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Customizing the WordPress Admin : WPNYC Meetup Recap

February 22, 2013 By Chrisdigital 3 Comments

Presentation screen : Tailoring the WordPress Admin for Clients and WorkflowsLast Tuesday, on a drizzly February night, several scores of intrepid WordPress fans came out to the latest WordPress NYC meetup, “Customizing the WordPress Admin” hosted at New Work City. I have been rather busy in recent months and I found this latest subject rather serendipitous. Why you ask?… well, you may recall that last Summer’s WordCamp New York Meetup was jam-packed with good information and as an attendee, I couldn’t experience all of it. Needless to say, choosing which seminars to attend seemed like a series of terrible sacrifices. But, I was happy to learn that Helen Hou-Sandí (Director of User Interface Engineering at 10up) was doing a reprise of her talk that I missed last June on customizing the WordPress administrator’s control panel for our group. As a sweetener, Boštjan Špetič of Zemanta walked us through a very new and hip way you can find and assess WordPress plugins.

OMG 23,000+ Plugins! What Do I Use?

Boštjan Špetič walks us through his RankWP site which features WordPress plugin search engineThe first presenter at the meetup was what I consider a bonus treat. Boštjan Špetič (CEO of Zemanta) gave us a peek at his freshly launched side project RankWP.com. He, like most people, can be easily frustrated with the WordPress.org plugin directory index and sought to re-think it completely as an experiment. So he “scraped” that entire section of WordPress.org and built a functioning demo of how he imagined it working. Thus, RankWP.com was born. To be honest, it’s pretty freakin’ cool. So much so, I thought it stunned most of the attendees as he detailed the work he put into it. RankWP.com should become an essential tool for how we all decide which plugins to use with our personal WordPress installs in the future for reasons that are self-evident; it’s much easier to find contextual and relevant results for items you’re looking for over the WordPress.org Plugin Index.

A look at Rank WP's homepageIn response, the crowd gave some great constructive feedback and I am very excited about where the project will go in the future. The crowd wanted to see the compatibility with the current version of WordPress and when the plugin was last updated in search results, among other comments. This is certainly a good supplement to my usual googling for “top” or “best” plugin lists for a required feature if I’m not interested in building it myself.

Oh, Man This Should Be Good

As most of you know, that tune in for these recap posts- I write these recaps as exercises to clean up my notes and help some of the information I have learned “stick.” This meetup’s main topic was especially relevant to me since I’ve primarily been using WordPress as a content management system for my clients for the last several months. I’ve utilized a series of plugins and self-learned tricks to integrate jQuery UI and home-brewed enhancements to the admin interface to make data entry easier and less confusing for my clients. I was very interested to learn and hear what more experienced developers were doing on this front. Since Helen Hou-Sandí is a WordPress core committer and was leading the charge on Post Formats UI and WordPress CSS standards, I was fortunate to slide into the event last minute to learn from a seasoned pro.

I’m Not Worthy

Helen Hou-Sandí speaks to 100+ assembled at WPNYC meetup re: Customizing the WordPress AdminThis presentation did not disappoint, because some of the things Helen covered I would probably not have thought up myself…. How about a tweak that doesn’t break the “featured image” association with a post until you actually want to update the post? OK, how about a page layout preview / “staging” engine entirely built in .js (Javascript) before your client hits publish? Setting up a staging environment for WordPress is a famously “hairy” and painful proposition with many approaches. This is an investment of time and resources most clients don’t even have the imagination for. But, making edits to a “live” site is not ideal and I ran across Ramp doing my own research on the topic. Which was an option Helen mentioned as an up-and-coming alternative that everyone has said good things about, but I personally have no experience with. I can see how and why she “baked” her own solution to a vexing problem, which was pretty awesome to see in action. The other very cool thing I can mention were the project scheduling & assignment screens she showed that were built on top of a feed from Basecamp and custom taxonomies. That was pretty sweet.

Customizing Post type Icons with CSS SpritesI won’t mention all the examples Helen illustrated because I’m not sure it’s appropriate (some of it was advanced client-related work), so please reference her slides. But by far her most relatable admin hack was simplifying and smoothing out media content uploads pre- version 3.4. Several months back (before 3.4) there were a lot of UI frustrations with the WordPress image uploader, so she got it there and streamlined the process for her clients. She warned that a lot of techniques covered like this one were for pre- 3.4/3.5 but they are still relevant depending on how custom an experience you’re trying to build. This was a pretty great example to see.

Helen also got into minutiae of using css sprites for your custom post type admin icons and their hover states. Use them or Helen will find you :-) Here is a cool icon template I found.

Note: A link to her slides are below.

