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The Case for Open Source in Enterprise aka What I Learnt at WordCamp UK 2009

Posted on 22. Jul, 2009 by Chi-chi Ekweozor in Events, Inspired

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder & Chi-chi, WordCamp UK 2009

After two frenetic days at Arts Council England’s Art of Digital London event in Sadler’s Wells which I liveblogged as part of the AmbITion content team, I was in welcoming Wales for WordCamp UK 2009.

WHAT IS WORDCAMP?
WordCamp is the annual conference for WordPress users and developers in the UK.  An informal gathering of WordPress end users brought together by a love for the web’s best content management platform, this year’s event took place at Future Inn, Cardiff Bay on 18-19 July.

I HELPED TO ORGANISE WORDCAMP
I was involved in some of the organisation of WordCamp UK 2009, helping to draft the Sponsor Pack for the event.  I was also one of the event’s microsponsors and one of the speakers!

As this was my first WordCamp, I was particularly excited about meeting some of the great people I’d gotten to know on the active WordCampUK mailing list, managed by the illustrious Tony Scott.

WHAT HAPPENED AT WORDCAMP
Well, Saturday and Sunday were two days of amazing talks that took in the NHS’s use of open source technologies (including WordPress!), a thorough introduction to search engine optimisation (SEO) for WordPress and excellent advice on website security and visibility from Google.

That’s not to mention the brilliant question and answer (Q & A) session with the enigmatic charisma that is Matt Mullenweg, one of the founding developers of WordPress.  I managed to get a video interview with him about my social media for social good project, 7 Wonders in 7 Days of which you can watch a brief snippet here.

My slides are up on Slideshare as are others by speakers at the event.

MY PRESENTATION: BUILDING AUDIENCE AND COMMUNITY
My presentation on Building Audience and Community was to be delivered as a panel discussion with respected blogger Chris Garrett.

Unfortunately, Chris could not make it so I decided to deliver my presentation as an interactive (Q&A) discussion with the audience.  This went really well and I got lots of great feedback from people afterwards.

I made some (very rough) notes during my talk.  Here they come:

MY NOTES FROM MY TALK AT WORDCAMP
My initial statement questioning whether ‘Comments = Community” was reduced to ‘Comments = Democracy” by the audience.

What is Community?  Apparently, it is Comment and Contribution.

Think carefully about the purpose of your blog.  What is ROI for you?  If there is no underlying purpose, you have missed the point.

You should be able to mine commercial intent from people.  There is profit there.

I’ve decided that I will blog key notes and quotes from each of the sessions I attended rather than promise to blog each in full at a later date as that is unlikely to happen!

WORDCAMP UK TALK: PLUGINS PLUGINS PLUGINS by Dan Milward

Dan Milward, developer of the popular WordPress e-commerce plugin and winner of the prize for person who travelled the furthest to attend WordCamp UK presented an interesting overview of plugin development for WordPress.

Dan runs Instinct, a New Zealand based WordPress plugin development company.  Plugins are a key part of the WordPress platform, providing an incredibly varied eco-system of additional features that extend the core functionality of WordPress as a web publishing platform and content management system (CMS).

My key takeaways from Dan’s talk:

• Follow the best practices laid out for plugin developers on the WordPress website to ensure your plugin remains listed in the WordPress Plugin Directory.
• Release your plugin using the GNU General Public License from day 1.

The whole ethos of open source software was discussed at length during WordCamp UK and it is worth highlighting that this is a key consideration for all web developers, whether you like it or not!

It really does affect how well you benefit from the fruits of your labours as a web developer.

Dan shared that he initially had reservations about releasing his plugin under the terms of the GPL which essentially makes it free software.

The GPL gives anyone using software licensed accordingly the freedom to share and change all versions of the program, even to the extent that they can profit from doing so.

Dan added that releasing his plugin as GPL was the best thing he ever did.

He was worried it would be stolen but it wasn’t.  In fact, it has received over 300,000 downloads and provides regular paid work customising the plugin for clients.  He also sells add-ons that further extend the feature set of his plugin.

I also attended Dan’s workshop on WordPress e-Commerce later that morning and learnt enough about his shopping cart plugin for WordPress that I will be using to power donations on the 7 Wonders in 7 Days website.

WORDCAMP UK TALK: Visibility and Security by Luisella Mazza, Search Quality Senior Analyst, Google

Luisella Mazza, a Search Quality Senior Analyst based in Google’s Dublin offices provided a well-attended talk on website Visibility and Security.

My key takeaways from Luisella’s talk:

Blogs represent the opinionated world against mainstream media.

It takes 10 minutes from you publishing your blog to it being indexed on Google Blog Search.

