WordPress Powers Sites.usa.gov

James Mathieson, Product Manager from Sites.USA.gov, General Services Administration, presented “WordPress Powers Sites.usa.gov” at the recent WordPress in Government Workshop.

Sites.USA.gov is a shared service to help government agencies focus on creating content rather than building systems to deliver that content. James’ presentation is an introduction to the platform, how it was built on WordPress and who should use it, and why WordPress is the solution for an open content management system when it comes the federal digital strategy.

Want more information about WordPress for government or enterprise sites? Contact WordPress.com VIP Services.

Andrew Nacin: Scaling WordPress & Optimizing Security

Andrew Nacin, WordPress Lead Developer and Tech Ninja at Audrey Capital, presented two topics at the WordPress in Government Workshop: “A Crash Course in Scaling WordPress” and “WordPress.org & Optimizing Security for your WordPress sites.”

A crash course in scaling WordPress

In this talk Andrew explains how WordPress can scale (spoiler: and it’s easy!) by delving into how nginx can play a role in multiple ways, and tips on tweaks to perform at the PHP and WordPress software levels, as well as hardware.

WordPress.org & Optimizing Security for your WordPress sites

In this presentation Andrew walks through the differences between major and minor WordPress releases, the philosophy on backwards compatibility, and a basic crash course in WordPress security. Click through his slides to learn more.

Want more information about WordPress for government or enterprise sites? Contact WordPress.com VIP Services.

WordPress in Government Workshop

wp-in-government

A few weeks ago in Washington, DC, WordPress.com VIP hosted a half-day workshop focusing on WordPress in Government, which was co-sponsored by our friends at GovLoop.com. The workshop was a huge success and I wanted to take just a few moments to share with you some highlights from the day’s events.

First off, why government? WordPress powers close to 19% of the top 10 million websites on the planet and we’re seeing major growth in all areas. The government sector, from federal to the state level and all the way down to local cities and towns, is experiencing some major technology shifts which have led to big changes in the way average citizens relate to and get information from their government. It’s an exciting time to be a technologist or developer at any level of government and it’s leading to some really interesting opportunities for WordPress, as there’s real interest on the part of government to move towards open source software and the availability of responsive platforms that help deliver on-demand information and government services.

We wanted to showcase some of the innovation that’s happening with WordPress for the government sector, so we hosted a workshop at the District Architecture Center in Washington, DC. We gathered over 115 key technologists and decision makers who work inside and outside of the government to network and to hear some presentations about some innovative things happening with WordPress in government. The attendees represented a big cross-section of agencies and organizations and many discussions centered on what they’re currently doing with WordPress and how they plan to scale their platforms.

We had attendees from:

  • Department of State
  • Peace Corps
  • Food and Drug Administration
  • Millennium/Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)
  • National Cancer Institute
  • Northrop Grumman Corporation
  • US Navy
  • U.S. Postal Service
  • Patent and Trademark Office
  • Department of Health and Human Services
  • Department of Veterans Affairs
  • Department of Defense
  • Department of Commerce
  • And more…
  • We’ve gotten some great feedback so far on the content of the event, and over the next few weeks we’ll be posting various presentations from the workshop here on VIP News so that you can learn more what’s happening with WordPress in government.

Here are some of the presentations from the event (we’ll be adding more as they become available):

You can read through some of the tweets and real-time reaction that was taking place through the event on Twitter (see below). #WPGov tweets can be found here, and thanks again to GovLoop.com for partnering with us on the event.

https://twitter.com/crushgear/status/347806946373550082

Here are some pictures from the workshop:

If you have any questions about WordPress inside your government agency, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Read more about WordPress in Government.

Ad Code Manager v0.4: Easier Configuration for Google AdSense and Doubleclick For Publishers Async

Ad Code Manager is a plugin designed to help you deal with ad codes, those short snippets of Javascript used to display advertisements on your website. Yesterday, Rinat Khaziev of Doejo, Jeremy Felt of 10up, and I released version 0.4.