Decisions, Not Options

In her intro, Helen dug into WordPress philosophy a bit, in particular the “Decisions, not Options” section, which states:

“When making decisions these are the users we consider first. A great example of this consideration is software options. Every time you give a user an option, you are asking them to make a decision. When a user doesn’t care or understand the option this ultimately leads to frustration. As developers we sometimes feel that providing options for everything is a good thing, you can never have too many choices, right? Ultimately these choices end up being technical ones, choices that the average end user has no interest in. It’s our duty as developers to make smart design decisions and avoid putting the weight of technical choices on our end users.”

This roughly translates into really knowing your content administrators and their needs intimately and stripping out any obstacles and challenges to their success in the admin interface. The other side of the equation is adding to or enhancing WordPress custom features that are unique to that client’s publishing experience.

Get Your jQuery On

Helen walks us through featured image meta box admin enhancementjQuery UI was a big aspect of the presentation and Helen noted that it snuck into WordPress’ core install recently, just not with the accompanying CSS apparently, so you have to style it yourself. Following up on this post- presentation, I learned jQuery UI is now native to WordPress as of 3.3.x. Here’s a great tutorial on some of the possibilities for the Admin UI, and that tutorial covers the jQuery UI integration I just mentioned. Helen specifically highlighted nice examples like adding a jQuery UI datepicker and jQuery UI slider to a form (e.g. for age range) instead of standard select elements. She also went into detail about injecting Javascript inline by echo scripts through WordPress template hooks. I prefer my method of enqueueing what I would call a “junk drawer” file named something like “application.js” that loads last and tests for user events or a DOM object and then runs the relevant scripts rather than sticking .js inline, but it’s a matter of personal taste. Her method also has the advantage of calling relevant code snippets when needed. It’s probably semantics, but it might matter depending on your specific execution, the scale of your application code base, and what you want to maintain.

[Her slides are here].

Plugins Mentioned…

Post 2 Posts

Helen discusses her appproach to A close up of media upload enhancements to adminHelen gave the example that this plugin is very useful in creating “many to many” relationships between data nodes (e.g. people –> companies –> many companies)

Advanced Custom Fields

I’ve used this myself recently and it is awesome because I know what it’s like to do this manually.

Simple Page Ordering

This one is nice, but I’ve personally use CMS Page Order and I really dig it.

*Note*– See her slides for other plugins and Github code she mentioned.

Some Other Plugins I Use To Customize The Admin…

I’ve used this premium plugin a couple times: White Label Branding for WordPress and here’s a free one that comes close to the features: White Label CMS.

Hardcore Mom Award

Special thanks again to Helen Hou-Sandí for reasons stated above and as you can note from the pictures, she is with child. I already knew she was a hardcore WordPress user from last summer’s WordCamp, but my respect for her has now been cranked to “11.” If I were pregnant, I would have found a number of other things to do on a drizzly Tuesday night than present in front of a room of 100+ people.

Some Random Items And Announcements I Noted…

Steve, Jolie explain situation with the videos and other annoucements•Helen noted in her presentation that 10Up is growing quite well with about 23+ people now and considers it to be one of the largest WordPress consulting shops in the country.

• I appreciated the dedicated time at the end of sessions for networking and Steve for pointing out how active the wpnyc.org job board is. That was very good news.

• New Work City is coming along quite nicely. They may have one of the nicest spaces for meetups and the largest presentation screens I’ve ever seen.

•The official start time for the meetups is 7pm now, no longer 6:30pm.

• WPNYC meetup is also looking for help to edit the tens of videos still left to get cleaned up from last summer’s WordCamp, synced with audio and outputted to a format ready to be put online. They are also in need of assistance getting captions placed in all videos, but specifically the meetup videos. Contact Joly for more info.

• Also, the meetup’s price is going up to $6 for a trial period. The money from the extra $1 will be split between a door prize of around $50 dollars to a lucky attendee and a donation to a WordPress developer that gives back to the WordPress community. Rules and restrictions are being discussed as we speak.

“Don’t Email Steve”…

If you want to learn more about the WPNYC group, check out on Meetup.org. When we’re not meeting up check WPNYC.org. Attendees meet up the third Tuesday of every month, some say religiously :-)

On a final note, I want to make a last shout out to Tom Harrigan of RootBuzz (go check out what he’s up to). He dropped his spot on the guest list so I can get in.

Did I miss something? Have something to say?

Feel free to add comments and additions below. Thanks!

