This article is taken from the Joomla Community Magazine and can be read in full here.
The Flame Relay passes Clapham Common
The Games of the XXX Olympiad are underway in London, United Kingdom. They’re powered by the world’s best athletes, years of training and a lot of muscle. It turns out that a lot of the Olympics are also powered by Joomla! websites (just like the 2020Media website).
There’s a new version of WordPress out. Dubbed “Green” in honor of guitarist Grant Green, this release is mainly a feature and under-the-hood update. There are no critical security fixes.
Integration between Facebook and WordPress just got a whole lot easier, as Facebook have announced an official plugin for WordPress.
After Facebook announced its new plugin for WordPress, the relationship between the two popular applications just became stronger. With the new plugin, features like publishing and @mentions has become easy for WordPress publishers, many of whom have never written a line of code in their lives.
Once users install this plugin, they can start posting their WordPress content to their Facebook Timelines and Facebook Pages. We think that this is a really good move because it makes content sharing a whole lot easier.
Graham Armfield presented his favourite WordPress plugins and invited others to share theirs too. They are linked to in the comment to this article. As SlideShare isn’t the quickest way to see them, I’ve picked out a few here:
Relevanssi
Replaces the default search with a partial-match search that sorts results by relevance. It also indexes comments and shortcode content.
wp-twitter-feed
Place a twitter feed on your site with shortcode
Point and Stare CMS Functions
This plugin generates special functions to convert your WordPress install into a CMS, add security and generally white label the admin.
WP Better Emails
Adds a good looking HTML template to all WP default plain/text emails and lets you set a custom sender name and email address.
Our own picks can be seen on this blog, on the right hand side.
Talk 2 – Multi-lingual WP
Rich Holman discussed methods, things to look for and consider, design considerations and plugins that can help you build a multi-lingual site with WordPress.
In a detailed and well explained talk, Rich took us through the pitfalls and shortcuts to building WordPress sites in more than one language. The easy option is just to install seperate copies of WordPress for each language. This approach works well if you can build common elements to your theme, and it’s appropriate for the project. This is best if the content on the different sites does not need to be equivalent. A more common requirement is for the same content to be readable in several languages. This will involve several considerations.
Design
Allow enough space in menus and other areas. Verbose languages like German can really mess up your lovely neat menu!
Be aware you are designing blind. Often the designer won’t know the other languages and good communication is the key.
Right to Left (RTL) languages could mean moving your content around – for example moving the sidebars from right to left.
HTML Language codes. Make sure you declare the language being used in your underlying code. This way plugins like Facebook’s Like button will automatically change it’s text to match.
Rich Holman
Development
The admin screen in WordPress already have translations.
Theme translations use .po and .mo files. Use Poedit to create and manage. Some of the translation plugins available will read your theme and create translation files ready for editing.
Problem areas
Tags and Taxonomy
Queries – one home page had over 1000 queries to load.
Rich advised that switching plugins is not a good idea – they don’t really work together or store data in a consistent way.
If you actually need translations to be done for your content, Rich suggested ICanLocalize, which is part of the WPML family. Rates are around $0.07 per word. One final word from the audience was a note to check the font you are using has support for all the characters in your chosen languages. Many fonts from providers such as Google Fonts and Typekit only contain the Latin character set.
Talk 3 – Human Centred Design
Tammie Lister presented a call to action to bring back human focused design.
Tammie Lister
Tammie related her views on how the web recently has become very structured what with grids, templates and stock photography proliferating. She called on designers and developers to “make it personal”. Inspired by Aarron Walters work on MailChimp, and using examples such as the Twitter “Fail Whale” and Google Logos she showed how even large companies can humanise their image. Another personal dislike of Tammie’s is seeing “Submit” on forms. When in real life does anyone “submit” something? Jargon like this should be excised from the new web.
WordPress allows content to be created freely so stock phrasology and stock photography can be avoided, plus it supports custom error pages, custom headers and backgrounds in many themes, and language files in many themes allow the nuts and bolts to be humanised. Tammie suggests customising the Admin part of WordPress so that users you are designing for only get what they need, and removing the clutter that gets put in by default.
One member of the audience took a counter view and said how he’d tried in the past to get clients to go for a jargon-free website but because the client and their audience were within the same related sphere, some jargon was inevitable.
Social
As always after the talks proper, discussions and informal networking carried on ’til closing time at the nearby pub.
The UK CiviCRM user group meeting took place last night in London. We were there, and this is our report.
CiviCRM meetup
The meetup was hosted at techhub, in London’s “Silicon Roundabout”, Old Street. Our host for the evening was Michael McAndrew of Third Sector Design, a company specialising in CiviCRM based in techhub.