This release incorporates the following:

  • Streamlined configuration for Doubleclick for Publishers Async and Google AdSense. Check out the configuration guide for more details.
  • Faster, cleaner JavaScript thanks to Jeremy Felt and Carl Danley.
  • New filter ‘acm_output_html_after_tokens_processed’ for rare cases where you might want to filter html after the tokens are processed.

Ad Code Manager v0.4 is already installed on WordPress.com VIP, and available to download for WordPress.org installs. Please report any bugs, feature requests, or questions in the WordPress.org forums. Or fork the plugin on Github and follow our development blog to help with future improvements.

WordPress.com VIP mixes with London VIP clients

In February many members of the WordPress.com VIP team headed to London to meet up with some of our VIP clients and partners. One evening we organized a WordPress.com VIP client and partner meetup and the turnout was great!

There were many conversations about what’s next for the growing WordPress community in the United Kingdom, how UK enterprises, media companies, and large organizations are doing interesting things with WordPress, and what’s coming up in WordPress 3.6.

That week, we were also happy to sponsor the WP Meetup in London and meet some of the WordPress users and developers using and building web applications with WordPress in London. (Are you following us on Twitter? @WordPressVIP)

That weekend, Automattic also sponsored the PHP UK conference and several WordPress.com VIP developers were on hand to interact with the PHP UK community, as well as to share how a PHP application can scale as large as it does on WordPress.com.

We’ll definitely be heading back to London soon and often, so if you’re there or have colleagues there, let us know!

Are you in London or nearby and interested in WordPress.com VIP events? Are you, or an organization you know, doing innovative things with WordPress? Leave a comment below or get in touch.

What’s Coming Up With WordPress 3.6

Some really neat features are going to be included in WordPress 3.6, which is rolling out this spring.

Here’s a quick peek at the road ahead (but know that everything listed here is tentative, as it is still under development):

Overview: The focus of WordPress 3.6 is “Content Editing,” paying special attention to editorial workflows, revisions, autosave, editing, and post formats.

Autosave: The goal of 3.6 is that users should never lose posts because of “expired cookies, loss of connection, inadvertent navigation, plugin or core errors on save, browser crashes, OS crashes, cats walking on keyboards, children drooling in keyboards, etc.” This may include autosaving to the browser’s local storage, and log-in expiration warnings. They are also looking at a post locking functionality to prevent people from overwriting each other’s changes.

Editorial Flow: The features to be added to 3.6 are custom post statuses, which is the ability to add custom statuses like pitch, assigned, in-progress, etc., and draft revisions, which allow edits to already published posts be saved as drafts before taking place of the original post. They are currently seeking use cases for both features to better understand how they will be used.

Revisions: The revisions tool will get a little TLC — bug fixes, better user interface, and adding visual representation of what was added/removed in each revision.

Post Formats: The big update to Post Formats for 3.6 is the admin user interface. They are currently seeking wireframe ideas for the user interface for each post format (i.e. chat, quote, link, image, video). Folks from our Featured Partners are contributing to this feature: Helen Hou-Sandi from 10up is lead, and Pete Mall from Range is backup.

Custom Menus: The main focus for 3.6 will be improving the user interface for custom menus, which users have found confusing. You can follow developments on this ticket.

Where can I find out more information?

If you’re not familiar with Make WordPress Core, it’s a good blog to visit. It tracks the open-source development of WordPress, and is the homebase of much of the development discussion.

How do I get involved?

Want to help make WordPress better? Take a peek at the Core Contributor Handbook, or sit in on the weekly developer chat. Lots of members of the VIP community contribute to core, so you’ll see familiar faces.

WordPress at LeWeb in Paris, France

Will you be at the LeWeb conference in Paris, France, December 4-6th? 

