I attended talks on plugins, ecommerce, video blogging, SEO and WordPress MU. WordCamp was a wonderful experience — and a bargain at $25 for the day. Thanks to the organizers for putting it together, and to NCCU for hosting.

WordPress as a Factory: The Fundamentals of Plugin Development

Glenn Ansley gave an overview of Wordpress using the metaphor of a factory. The product is the data hosted on the website, and it is served up by a belt that cycles through all the different components that make up the blog. In other words, WordPress functions like a loop comprised of smaller loops, rather than a tree with branches.

The machines in our factory metaphor are the PHP functions, and plugins serve to modify our production center. Developers can do this by using the hooks in the WordPress codex in conjunction with the add_action and add_filter functions. Filters and actions behave similarly, but action functions do not necessarily expect a return while filters do.

Someone in the audience asked when you should create a plugin for a function, versus simply putting it in the functions.php template file. Glenn gave some good rules of thumb: 1. Will you use the function again? 2. Is the code for the function very long and complicated? If so, writing a plugin would be the way to go.

More information on writing plugins is available on the WordPress codex.

WordPress & eCommerce: What You Need to Know

Shayne Sanderson demonstrated how to install and configure the WP e-Commerce plugin. WP e-Commerce is a shopping cart application for selling products online. It is very customizable, both in terms of the appearance of the shopping cart, but also in handling payment options (PayPal, Google Checkout, etc.)

Video Blogging with WordPress

This presentation by Hal Goodtree focused primarily on video production. In fact, Hal summed up the WordPress component within the first two minutes: Create video -> Upload to YouTube -> Embed in WordPress post. Why YouTube? It gives your video a wider audience than posting only to your own website. YouTube videos also tend to show up high in Google search results.

Editing your videos prior to posting them online is crucial. Web videos should generally last no more than 2-3 minutes. You should start with an intro, say what you’re going to say, and then get out.

It’s important for editing to separate sound from picture when recording, and you should plan the order and direction of your shots beforehand. It’s good to get the same shot from multiple angles, so you can pick and choose what works best later. Music, titles and transitions are important too — just don’t make them tacky. Your video will be more interesting if you don’t just use one long take. Instead, intersperse cutaways, b-roll, illustrations, and/or different camera angles.

When composing shots, there is no need to move the camera or zoom in and out. Web video is a closeup medium, so you should get as close to your subject as possible. The rule up upper-thirds also applies — keep the subject’s eye’s in the upper third portion of the shot.

SEO for WordPress

Andy Beal (who had an awesome accent) presented on search engine optimization, and specifically how you can use Wordpress to boost search rankings for your website. Effective structure and content are primarily what matters; the days of little tricks to boost rankings are long over. Luckily, WordPress produces search engine-friendly websites out of the box.

It’s most important to give your website a descriptive title (for the website and individual posts) and post slugs. Also, if your site has both “www” and non-”www” URLs, it can help to redirect one to the other (it doesn’t matter which). Of course, if a page moves, it’s a good idea to set up a redirect there, too. All redirects should be “301: Moved Permanently.”

By default, WordPress creates post slugs (i.e., permalinks) depending on the post’s title. However, you should change the slug to include post keywords only — having a “killer slug” can really help. It’s also a good idea to link related posts to one another.

WordPress MU: Installation, Plug-in Management, and Features

Lew Ayotte gave an overview and demo of WordPress MU, which we found out during the keynote can be pronounced “M-U”, “Myu,” but most definitely not “Moo.” MU can be set up either as vhosts (foo.bar.com) or not (bar.com/foo). Depending on your server access, global variables can be set either in the php.ini file or .htaccess.

To set up MU, first create a MySQL database user with full access. Then, download MU from http://mu.wordpress.org/download/. Decompress the file, upload it to your server, and install it at root level. When you first go to that URL, you’ll be presented with options to specify database fields and host info.

