Category Archives: Opinion

Opinion

CiviCRM 2012

civicrm logoCiviCRM, the free and Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector went from strength to strength in 2011. 2020Media has been providing CiviCRM hosting for several years for organisations small and large. Hosting plans with integrated “zero-click” installs of CiviCRM start at £100 per year. Read more about CiviCRM Hosting.

Planned CiviCRM improvements for 2012

  • Accounting integration improvements and Quickbooks integration
  • CiviMobile – CiviCRM for mobile devices
  • CiviSMS – SMS blasts and interactions
  • Mass Dedupe and Merge – Batch merging for groups of duplicate contacts
  • Multiple membership renewal reminders
  • Relative date filters for all search forms
  • UK Direct Debit Integration

These planned improvements rely on donations to the core development team, so if you can donate anything at all to help ‘make it happen’, you can do so at http://civicrm.org/mih. You can choose the specific feature you want to target so it’s very clear how your donation gets results.

Let’s a take a detailed look at these 2012 CiviCRM features

Accounting integration improvements and Quickbooks integration

This feature is the first step towards enabling better integration of accounting concepts and systems with CiviCRM. It  implements a number of data changes to make further enhancements possible, as well as providing Quickbooks integration via IIF file export (and integration with other packages via CSV export)

CiviMobile

CiviCRM for mobile devices. This 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 have the ability to create/edit contacts, and handle event attendee check-in.

CiviSMS

Support for SMS blasts and interactions, targeting the following features:

  • Broadcast an SMS message with token support to a group of contacts via workflows similar to Send Email and CiviMail
  • Collect responses from the above message and associate it with the message and the sender
  • Validate and store the response as a survey answer
  • Integrate with multiple SMS gateways – ClickaTell, Twilio and Tropo

Multiple membership renewal reminders

Administrators will be able to configure an unlimited number of reminders at specified dates relative to the membership expiration, and configure different message templates as needed for each reminder.

UK Direct Debit Integration

Requirements and specification are being developed here:
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Direct+Debit+integration+%28UK%29+requirements+and+specification

Will allow UK based non profits to connect to a UK based direct debit provider and process recurring direct debit payments.

Opinion

Joomla! 2.5 to be released January 2012

Joomla! 2.5 will be released in January 2012 and it is the successor of Joomla! 1.5. It will be a so called long term release and it will be the Joomla! state of the art until July 2013. The versions 1.6 and 1.7 were short term releases and they paved the way to Joomla! 2.5.

New Features

Joomla 2.5 will have a host of new features including new search functionality, multi-database support, and update notification.

Search is “reinvented” in Joomla! 2.5 with Finder. The new finder component works with a search index.

New Search Function in Joomla
New Search Function in Joomla

Based on Finder, which was developed by jXtended, Joomla 2.5 has added an exciting new natural language search function. This feature incorporated auto-completion and stemming. Stemming is the ability for the search to use the root of the word you entered to locate matches. While there is still work to be done, this search is also much better at searching in languages other than English.

This new search is faster and more versatile that the standard search. The data is indexed to get this flexibility and speed. New plugins are required to use this search. Joomla ships with the new core extension plugins, but other extension developers will need to create their own plugins to work with this new search. By default, the standard search is active and this new search is disabled. You can enable the plugin and index your files when the extensions you want to search have the new plugins.

More Databases

With Joomla! 2.5 it will be possible to run Joomla! on MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Drivers for PostgreSQL and Oracle seems to be very near (Getting Ready for Multi-Database Support).

Joomla Update Notification

The number one request from ideas.joomla.org was for Joomla to tell the site administrator when Joomla needs to be updated. Site administrators will now be able to see as soon as they log in if Joomla is out of date. They can then click the button and be taken to the one-click update to Joomla. A second icon does the same thing for any non-core components that are set up for the one-click updating by their developers.

User registrations with CAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA plugin using the reCAPTCHA service can be enabled. Once you sign up for free with reCAPTCHA and enter your keys, you can enable CAPTCHA on new user registrations. It could also be used by other extensions needing CAPTCHA. This helps stop spammers signing up to your site.

Better Choices for Offline Mode

You can use the default offline message, disable it or create a customized message. Additionally you can select an image for the offline mode page. You have even a possibility to set the site to offline mode during installation so no unauthorized people can see it before you want them to.

Why 2.5? What happened to 1.8?