Meet-ups are free and a great way to get to learn more about CiviCRM and are suitable for those that are new to CiviCRM as well as people that have been using it for years. There were two presentations, a mingle session and a case study report from a charity that’s successfully implemented CiviCRM.
CiviCRM in 2012
The keywords for 2012 are: mobile, scalable, community.
CiviCRM
A code sprint (?) scheduled for later this month in London will be focusing on CiviMobile. CiviCRM for mobile devices includes iPhone, Android, iPad, Blackberry and more. This version will include the ability to view/search contacts and see most of the details of each contact. It will also allow users to create/edit contacts, and handle event attendee check-in. Several core developers will be in town and any developers are welcome to join.
CiviCon is taking place in San Fransisco on 2nd April. CiviCon is THE annual event bringing together the people who use, develop, design and implement CiviCRM. Good news for us in the UK though, a CiviCon Europe is planned for Autumn, although dates and location have not yet been finalised.
CiviCRM 4.1 News
Beta release for WordPress – along with Drupal and Joomla, CiviCRM will now work within WordPress. WordPress has emerged from it’s blogging roots to become one of the most widely used content managment systems in use today, powering an amazing 14% of the web.
Social plugins (Facebook, Twitter etc).
Better cron (simple for admins to setup).
Personalisation of campaign pages for events (think JustGiving).
Improvement to admin menu.
A couple of UK specific projects were mentioned, with a call for some help from developers or sponsors to get them completed. These are Direct Debit integration and Gift Aid. The Direct Debit integration is a “make it happen” project, which basically is a call for funding, and the Gift Aid module needs a bit of development help to fix some not too tricky bugs.
CiviCRM Marketing
The new CiviCRM website
Dave Moreton, from Bristol based Circle Interactive, talked to the group about improving the marketing of CiviCRM. It’s apparent that next to the giant forces of SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics etc, CiviCRM has a much lower profile. It’s also true that it’s a very different product. That said, the non-profit, membership, civic sector are often unaware of the existence of CiviCRM and end up using a commercial-focused CRM system that is less than ideal. David’s talk was about efforts within the CiviCRM community to increase awareness, talk up it’s successes and provide comparisons and marketing material for system integrators to use. He finished by showing us a sneak peak at the new CiviCRM website, which of course aims to solve these issues.
If you are interested in helping, there are occasional IRC meets, an online group at civicrm.org/groups/marketing and PDFs, Powerpoint and how-to material at Spreadtheword
CiviCRM Case Study
Finally we heard from Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research (LLR). Parvez Saleh from Veda Consulting, talked us through the tasks that were needed for migrate in just 2 hours a complete legacy system to CiviCRM.
the LLR website
LLR went from a system that was used by just a few users which specialist knowledge (and lots and lots of spreadsheets), to a website-integrated CiviCRM system that can be accessed by 80+ users, speeds up the financial reporting functions and will save the charity tens of thousands over the next few years, as well as enabling increased fundraising. Now one of the largest CiviCRM installations in the UK, the system serves the needs of 350,000 contacts, 90,000+ participants and over 1.2 million contributions a year. LLR are now holding a “spreadsheet amnesty” to move all data onto the system.
Successful Event
The event was attended by around 50 people. Most were new to CiviCRM but we also met with system integrators, developers, current users and administrators. The user group meeting showed that there is an established infrastructure of support for CiviCRM here the UK, and organisations considering it for themselves can be confident they will get the support they need. 2020Media provides complete hosting packages for CiviCRM, and our support is based around our hosting expertise. Therefore we can deal with the kind of problems you might have if you get a error on a page, emails not being sent, uploading images and so on. We can also help users get to grips with the basics of using Civi. We also have a network of developers and consultants so get in touch if you want to know more.
The long awaited new version of Joomla has been released today.
Joomla is a free content management system used on tens of thousands of websites of all shapes and sizes.
2020Media hosting fully supports Joomla 2.5
2020Media can help you migrate older Joomla versions to 2.5
Along with new features such as advanced search and automatic notification of Joomla core and extension updates, the Joomla CMS for the first time includes multi-database support with the addition of Microsoft SQL Server. Previous versions of Joomla were compatible exclusively with MySQL databases. This improves support on the Windows platform, which 2020Media are able to offer at no extra cost.
Other key features in Joomla 2.5 includes:
Automatic notification when a Joomla or extension update is available. When logged into the control panel, site administrators will instantly have access to new notification buttons that allows them to see and act on the latest updates. In addition to updates for the Joomla CMS, a second button offers third party extension notification updates.
A better natural language search engine to the Joomla core. Complete with auto-completion and stemming (for example if you type “running” in a search field you also see run), it is faster and more versatile than the standard search.