Plugins can be installed globally for all your MU sites, or on a site-by-site basis.

Keynote Session with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg

Matt gave an informal (and entertaining) history of WordPress. He then told us about some new developments. The first is P2, a WordPress theme for microblogging, much like Twitter. Another is VideoPress, a WordPress upgrade that makes it easy to upload, embed, and share video, even in HD. Another project is BuddyPress, a suite of plugins and themes which add social networking functionality to a WordPress MU site.

Speaking of MU, the multi-blogging platform will be merging with “regular” WordPress in an upcoming release. Then, whenever WordPress is installed, the user will have the option to set it up as single- or multi-blog.

Someone in the audience asked what WordPress’s business model is, since the software is free. Matt says that WordPress makes money from the hosted blog product WordPress.com; advertisements on WordPress.com, which appear for first-time site visitors who are not using Firefox(!); comment-spam blocker Akismet for commercial use; and premium upgrades such as additional storage space for multimedia.

Lunch was included in the conference, and there was even a special WordPress cake!

Crossposted to the Blackwell Interactive blog.

The slides from my presentation, “Driving a Hybrid: The Basics of Adobe AIR,” are located here. The presentation included a demonstration of using Dreamweaver and regular HTML, CSS, and Ajax to build a simple AIR application that displays news headlines. The files for that application can be downloaded here.

I also presented “Adobe Flex: Flash for Coders and Programmers” as part of the poster session. A smaller version of my poster can be downloaded here.

One of the biggest differences between this conference and previous years was the active Twitter backchannel. There were several of us who became Twitter buddies a few months before the conference, so it was cool to already know a little about each other before meeting in “real life” (and a little strange to hear people whispering, “Hey, is that cdulude? Yeah, I think so!”) Twitter was also very useful for things like meeting up for dinner or impromptu discussions. People also carried on discussions during sessions using Twitter — someone referred to it as the electronic version of passing notes. There was the occasional “This guy sure is boring!” but for the most part, discussions were fairly constructive. Or at least, fun.

Twitter use at this conference reminded me of one of the arguments for using online forums and discussion boards in a classroom setting: they encourage quieter students to participate who might feel intimidated during the regular in-person classes. Similarly, I felt that Twitter allowed yet another way for people to contribute to the conference instead of sitting passively by.

And finally, I did manage to live-blog some of the sessions:

• Keynote by Kyle Ford, director of product marketing at Ning, Inc.
• Test-Driven Development for Web Applications
• Agile Web Development
• Web Manager’s Roundtable
• Keynote by Jeffrey Veen, founding partner of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map
• Cross-Site Scripting: What is it, and how can you protect your site from becoming a victim?
• Have a Clutter-free Front Page: Using AJAX to Bring in Content on the Fly
• Social Networking: The Web Game Changer

• Posting video content
• Language immersion
• Video conferencing
• Social notes — Michael Wesch

Education should be a two-way street.  We need to stop thinking of education as a product to be passed along, and more of a process. We participate therefore we are. Google/the internet is like the calculator metaphor — having the tool levels the playing field in terms of knowledge.Education should be more about training people to synthesize information, not just how to look it up.Big is the new small. Tools like private forums allow people to participate without it being completely public. Also allows quieter students to participate with less intimidation. Asynchronous participation people can contribute outside of class.

Ambient awareness — the idea that minutiae of people’s life gives a snapshot of people’s lives, even though each little snippet doens’t realy matter. Makes you feel looped in when you’re not there. And lets you get to know people even if you’ve never met them in real life.

Unit testing framework benefits over home brew: testing infrastructure is already built. Example: PHPUnit

Downsides: easy tests, easy input methods. Testing the right things at the right level? Hard to pinpoint causes of error.

Test small pieces, not applications. Don’t test against live data. If your test are PASS/FAIL, code appropriately. Benefits of unit testing: Ensure new features don’t break expected behavior. Code coverage analysis: graphical representation of where we need unit tests. Downsides: It’s possible to run tests that test incorrect logic.