Blogs are very attractive to spammers as they can be used to build artificial connections between sites, thus boosting Google PageRank and search engine ranking.

There are over 200 factors that are used to determine PageRank results, however. Links alone are not enough.

Use Google Webmaster Central to run searches on your site to see ‘what Googlebot sees’.  This will allow you to protect against hacking attempts by spammers.

If the most popular keywords to your site are ‘spammy’, you have been hacked!

If you are hacked one of the consequences is that “Pages on your site may not appear in Google Search…”

Google Webmaster Tools provides a lot of information on how to deal with hacked sites. There is also a Google Webmaster Tools blog.

Also consider protecting your wp-admin login page.  For more details on this see Google Associate, Matt Cutts advice for webmasters.

WORDCAMP UK TALK: WordPress Q&A with Matt Mullenweg, Tony Scott and Peter Westwood

Arguably one of the most inspirational sessions of the weekend, this hour long (at least!?) presentation by co-founding developer of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg was really helpful to my understanding of why WordPress is so popular.

My key takeaways from Matt’s talk:

Matt founded WordPress 6 years ago along with Stockport-based developer Mike Little.

Whilst he was working at CNET as a college student, he was allowed to open-source WordPress.  He dropped out of college to do this. {Can Matt/anyone closely linked to WordPress please verify this?  I wouldn’t want to get this wrong.  Many thanks}

__________

Mike Little clarifies that Matt was able to open source the WordPress work he did for CNET whilst working for them in the comments below.  Andrew adds that Matt dropped out of college to work for CNET.

__________

In future WordPress and WordPress Multi-User will be combined.  This will allow anyone who downloads the software the ability to create a network of millions of blogs as is currently demonstrated at WordPress.com.

Other future developments: moving to a one-click install of BuddyPress, the social networking plugin/platform for WordPress.

Potentially, BuddyPress enables ownership of an individual’s digital identity, providing a social networking profile that can be exported out by a user, something that Facebook does not allow.

Matt envisions a future where WordPress is 100% seamless for users. A user experience that is more akin to Firefox, as he put it.  WordPress would be able to scan your Theme, for instance and tell you if it’s broken.

He sees WordPress more like a Linux ‘kernel’.  The kernel is the core part of the Linux operating system.

WORDPRESS NOW POWERS WEBSITES BY UK AND US GOVERNMENT

WordPress has been embraced most by US, UK and Brazilian governments.  Speaker.gov, the website of the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi is powered by WordPress.  Number10.gov.uk, the UK Prime Minister’s home page is powered by WordPress.

Matt has established Foundation Status for WordPress to ensure that if he is run over by a bus it remains a non-profit open source entity that (potentially) runs for ever.

Future developments:

Better documentation for WordPress.

The ability to provide a guide for WordPress that tracks development and is distributed alongside the software.  In essence, you could download a nice book that told you all you need to know when you install.

ENCOURAGING ENTERPRISE TO ADOPT WORDPRESS

“How does one encourage enterprise to adopt WordPress?”, someone in the audience asked.

The number one thing is the showcase.  WordPress now powers blogs for Yahoo because of grassroots advocacy within the company.  Point to that adoption, to mainstream and government adoption.

Show customers others like them that are using WordPress.  Ford is using WordPress.

The GPL applies to WordPress code, to Themes and Plugins.

GPL is enforceable, companies often settle out of court.

You are building something out of WordPress.  WordPress exists because of all of this.

You should follow WordPress’ lead.

The future of WordPress is driven 100% by you guys.

WordPress is what it is today because we all created it.

Thank you all for creating WordPress.

– end my notes of Matt’s talk –

How inspiring was that! And that’s only a fraction of my notes.

You can watch videos of my interview with Matt Mullenweg and co-founding developer Mike Little about my social media for social change project, 7 Wonders in 7 Days on YouTube.

WORDCAMP UK TALK: WordPress in the Health Sector by Michael Kimb Jones

Michael Kimb Jones’ presentation on the NHS’s use of WordPress for an external website was illuminating.

My key takeaways from Kimb Jones’s talk:

Many websites within public sector organisations soon become out of date due to the onerous process of updating them via the traditional FTP upload mechanism.  You have to deal with an intermediary ‘webmaster’.

WordPress provides a much more user-friendly, easy to update website.

The real issue with adopting WordPress in the public sector is one of ensuring open source technology is adopted first.

WordPress needs to use platforms like PHP and MySQL that are open source technologies.  Much of the public sector in the UK is powered by proprietary IT systems which are deeply entrenched.

Kimb Jones was successful in deploying a fully featured website for Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust that is running on the WordPress platform.