On December 6th at 14:15 CET, WordPress co-founding developer and Automattic President Matt Mullenweg will be on the main stage with Om Malik from GigaOm interviewing. The talk may be shown in streaming, but that is to be confirmed. You can follow @WordPressVIP to stay updated on the day and let us know your thoughts, too!

If you’re attending LeWeb and will be at Les Docks those days, make sure to stop by the booth where we’ll chat with you about the latest news and developments in the WordPress project and community, and we’ll have some swag to give away, too!

For more info: LeWeb.co

New Liveblog Add-On from WordPress.com VIP

We’re proud of our VIP Clients, many of whom report the latest and most important news as soon as it’s available. It was they who we thought of when we developed the new Liveblog Add-on.

We can’t wait for you to see it in action, either as an author, or a reader! To see what it will look like, take a look at the video we created for the Liveblog Add-on.

https://videopress.com/v/tWpw6nCt

Here’s what makes the Liveblog Add-on special:

  • Post updates right from the front-end of your site (no need to use the /wp-admin dashboard)
  • Viewers of your Liveblog get new entries served to them instantly and automatically, without needing to refresh their browser.
  • Your authors can drag-and-drop photos right into the Liveblog area, without needing to navigate to separate browser tabs or windows.
  • There’s no need for a separate site dedicated to liveblogging: every post can be a liveblog, even existing ones.

If you’re interested in using the Liveblog Add-on as a WordPress.com VIP Hosting client, get in touch!

If that’s not enough, we’ve also completely open-sourced the Liveblog code for self-hosted WordPress! You can find it in the WordPress.org plugin repository and on github.

Take a closer look:

Thanks to VIPs GigaOM and Local TV for their feedback and contributions during the beta testing phase for the plugin.

Bulk User Management

Josh Betz is an Intern Code Wrangler with Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP program this summer before he heads back to the University of Wisconsin to complete his degree in Computer Science. He enjoys running, hacking on WordPress, and the beautiful view from the terrace at UW’s Memorial Union.

Bulk User Management is a plugin that we’ve built to solve the problem of having to access each site in your network to manage users. It is especially useful for site administrators with large blog networks or anyone who might want to add multiple users to multiple sites from a single dashboard.

Bulk User Management allows a set of specified users to manage permissions across all your sites. Users from every site in your network are displayed in a list and can be added to or removed from any of your sites. Any users who aren’t currently in your network can still be invited to any of your blogs through the normal invite process.

The plugin works by aggregating a list of users from all your sites into a single list with information about each user, like their username, email address, and their user level on each of the sites they have access to. There are bulk actions available like “Modify” and “Remove” that let you make changes in large batches instead of one at a time.

You can select which users to manage with checkboxes just like you would see in the normal Users page. Selecting an action from the “Bulk Actions” dropdown will reveal a bulk edit section in the table where you can select which blogs the changes should apply to and a role if necessary.

The following are some screenshots showing step by step how the bulk editing flow works.

Bulk User Management is also available in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. It’s also on github, we’d love to have you check out the code and contribute!

Developer Plugin v1.0: Helping WordPress developers develop

One of the great things about developing for WordPress is the number of tools available for developers. WordPress core ships with a bunch of useful features (e.g. WP_DEBUG) with many more built by the community (like our own Rewrite Rules Inspector and VIP Scanner) that make development and debugging a breeze. The hardest part is getting your environment set up just right: knowing what constants to set, what plugins to install, and so on.

That’s why we built-in the Developer plugin. It’s your one-stop resource to optimally configure your development environment by making sure you have all the essential settings and plugins installed and available.

If you’re a WordPress developer, we highly recommend installing this plugin in your development environment. You can download the plugin from the WordPress.org Plugins Directory or directly from your WordPress Dashboard (Plugins > Add New).

Here’s a quick walk-through:

If you’d like to check out the code and contribute, join us on Github; pull requests are more than welcome.

Are there any tools, tips, and tricks that you’re using that we’ve missed? We’d love to add them to the plugin. Let us know in the comments.