Browser based testing with Selenium. From OpenQA: http://www.openqa.org . Easily record and playback actions.  Automate acessiblity checks — cynthiasays.com .

Need continuous integration, not just tests. But: tests can be the foundation for CI. Tests can serve as secondary documentation. Ensure that all developers are working with the latest code, adn everyone can see that progress is being made.

Cruise Control: cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net . A framework for continuous build/integration process.

Joel Spolsky: 12 Steps to Better code.

On the Effectiveness of Test-first Approach to Programming: Improves poductivity.

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto:

• Highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change.
• Deliver working software frequently, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Business people must work together, rather than being isolated in silos. Also physical proximity and face-to-face communcation. Not keeping everyone in their own offices.

Agile processes promote sustainable development. Keeping sponsors, developers, users involved should be able to maintain a constance pace on the project. Agile methodologies include: Agile modeling, Extreme programming, Scrum.

Source code management: Version control, release tracking, development vs. production code lines.

Test driven development: What does this section of code do? Write a test first. Write code to pass the test

• Unit testing: Component level, which finds basic logic and syntax errors.
• Functional testing: Application level.

Continuous integration includes automated check-out, automated build, automated testing, immediate feedback for failures. Refactoring improves readability of code, but does not fix bugs or add new functionality. Test first.

Design patterns: Most problems have been solved before and solutions optimized. Using standard constructs make it easier to maintain code.

• Bob Crisler, University of Nebraska
• Rachel Stewart, University of Iowa
• Doug Tschopp, Augustana College
• Luke Robinson, Calvin College
• Sri Giridharan, Seton Hall University
• Doug Ruschman, Xavier University

We talked about web/style policy guides. Policy guides, as well as their implementation and/enforcement, vary from institution to institution, if they exist at all.

How to account for social media? Xavier has its own social network for accepted students. Calvin picks up accounts on Flickr, Facebook, Flickr. If we keep adding social networks, who’s going to maintain them? Nebraska has its own social network, and is looking into Elgg for a social platform.

Some schools (such as Augustana) are shifting to Gmail for email service. Many have an email newsletter, at least for faculty/staff.

Calvin College has a lot of video production; on Vimeo, YouTube, etc.  Xavier has BlueTube, where students can upload their own video (this was presented as a poster last year, if I remember correctly?) Alumni love seeing what students are doing on campus.

How do you handle rogue departments? Mention “talking to the chancellor.” It’s a big help to have allies in the upper levels of administration. U of Iowa College of Business used to be under Communications and IT, now wholly under IT.

Experiences with student workers seem to run the gamut.

1974 was the conceptual end of the 1960s. Since then, data storage has been commoditized and is much more accessible. More ools for participation + greater scale of data = now we’re surrounded by data. Numbers by themselves are meaningless; we need metadata and/or visualizations for it to make sense. Since people process information differently, it’s good to have different ways of presenting data. However, be careful about “over-decorating” it, or else the meaning is lost.

We looked at a visualization from 1854 mapping the cholera outbreak in London. The visualization narrowed the source of the disease to one contaminated pump. This empirical data helped dispel superstition and class discrimination. Another example is the London Underground map.

• Find a story in the data.
• Assign different visual cues to each dimension of the data.
• Remove everything that isn’t telling the story.

Many designers moved from print to web. Those who gave up control and were most willing to embrace change were the ones to transition best. CSS Zen Garden is a good example of this. Reading sites through RSS rather than a regular website is another. Enable users to find their own stories in the data.

You can use your data ton interact with your system — i.e., Trends in Google Reader.

We need to provide filters to enable clarity and find trends that the designers of data never imagined.

Shift has moved from:

• Storytelling -> Discovery
• Visual cues -> Interactivity
• Editing -> Filtering

Math is easy; design is hard.