Resources:

  • 1. Helen Hou-Sandí slides from this presentation: Tailoring the WordPress Admin for Clients and Workflows
  • 2. “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman was mentioned as a source of inspiration for UI/UX design by Helen.
  • 3. Media-models.js and Backbone.js were mentioned briefly.
  • 4. Complex Meta Boxes in WordPress
  • 5. SpeckyBoy: 20 Snippets and Hacks to Make WordPress User-Friendly for your Clients
  • 6. Add a character counter to excerpt metabox
  • 7. How to Limit the Display of a WordPress Meta Box
  • 8. Add a jQuery DatePicker to Event Posts {WP}
  • 9. Creating Admin Themes
  • 10. Tuts+: How To Change Your WordPress Publishing Workflow For The Better
  • 11. Smashing Magazine: Six Revisions: How to Customize the WordPress Admin Area
  • 12. Smashing Magazine: Smashing Magazine’s How To Customize The WordPress Admin Easily
  • 13. Justin Tadlock: Uncluttering the post editing screen in WordPress
  • 14. Smashing Magazine:Useful Free Admin Plugins For WordPress
  • 15. WPBeginner: How to Improve your Editorial Workflow in Multi-Author WordPress Blogs
  • 16. Ulancer: Improving the WordPress Admin’s Workflow
  • 17. Hacking the WordPress Admin: Mastering Custom Columns
  • 18. [Video] Alan Cole’s talk last October about: Growing Pains: Experiments with Child themes and why I stopped using them.
  • 19. Tuts+: Customizing Your WordPress Admin
  • 20. Smashing Magazine: How To Improve And Refine Your WordPress Theme Development Process

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: #wpnyc, customizing WordPress themes, Recap, Using WordPress as CMS, WordPress CMS

My WordCamp NYC 2012 Recap : 800 WordPress fans assemble

June 12, 2012 By Chrisdigital 8 Comments

-Steve Bruner does the wrap up after a marathon of WordPressWell, it was that time of year again. The time when people’s thoughts turn to warmer weather, cool drinks, blockbuster summer movies, and ofcourse how to improve their WordPress skills. Maybe that last one is just me… or not. Recently, (during WordCamp New York City : June 9th – 10th) WordPress themers, pro bloggers, development rockstars, and newbies thirsty for knowledge got a chance to assemble from all over the world much like Marvel’s Avengers to rub elbows with WordPress core developers (and more importantly each other) in the spirit of learning.

Since I had such a positive experience in 2010, and due to the fact New York took a collective hiatus in 2011, I was looking forward to another wonderful event this time around after all the anticipation. Turns out many people were looking forward to this as well, because we easily hit in the neighborhood of 800 attendees. This year was really special for me personally, because I decided to introduce my son to WordPress. He was excited about assisting me in volunteering, and getting a window into what I do for a living. He also looked forward to being in the “beginner track” sessions, because he has dreams of running or being part of a school newspaper in the future.

[ ↓ Jump down to my list of favorite WordCamp NYC 2012 presentations ]

“Focused” And Diverse

Father and son WordCamp New York 2012 volunteers and attendees pose for the cameraIn addition, this year felt more “focused” and mature to me. That is probably a side-effect of my own knowledge, and the maturation of WordPress itself (WordPress 3.4 launched June 14th.) Also noteworthy, are the facts: like myself several people brought their kids, there were a lot more female presenters, and the topics spanned the spectrum of “improving how you blog” to “getting into the guts of WordPress and coming out the other side” figuratively speaking.

Due to my affinity for this event, I answered the call for the second time in three years and volunteered to aid the WordCamp NYC 2012 team to stage one of the most diverse events I’ve ever attended- diverse in attendees, and in presentation content.

The Fellowship Of WordPress

Shot of the crowd that was starting to develop for keynote WordCamp NYC 2012 speech on SundayIf you’ve never been to one of these WordCamp events, you really missing a treat. WordCamps are hosted year round, all over the country- supported by local Meetup groups, sponsors, and the WordPress foundation. Speaking for “our event” (WordCamp NYC), there is a real spirit of “brotherhood” and “tutelage” at the event that everyone buys into.

Since the event was held at Baruch College (mostly in their 55 Lexington Ave. location) It was always an interesting proposition navigating the hallways and watching people do the lost-freshman-first-day-of-high-school routine trying to find the room numbers of the different sessions. But as usual people made it work.

Shoutout To The Organizers, Volunteers And Individual Sponsors

WordCamp New York City 2012 Organizers take a bow at the urging of Steve Bruner during closing wordsThis year the hard assignment of organizing this year’s WordCamp went to a crack team of intrepid souls from our local WPNYC.org group. If you want to shoot them a note of thanks, Check out this WordCamp NYC 2012 organizer Twitter list. We also had 40 people step up as volunteers and 22 people step up as individual sponsors, including myself.

