Category Archives: Opinion

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!

Opinion

Joomla! Day UK 2011

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2020Media was proud to sponsor this year’s Joomla! conference Sept 24-25th 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB8LyRosHzE

Joomla!Day events are a great opportunity for the community to come together and share learning, find out about the latest developments, meet the people behind the extensions which they use, and network with others who are involved in this area of website design.

With 175 delegates from around the world, Joomla!Day UK 2011 brought together people from all walks of life with every possible level of experience with Joomla! – from complete beginners who had never installed the popular open source content management system, through to developers who have been part of the team since the project began, and everything in between.

Microsoft kindly provided their offices, allowing the event exclusive use of their amazing facilities including a 200+ seat auditorium and 15 breakout rooms, as well as excellent hostesses who ensured that everybody was registered quickly and found their way to the right rooms during the event.

Videos of the sessions are being edited and will be appearing on the Joomla!Day UK 2011 website and YouTube channel, along with slides from all speakers.

Ryan Ozimek, the President of Open Source Matters (OSM), gave the keynote on the first day.

Ryan reminded the conference that the future for Joomla goes well beyond the CMS. The CMS has been an amazing piece of software, built by the community and extended by the community, but has been focused mostly on Web publishing. Ryan said “When I visit universities and talk to young people, they’re not that interested in building the next commenting system or blogging platform. They want to use Joomla to build the next Twitter or Facebook.”

2020Media is a proud supporter of the Joomla! project from events like Joomla!Day, Usergroups, the Extension Directory and providing top-class hosting facilities here in the UK.

Opinion

WordPress London Meetup 22nd September

3 interesting talks encouraged members of the London WordPress Meetup group to fill the venue to capacity on Thursday evening.

BuddyPress

Buddy Press Dev Paul Gibbs
Paul Gibbs

Core developer Paul Gibbs talked us through the new release of BuddyPress, the social network “out of the box” plugin for WordPress. BuddyPress 1.5 is an almost complete recoding of the plugin, taking advantage of the new features in WordPress 3 and above. It  includes a new theme with a fresher look (as many users never attempted to create their own), more complete documentation so that developers and designers can take and extend the core plugin code, and the ability to embed media from sites such as YouTube directly in your site.

WordPress E-Commerce

Jeff Ghazally WP-Ecommerce developer
Jeff Ghazally

Jeff Ghazally, one of the developers of the WordPress e-commerce plugin called WP e-commerce spoke about the new version of this plugin, and demo-ed setting up a online music store for digital music downloads in under 5 minutes. Although the core plugin is free, most users need to purchase a plugin add-on to give them the functionality they require. Add-ons range from $10-$195. Community plugins add more specific tasks. WP-ecommerce downloads total over 1.3 million to date, making it one of the all-time most popular plugins.

Better WordPress Search

Shakur Shidane
Shakur Shidane talks about SOLR search

Developer Shakur Shidane gave us an overview of using Apache SOLR project to add a full featured search to WordPress sites. Search in WordPress is pretty simply – for example it can’t recognise the similarity between “smile” and “smiling”. The SOLR project includes and much more. Although not suitable for most small WordPress users on shared hosting, due to the technology requirements, Shakur’s talk showed us the WordPress can be used for the biggest of sites when required.

Hosting for WordPress

The talks this week at WordPress London showed us just how powerful WordPress can be. From a fully featured social network for your specific group, to extensive e-commerce ability, to high powered search, WordPress is ready for heavy lifting.

If you have a WordPress project coming up that may need specialist support, why not get in touch with us? 2020Media offers specialist hosting support for WordPress for all sizes of website. With ‘no-click’ WordPress install, experienced and friendly technical help and free support, the team at 2020Media are waiting to hear from you.

 

Opinion, Tips and Tricks

London Joomla User Group report

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joomla UG LondonThe September London Joomla User Group meeting took place with less than a week to go until the only UK Joomla conference of 2011 – Joomla!Day UK 2011. Several of the speakers were at the meeting and we were given a preview of one of the talks coming up on Sunday.

Coupon code for 100% discount on your extra tickets is MAXIMUM.

Use the code for today (Wednesday 21st September) only.

Other topics discussed were getting Joomla running on a local Windows setup for development (Microsoft’s Web Matrix was recommended); the imminent release of the long awaited VirtueMart 2 – this will actually be released during Joomla Day London; a discussion about everyone’s favourite extensions; and finally we talked about making Joomla fast.

Jet Set Joomla

rockettheme- AfterburnerWe asked what the fastest Joomla theme was – Afterburner from Rockettheme was suggested; honourable mentions went to Joomlapolis and Morph.

To further increase your site’s speed, use of a content delivery network was suggested – although not free, these can definitely help. If you sign up via the guy who makes the Joomla plugin there’s a discount for one popular commerical CDN.

Use Firebug for Firefox to check the download speed of all the components of your site – find out if anything is dragging your load times down.

 

 

Opinion

Preview New Features

Here’s a sneak preview of some new features we’ll be adding later this year for our customers.

Improved Reporting

Users of our customer portal will be able to get a daily report of their service usage. This example features bandwidth reporting:

Bandwidth Report
Bandwidth Report

These new reports will cover website bandwidth, disk quota, broadband usage etc.

Automatic Renewal

What would happen if your main domain name expired? You’ve asked for automatic renewal of domain names and services, so we’re working to introduce this soon. Payment systems and domain registry backend systems are being integrated so that if you have a registered continuous payment method set up, such as Direct Debit, we can seamlessly allow you to set your services to auto-renew. Unlike some companies, we’ll never make this mandatory and you’ll always have the choice.

Key Benefits

  • Simplifies your life; your 2020Media subscription is automatically renewed every year without any action required by you.
  • Saves time and reduces stress, you don’t have to worry about remembering to pay for your subscription before it expires.
  • Automatically receive the appropriate best pricing for your hosting plan.
  • Never miss your payments, avoid charges for arrears or court costs on overdue invoices.
  • Avoid redemption and reactivation charges on expired domains.
  • Opt-out of automatic renewal service at any time.

Simple, secure and making our payment system more streamlined.

Customer Portal

customer portal thumbnailHave you looked in the 2020Media customer portal recently? This is the hub of all your 2020Media products and services.

Portal Docs

  • All invoices can be downloaded at any time.
  • Renewal notices are archived here.
  • 30 day Financial statement, generated daily.
  • 90 day statement, generated monthly.
  • Account credentials  available 24/7
  • Usage reports (coming soon)
  • Services listed with important dates (updated on request)

Tickets

  • Keep track of support queries with My Tickets.
  • View the complete history of the query.
  • Search facility – locate previous requests.
  • Open and respond to queries via email or the web.
  • Works with mobile devices with specially optimised view.

The customer portal also includes an area where you can update your profile and password. Add social media links, and upload a photo.

Login to the customer portal at  https://pfs.2020media.com/ and let us know what you think.