional bugs in these plugins.

People who view WordPress as a product will typically expect that any collection of plugins will work elegantly and seemlessly together. Rarely is this the case. Even between experienced WordPress developers you will find preferences for different implementation approaches. Mix in plugins written by developers that do not have extensive WordPress experience and you can end up trying to weld the transmission from a 57 Chevy to a tricycle.”

It is not always obvious when there are problems with a particular plugin. Many will work but may clash with certain other plugins or even theme functions and this weakness might need lots of extra testing if the site is going to be a large one.

If it is a small site, you may be able to just switch out to an alternative plugin and most of the time that will work.

Here are some of the more popular plugins. It is a fairly random set of 10 but based on the hundreds of sites that I’ve seen and worked on my guess is that most sites would have at least half of these and combinations of the next 200 or so listed plugins.

• Google XML Sitemaps Downloaded 3,659,339 times
• WPtouch iPhone Theme Downloaded 796,224 times
• All in One SEO Pack Downloaded 4,991,211 times
• Fast and Secure Contact Form Downloaded 269,918 times
• Contact Form 7 Downloaded 1,851,559 times
• NextGEN Gallery Downloaded 1,865,952 times
• WP Super Cache Downloaded 1,197,587
• Google Analyticator Downloaded 854,535
• Twitter Tools Downloaded 532,607
• Sociable Downloads 993,790

You might say that the top 10% of plugins follow a power law distribution, the true number I would guess is much lower / maybe 3% of the total 9,000 or so. The other 97% of plugins have a very long tail distribution.

Your search choices are as follows. The other variables are voter approval (highest rated) by version and general age of the plugin including how many times (Recently Updated) the plugin has been updated. Raw downloads are indicative but if the plugin is updated 6 times per year you may want to divide that number by 6 to get a better idea of relative popularity.

Sort by Relevance, Highest Rated , Newest , Recently Updated, Most Popular

Unfortunately the search filter process is not as good as just using a Google site search. For example looking for SEO plugins as below.

site:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ SEO

If you search around you can find various top plugin lists that might also be a useful guide.

Finally some of the differences between plugins simply come down to the programmers preferences and arguments about quality of programming code are eternal. They remind me of the Paul Grahams Blub analogy

“Blub is a hypothetical programming language; it is an average programming language “[r]ight in the middle of the abstractness continuum. It is not the most powerful language, but it is more powerful than Cobol or machine language.”. It was used by Graham to illustrate a comparison of power between programming languages that goes beyond Turing completeness, and more specifically, to illustrate the difficulty of comparing a programming language one knows to one that one does not^[14]:”

Sometimes all the programmers are wrong or all right but ask an engineer and the better measurement might be optimal speed of loading or security considerations.

So what is the best way of making sense of WordPress plugins?  I would say the worst person to ask about this is a programmer.

In the past I have run plugin workshops for individual clients to review what they have in context and compared to what other similar sites might be doing.

However if you are a programmer I’d have a good long look at the Blair Williams presentation called : Pimp Your WordPress Plugin or if you’d rather check the video for Pimp Your Plugin over at WordCampTV. Also worth checking out is another recent video by Jonathan Dingman: Essential WordPress Plugins & Optimization should be standard issue for new installs and methods for squeezing the best performance out of your new WordPress blog.

Help in picking plugins is very much on the way. Later this year instead of a version update for WordPress itself the community is being encouraged to work together on a number of the top plugins. These will be identified as core plugins.

One of the best ways of improving code quality is to engage multiple programmers who can argue about what is best and hopefully peer review some of this the same way that WordPress code is reviewed. This is an excellent move in my opinion and I look forward to seeing how it goes later this year.

Wellingtonian Dan Milward and myself got to WordCampSF back on May 1 in San Francisco. There were 750+ people there and for most of the day there were two streams running with more technical sessions downstairs and general – more road-map style sessions upstairs.

San Francisco WordCamp is always a bit more open ended than the other  60 WordCamps now held everywhere around the world which are more locally tuned. Half of the attendees are from out of town and there are quite a few connectors from all around the world including us.

The sessions for San Francisco included some forward thinking and a few surprises.

First up I went to Niall Kennedy‘s session on writing plugins. Niall is the VideoPress guy and made the excellent point that using VideoPress for running video on your website is much easier and better performance than you can get from your regular shared hosting package.

I’m hoping that Scott Berkun‘s session video will be up soon as I suspect it was also very good.

It is always a balancing act programming a WordCamp since the actual projects are often more interesting than the platform but attendees expect elements of both and there are always a range of attendees skills and experience.

This can lead to too much tech and not enough project wow and vice versa.

The full schedule for SF 2010 is over here. One of the surprising things at WordCamp SF was the high profile of Microsoft who have clearly noticed WordPress usage over the past few years, as have Google and Salesforce.

Daniel Cook presented on how to turn Microsoft Office into a game. I opted for an alternative session from Vanessa Fox on audience engagement which truthfully wasn’t that engaging.

John Ford then gave a presentation on “Living with Our Computers… and Keeping it Healthy” which sure enough emptied the room. Who wants to hear the words healthy and computers in the same sentence. Point being that our modern lifestyle of sitting down most of the day is really tough on our physiology.

To be fair Jane Wells was talking on “User Experience the WordPress Way” at the same time which I would have been at if I hadn’t already seen a presentation by her on that.

After an excellent BBQ lunch we then filed in to a jam packed theatre for  the Matt Mullenweg keynote.

An extended version of this post is over at WordCamp NZ including Matt’s video …