New Release Cycle
Every 18 months, a long term release of Joomla! will appear. That’s why 2.5 will be released this month. The .5 signifies a long term release. Moving from 1.7 to 2.5 can be done with the one-click upgrade within Joomla and most extensions that run on 1.7 should also run on 2.5.

Joomla 2.5 is the direct upgrade for Joomla 1.7. Joomla 1.7 will be supported for critical security issues only for a period of one month after the release of Joomla 2.5. After that time, only Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 2.5 will be  supported by the Joomla project. Note that Joomla version 2.5 is a long-term-support (LTS) release and will be supported for at least 18 months.

Further Reading

Opinion

Nice WordPress Theme

1 Comment

Just a short post today – we came across this very nice WordPress theme the other day.

Nice WordPress Theme

The creators are www.wpshower.com. They have 10 themes on their site and nearly all of them are free, but all are very high quality.

If you’re starting out in WordPress, a pre-built theme is a useful place to start, and can save you both time and money. As your site develops you may need the services of a web designer. A web designer who understand WordPress can take an existing theme and adapt it seamlessly to your vision, or can build a unique theme just for you. Many web designers and developers use 2020Media’s services, so let us know if we can help put you in touch with one.

 

Opinion, Tips and Tricks

Usergroup Roundup and news from EU

It’s been a busy week with a Joomla and WordPress usergroup sessions, as well as a meeting with Eurid, the registry for .eu domains.

Joomla Usergroup

Joomla Usergroup London logoThe regular monthly meetup of the London Joomla usergroup took place on Tuesday. Phil from SoftForge gave us some insights into the Akeeba Backup tool. Many people already use the extension to make backups of their site. What is not so well know is that the Pro version (a very reasonable $50 or so for unlimited sites) easily adds the ability to copy the backup to offsite storage. Currently DropBox and Amazon Storage are available. Phil also pointed out the security feature of Akeeba to setup a secret key as attackers could trigger your backup repeatedly and cause a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. This setting is in the top right Parameters button. Akeeba Backup is even being used to non-Joomla websites.

2020Media will setup Akeeba for any customer using our hosting competely free of charge. Just ask!

WordPress Usergroup

Two talks this week – WordPress SEO and a newbies guide to Custom Post Types. The evening began with a quick roundup of WordPress news (download the podcast).

  • WordPress 3.3 is almost out. New features include a drag and drop interface for adding images and other media.
  • Akismet, the anti comment spam service is continuing it’s march towards a paid model
  • There’s a plugin to check your website for vulnerability to the tomthumb problem.
  • WP Install Profiles is a Drupal-like idea for developers who want to pre-fill their installs with their favourite plugins and themes.

David Bain speaking at WordPress LondonDavid Bain, an internet marketing expert who uses WordPress in his work, talked about getting your WordPress website noticed in the search engines. David talked us through his 3 “P”s – Preparation, Publishing and Performance. Lots of great tips and well worth attending if you were able to get to London. His slides and our podcast will be available soon. Download the podcast

Keith Devon speaking at WordPress LondonKeith Devon gave us a great introduction to Custom Post Types, which was very useful for the new developer or designer. Simply put, setting up Custom Post types allows you to add a new section to the admin menu for a adding content to a specific type of page that you design. For example if you had staff profiles, you can create a page entry that has boxes for their name, position and job description, and then on the front end display this in a particular way. Download the podcast.

Eurid Meeting

Aliette Boshier from Eurid
Aliette Boshier

The team for the .eu registry were in London to convince the euro-sceptics in the UK that getting  a .eu domain is a good idea! Whilst the argument “show you are European” may not be terribly popular at the moment, the EU is still Britains largest overseas trading partner. If you run a business that trades with the European area, a .eu domain is a wise choice to link to your website.

The .eu domain is 5 years old this year and is now considered a well established and trustworthy domain extension. There are over 3 million .eu domains in use, and it’s the 5th most popular extension in the UK (behind .uk, .com, .net and .org).  .eu domains are now available from 2020Media with multi-year periods of 1 to 10 years, and were one of the first domain extensions  in the world to offer a registry-backed DNSSEC (secure DNS) support.

 

 

Opinion

Publishing with WordPress

Telegraph AtriumThe Telegraph were hosting this month’s London WordPress meetup at their headquarters in Victoria.

  • Talk 1:
    • BuddyPress core developer Paul Gibbs talked about how the Telegraph uses WordPress.
  • Talk 2:
    • WordPress and Web Accessibility: Why it’s Important

Graham Armfield  talked about accessibility. The presentation covered some issues that disabled and elderly users experience with websites, then discussed steps that we all can take to improve accessibility – and why it makes business sense.