It cost £200/year in hosting costs and has over 330 pages.  It currently receives 10,000 visitors a month, the previous site received just 2000.  It also receives 100% positive feedback from users and 5 active editors that update it!

WORDCAMP UK TALK: Integrating WordPress and bbPress by Simon Wheatley

I got a fair bit out of Simon’s fairly developer-focussed talk on integrating WordPress and bbPress, the message board/forum software provided by the developers of WordPress.

He presented custom WordPress development work on national wit and raconteur Stephen Fry’s website along with a couple of interesting plugins he has written that enable users to very quickly create their own Widgets in WordPress.

WORDCAMP UK TALK: Site doctors: Let the experts help you! By Dave Mee, Nick Garner, Hwa Young Jung

I absolutely loved this session!  Informally called WordPress Doctor (using the #wordcampdr hashtag on Twitter), it was an opportunity to have your website taken apart by experts in WordPress development, design and SEO!

On hand to ladle out exceptionally helpful advice were Dave Mee and Hwa Young Jung, the team behind social media design and development company, Tandot and Nick Garner, social media and SEO manager at Betfair.

The reviews are online here.  I am deeply grateful for the fantastic advice I received about the Real Fresh TV website and will be working with Tandot to implement it.

WORDCAMP UK TALK:  WordPress SEO: Tools, tips and tricks to help you get more traffic by Nick Garner

I also found Nick’s session on WordPress SEO extremely insightful.  Take a minute to view his slides.

My key takeaways from Nick’s session:

Use Google XML Site Maps on your sites so that you get attribution for your content first.

Typical cost of links in the ‘SEO trade’ is £20/£25.

Use breadcrumbs to organise hierarchy.

Trust Rank is almost as important as Page Rank.  Trust Rank is a factor decided by Google’s 12,000 human website reviewers.

Some links matter more than others.  Think about social interactions.  Make your site useful and relevant.

The more sociable, interesting and useful you are, the greater your prominence.

WORDCAMP UK TALK:  WordPress for News Organisations by David Coveney of Interconnect IT,

David presented an interesting talk on WordPress being used by news organisations.   His company has set up the Telecoms.com blog for Informa Telecoms.

The site has seen a 50% traffic improvement and is one of the first full blog deployments from a major news group.

He advised that to pitch WordPress to blue chips, you need to write case studies.  Describe what you do and how you solve problems.

That’s pretty much it!  If you were there and remember it differently, please shout out in the comments.  I’m already very much looking forward to WordCamp 2010.

You can also read a number of excellent post event reviews about WordCamp 2009 including this insightful and amusing write-up by Vixx and one of the first by Simon Dickson of Puffbox.com

UPDATE:

Thanks to Mike Little for the clarification that Matt was able to open source the WordPress work he did for CNET whilst working for them.  Thanks also to Andrew for letting me know Matt dropped out of college to work for CNET.

Thank Yous:

Well done and a million thanks to everyone who worked hard to make WordCampUK 2009 a success.  Worth adding as I’ve mentioned a couple already is Hayley Marsden who helped source the venue, organise a ton of things before we arrived and kept the speakers running to schedule.  Thank you Hayley.

Others include Laura Kalbag who designed the WordCamp UK 2009 website along with Simon Wheatley and Jonny Allbut who did lots of design work on the sponsor pack.  Of particular note: everyone on the WordCampUK mailing list who contributed.  Let’s get planning for WordCamp 2010!

Related posts:

1. Free Ticket Giveaway: WordCamp UK, 18-19 July, 2009
2. Free WordCamp UK 2009 Ticket Giveaway: We have a winner!
3. The Case for Manchester Open Data City and the Joys of Courting Corporate Philanthropy
4. WordCamp UK 2010 is happening in Manchester… woot!!
5. b.TWEEN09 and WordCamp UK – The Media and Web Conference Season begins

Tags: , AmbITion, Arts Council England, Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, bbPress, BuddyPress, Cardiff Bay, Chris Garrett, CNET, Dan Milward, Dave Mee, David Coveney, e-commerce plugin, Ford, Future Inn, GNU General Public License, Google, Google PageRank, Google Webmaster Central, Hwa Young Jung BC, Instinct, Interconnect IT, Luisella Mazza, Matt Cutts, Matt Mullenweg, Michael Kimb Jones, Mike Little, MySQL, Nancy Pelosi, Nick Garner, Peter Westwood, PHP, Puffbox.com, Search Quality Senior Analyst, Simon Dickson, Simon Wheatley, Site doctors, social media for social good, social media for social good project, social media UK, Speaker of the House, Tony Scott, WordCamp, WordCampUk 2009, WordPress, WordPress for social media, WordPress in the Health Sector, Wordpress SEO