We need to shift our perceptions on how students communicate. Teenagers have a much different idea of public vs. private. Older people things information is private until made public; teens think the reverse.

Know yourself — then understand the user.

Cross-site scripting is an injection against your users, not your server. 88% of higher ed websites had vulnerabilities, many of these were cross-site scripting These programs trick users to going to the page owned by the attacker. Phishing. Identity theft. Collect emails for spamming. Platform independent. URI/JAR exploit — launch desktop application as you.

Why especially dangerous to Higher Ed? People trust higher ed sites. NC State study: Users unable to tell the difference between fake and real popups 63% of the time, even with warnings.

3 types:

• Non-persistant/reflective: Most common, only lasts and long as the user is there. Relies on social engineering.
• Persistant/stored: Data is stored externally, replayed every time people return. Very dangerous.
• Local: On user’s local machine. Less likely, but still dangerous.

Penetration of others’ websites: legal grey area. Illegal in some countries. We had a live demo where we hijacked NBC.com’s website.

What can we do to protect our applications? Be paranoid. Trust no one. Layers — don’t be the low-hanging fruit for hackers.

Techniques: Input filtering/blacklisting (can’t be your only defense). Input validation, even with dropdowns. Output encoding (for allowable characters, such as ampersands). Intrusion detection systems (e.g., PHPIDS). Tidy the output (e.g., HTML Purifier — only allows valid HTML, AntiSamy).

This presentation discussed the redesign of the Valpo Athletics website. Options included a “Content Puke” and Flash — but there were no Flash developers on staff, and it would make the site less searchable. The solution? Ajax, which allows you to grab data after the page is loaded. Ajax uses the XMLHttpRequest function for this. And contrary to popular opinion, it does not really need to use XML.

The benefits? Ajax is a buzzword, so it’s great for pitching to higher-ups. It allows you to create Flash-like interface without Flash. There are no extra plugins necessary. Also, unlike Flash, there is no rebuilding of SWFs; you can just make changes to a file. Ajax also allows a rich internet experience on devices like the iPhone, which suport Ajax, but not Flash.

Problems? Some people and devices don’t support JavaScript, or partially support it.  So the site needs to gracefully degrade. That way, the site works for anti-JavaScript people/devices, although it might look a little strange.

Pick a framework — most browsers support it by default, and you can save time by not reinventing the wheel. And they make complex things simple.

Negatives of a framework: It can also make a lot of simple things complex (i.e., bare bones JavaScript stuff). Some frameworks are not good for some tasks. Frameworks also add to load time.

Lessons learned: Test in as many browsers and OS’s as possible. “Premature Ajaxulation:” People get excited about Ajax, but don’t know how to use it appropriately. Which leaves you open to SQL injections and cross-site scripting attacks.

Social networking has been around since people gathered around the campfire. Social networking moved on to transportation, and later communications technologies. Now, digital communications are the big thing. There have been only 3 killer internet apps: Email, the web, social networks.

Today’s prospective freshmen: big on the internet based social networking. 49% of students use social networks to make new friends. What about email? Reports of the death of email are greatly exaggerated.

Social networks are the new killer app, and they’re not just web-based. They’re also both private and public — have to think about both; not just Facebook. What do social networks replace? Email. Chat. Blogs. Photo, video sharing. Although all of these are essentially rolled into many social network applications.

Public vs. Private. Facebook is public — personal pages and institutional pages. Institutional pages have fans events. Private social networks: Ning. Example of Ning sites: highedweb2008, uwebd. But some universities also ahve their own Ning sites (e.g., Texas Southern University, SUNY Oswego alumni). Why not just use Facebook? Some members might not be on those networks and/or want to share information, but they would want to be in touch with certain groups.

How can we use these technologies: Assign responsibility for site, participate, connect everything. RSS feeds: saturate everything. Social networks, portals, blogs, homepage, SMS text messaging. For example, add an RSS feed on your institution’s Facebook page. Add a Facebook/Ning badge to your website.