How the Telegraph uses WordPress.

The Telegraph media group have two websites running WordPress. There is Telegraph Blogs, which is where 40 or so journalists have their own blogs; and MyTelegraph which is where the public have their say.

Telegraph Blogs

Telegraph blogs screenshot of telegraph blogs websiteuses WordPress multisite install to host a blog for each of the journalists. In turn these are split into several headings such as News, Sport, Culture, so that an editor can manage the content for each section. For speed, they use memcached and Akamai content delivery. The Akamai network in particular helps with spikes in traffic when a particular topic gets a lot of traffic in a short space of time. The themes are fairly static, but new plugins are added regularly and comprise a mix of off-the-shelf contributed WordPress plugins, and in-house plugins that have been built to meet a specific need for Telegraph Blogs. All undergo thorough manual and automated testing for security and scalability and are usually tweaked in some way. Some of the plugins used include: yoast breadcrumbs, WordPress SEO, Widget Logic.

MyTelegraph

MyTelegraph isscreenshot of mytelegraph website probably the largest BuddyPress installation in the UK, with over 90,000 users. It’s no surprise then that Paul is a lead developer of BuddyPress. The MyTelegraph is a mix of groups and personal member blogs. The groups section includes categories such as Politics, Travel, Book Club and Football and uses the power of niche communities to maintain focus and engagement with members. Community managers guide the site and help new users find their feet. Groups are a feature of BuddyPress. Users can also create their own blogs, which is deployed with WordPress Multisite. The sitewide tags plugin allows their posts to appear on the MyTelegraph home page. Other plugin used include yoast breadcrumbs, blackbird pie (a twitter integrator), WP report posts, BuddyPress group blog, and of course BuddyPress itself.

You can listed to Paul’s talk on our podcast – the audio quality isn’t great as no-one told Paul to use the mic until 30 seconds before he finished!

WordPress and Web Accessibility

52% of people who meet the legal definition of having a disablilty prefer not to describe themselves as disabled. There are around 10 million people in the UK with some kind of impairment – if your website doesn’t address basic accessibility then you could be losing money and clicks.

Graham used Tesco as an example – a redesign of their website to improve accessibility cost £35,000, but after the relaunch, the website turnover was up £1.6million.

Accessibility – why it matters

Graham Armfield speaking at London WordPress
Graham Armfield

Graham’s interesting and informative talk covered what WordPress does well and not so well when it comes to helping the disabled access your content. Screen readers are commonly used by those with a visual impairment (they convert the text to speech). The other common accessibility method is tab – instead of using a mouse, users will hit the tab key to move around a web page.

With these two tools in mind, Graham demonstrated how some WordPress generated sites could be severely lacking in usability if you looked at them without a mouse or  only a screen reader. Some drop-down menus weren’t showing up when hitting tab, meaning those sections of the website would be totally inaccessible. Screen readers can give misleading information due to over-use of the title tag (which is extensive in WordPress).

There are a few WordPress plugins that can help: Remove Title Attributes; My Read More; Accessible Tag Cloud. Graham called for developers to help extend and create more plugins to improve accessibility in WordPress.

Some tips for users of WordPress:

  • Image Alt Tag. Read out by screen readers to make it descriptive
    • For decorative images leave blank
    • Background images are usually ignored by screen readers so don’t bother.
    • If image is a link, describe the destination
  • Links. “Read More” is no use to a blind person. Make the link text mean something
    • If the link opens a new window, say so in the title attribute. It’s confusing for screen readers otherwise.
    • There’s no need to repeat the same text in the title tag as on the hyperlink – screen readers will read out the same thing twice
  • Headings. Often used as a navigational shortcut. As per good design practice, break up your content using heading tags.
  • Lists. Lists like this one should be coded using appropriate html (the UL, LI tags) – the screen reader will tell the user they are in a list and how many items it has etc.
  • Video. Avoid auto start, Add captions using tools like subtitle-horse.com
  • Menus. Make sure you can tab around the menu.

Graham finished his presentation with a collection of links for further reading. These included the WAI-ARIA project, W3.org, HTML5accessibility.com, Accessify and his own blog at Coolfields.

Download the podcast, or watch Graham’s slides at SlideShare.

Do you need help with a WordPress website? Why not talk to 2020Media – we have oodles of enthusiasm, buckets of knowledge and tons of techies who are eager to help!