thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

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 …

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Helping clients plan to get the best out of their WordPress sites is something that I really enjoy.

Having a theme library loaded and switching between them for instant changes to “the look and feel” is a fun moment in the discovery planning process.

For non – WordPress users a Theme is effectively a website design “skin” that overlays the content. It works by providing a filtered view of the text (XML) content.

For more technical users we are talking about combination of stylesheet (CSS) and some core function code (pages, posts, comments) which is written in PHP.

At the visual level this is fairly easy. For example if the client has an existing site structure we would look to match the colours, and general look and feel with a similar theme that has 1 , 2 or 3 columns. We may be also looking for menu layouts, header functions, plus sidebar and footer configurations.

Part of this is to understand the branding context and also if there is an existing format whether that should be kept if if there is a more optimal layout.

What we would then do is match fonts, include branded headers and other brand ID assets on a theme that was as close as possible but sometimes it can be quicker to build a new theme that to find one that matches up.

Way back in ’97 there was programme called Net Objects which did something similar in packaging various components together with a set of styles and saved all of the information into an object called a NOD probably some kind of early XML file.

The great thing about that programme was the user interface for applying “styles” really simplified the menu and navigation processes by including all the image icons and button type files along with it.  I used that for many years for fast prototyping of sites and to replace PowerPoint for presentations as it was faster and easier.

Fast forward 9 years to 2006 – WordPress was coming of age with newer more visual releases although from memory I think that Joomla had a bigger range of theme like styles at the time.

But by late 2006 when I started this blog there were some great themes around for WordPress and having used lots of content management systems before I was ready to try something a bit more open ended.

Where to Search for WordPress Themes?

The best place to start is WordPress.org theme library. This is because the 800+ themes there have been sorted into some kind of taxonomy and at least partly vetted by WordPress developers and enthusiasts. This is important for two reasons.

1. Some themes have hidden code in them which might be advertising or worse. See the theme authors guidelines which aims to prevent  “hidden, paid or sponsored links in the theme. Links back to the author’s site are fine.”
2. More importantly this library provides a structure for searching where you can filter searches by types such as fixed or variable width, number of columns, main colour, features and subject which are called theme tags.

This generally provides a  range of visual templates and ideas for a wider search in other theme libraries.

In the past the searches haven’t been very precise possibly because some of these tag and taxonomy rules haven’t been fully applied and because some theme authors game the system by loading up on the equivalent of all possible keywords.

Frameworks and Coding Considerations

Having worked with dozens of themes now it is clear that under the skin many of them can be traced back to earlier building block models or frameworks.

Every install of WordPress comes with a default theme sometimes called Kubrick and that one along with K2 and others. More recent core themes are Carrington, Thematic and Sandbox.

Thematic  describes its Theme as

“a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it.”

Another excellent theme  is Thesis. One of the first serious themes that I learned from was Chris Peasons Cutline series.

As Chris puts it- here are 5 more reasons to look deeper into the code and overall framework of each theme to save hassle later on.

“As a serial site developer and blogger, I’ve found that the most valuable tool one can have is a refined template system that solves fundamental development, design, and publishing problems, including:

1. SEO and careful attention to in-site link equity
2. an “em” -based approach to element sizing (pixels are nice, but “ems” are by far the most accessible – and therefore the best – choice)
3. polished typography with finely-tuned geometrics for maximum legibility
4. an aesthetically pleasing layout that favors usability and clarity over extravagant presentation
5. forward-compatibility (I like to call it futureproofing)”

Put more simply – picking a great theme now which has “good bones”and optimal features can save a lot of time later on. Some themes come paired with a series of plugins for say featured content and a number of themes come as a kind of half-way house with extensive theme options for those not so comfortable with stylesheets.

Theme options allow user to make changes to a style at a higher level by ticking an options or using other present menu re-combinations to make changes without needing to ever see the CSS code.

An example of this approach would be something like the Atahualpa which come with something like 300 “theme options” and personally a style sheet looks easy after that.

It is described as follows and the links below are tags that can be used for searching.

“Version 3.4 – Atahualpa is a WordPress/PHP/CSS Framework that lets you build your own unique, professional and browser-safe WordPress theme: 1-5 columns, fluid or fixed width, rotating header images and over 200 theme options. Tutorials, downloads and support at the BFA WP Forum

Tags: threaded-comments, theme-options, custom-header, custom-colors, flexible-width, white, sticky-post, translation-ready ”

StudioPress Themes offer another approach where a set of plugins have been pre bundled with a theme and page templates are somewhere closer to a magazine style format.

Magazine syle themes generally have a larger number of columns like a newspaper and would tend to have a category menu as well as featured content sections and even special video or audio panels.

In summary most clients start out looking for a particular look and feel but there are other more practical considerations which could benefit them by saving time and money if the selection criteria is deepened.

As a WordPress practitioner I would steer clients towards some of the other functional considerations like “does it play nice with key plugins ?” and is the structure fully transparent and robust for scaling up and working with other applications which will be the next frontier.

There are other considerations but perhaps you can write in with your comments and questions on what you think are most important when choosing a great WordPress Theme.

As one of the organisers for Wordcamp NZ I’m very interested in what happens at other wordcamps around the world. They are community based events organised around WordPress users of all shapes and dimensions globally.

Next week I’ll write about WordPress themes but today a good place to look at is the roadmap and a bit of history from the key WordPress founder.

“At WordCamps Matt Mullenweg attends he gives an update on the roadmap for WordPress including some updates on where the platform is now and generally providing a deeper context for users and developers alike.”

Here is the video (57m) from recent SAF WordCamp which had 700 attendees and is probably the biggest wordcamp so far in the 6 year old history of WordPress.

Description: Matt Mullenweg delivers his State of the Word presentation at WordCamp San Francisco 2009

Video shot & produced by Dave Curlee & John P. Post-production by Michael Pick.
WordCamp Location

San Francisco 2009

WordCamp Dallas in this coming weekend and I’ll be following as best as I can from here some of the discussions via twitter and other blogs from that event.

WordCamp UK is in July and we have WordCamp New Zealand on August 8th which is about 42 days time if my math is correct. Hope to see you all there.

See the Wordcamp Schedule for others

For the past 3.5 years I have been using WordPress to power this blog and also as a content management framework for a whole series of other websites that I develop and/or manage in some way.

Ironically I haven’t posted specifically on the WordPress publishing platform until now. One of my key activities to to assist brand owners with online marketing and fairly often we need to revisit their existing website to reposition their content in a more marketing friendly way.

Over the next few weeks I will post a series on the best use of WordPress for websites starting from today.

“WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. “

If you visit the main wordpress.org site which is the home to self-hosted version you can view the full range of options and extensions. The first point that most people notice is the 5 minute install.

Adam Purcell from Newcastle, NSW, released a how to video last week on the 5 minute WordPress install including an installation of New Zealand’s very own WP -eCommerce Plugin. It’s a demo not a tutorial though but it does give a fast summary.

I wrote a comment along these lines. This is the kind of background I often use to explain some of the WordPress process for new users.

———

The video had over 5000 views in 36 hrs.

Tune in over the next few weeks as I summarize thoughts about Themes and Plugins and provide examples of new ways to use WordPress.