Why You Should Volunteer Next Time

Just a little secret… I love volunteering, especially for morning setup and lunch because they are really critical. Not only that, but you get to meet the most people which helps if you want to turn to a neighbor for clarity on a point during a speaker’s session. I also like to meet, or work with the speakers if they have to register at your table, or if you happen to be their room monitor. It’s really a great advantage, you get the see the event in a whole different perspective than just being an attendee.

The Theme Of WordCamp NYC 2012

Andrew Nacin walks the crowd through details of the query at WordCamp NYC 2012If I had to pick a theme for this year’s WordCamp New York City I would say it was: “There’s a right way to do things and a wrong way. Learn the right way.” There was a lot of head-nodding in the sessions I attended (even if it was only me doing it.) I definitely think we’ll see a lot about “best practices in WordPress” in the near future. Take a look at this developing page on CSS in the WordPress Codex for example.

The Biggest Things That Stuck With Me As A Designer/Developer:

1. Stay on top of your updates, and take proper security precautions to protect your install.
2. Don’t work against how WordPress works, if that can be avoided at all.
3. Learn the nuances of why WordPress does what it does, this will make you a better developer.
4. If you don’t like the way WordPress works then become a core contributor and patch it, or file a trac bug.
5. We all have access to a really great WordPress community that’s willing to help.

For My Teenager, His Take-aways Were:

WCNYC 2012 - Mark Jaquith speaks as Andrew Nacin deals with the hecklers from his own team during keynote at WordCamp New York1. He really got a ground level introduction to the software.
2. Really enjoyed learning about SEO and taking full advantage of the tools Google offers.
3. Loved the concept of guest blogging and different things you could do to raise your online profile.
4. He really liked the idea of learning a trade that he felt would be in demand
5. He liked learning about all the useful plugins at his disposal especially for things like video integration.

A Lot To Process

This WordCamp was “off the chain” busting out with content, 80 sessions were held on Saturday alone with more on Sunday including repeats by popular demand. It was a lot to process even for a veterans, but oh so awesome ;-)

The coolest things I learned about by far were the new debugger tools available (see slides below), and the new Theme Customizer tool in WordPress 3.4 : download the latest WordPress, (3.4 or later) is out now!

My List Of Homework / Favorite Presentations (*means I saw in person)

Daryl Koopersmith demoing a new feature coming in WordPress 3.4: new theme customizer at WCNYC 2012These are WordCamp NYC 2012 presentations I saw live or wish I saw (like the Mets no-hitter.) It was so hard making choices! This is a list of 20 out of 80! I originally just wanted to highlight 10.

It’s really hilarious and an embarrassment of riches that so much information was offered to the attendees in one place (and in some cases direct from the WordPress VIP developer team.)

I’m not going to bore you any further, or steal the thunder from any of these slide presentations, so just check them out for yourself…

1. Brad Williams – WordPress Security
2. Boone Gorges – Using Git for Sane WordPress Development [Sunday]*
3. Mo Jangda – WordPress Debugging*
4. Andrew Nacin- You Don’t Know Query [Sunday]*
5. Daryl Koopersmith – Intro To Javascript In WordPress* (and the Theme Customizer walk-through for WordPress 3.4 on Sunday)
Snapshot of WordCamp NYC 2012 schedule : lots of content6. Alexandar Sapountzis and Jeffrey Marx – Customizing the loop*
7. Sonja Leix – WordPress Responsive Design Bootcamp
8. John Havlik – The Power Of Custom Post Types*
9. Sarah Whinnem- WordPress Hierachy and Custom Templates
10. Mel Choyce – Alas, No Mind: Designer-Developer Communication
11. Jeremy Clarke = Dry CSS – Theories, Methods And Tools For Scalable Stylesheets
12. Helen Hou-Sandi – Making Plugins and Themes disappear in into the WordPress Admin
13. Jason Paul – WordPress As A Custom CMS
14. Siobhan McKeown – Killer Docs For Devs
15. Mason James – Supporting WordPress:Caring For Your Clients And Community
16. Ben Doherty – WordPress On The Command-Line
17. Jake Goldman – What Would Core Do?
18. Erick Hitter – Moving beyond the Codex: Learning WordPress from itself
19. Kathryn Presner – A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress
20. Alex Miranda – Google Loves WordPress – Blogging For SEO

If want to learn more, checkout the WordCamp NYC 2012 Website. If you want follow-up info just check the #wcnyc hashtag on Twitter. Also my Meetup buddy Jean-Pierre Welch (@jpwelch) has a running Delicious.com feed of all the available WordCamp NYC 2012 #wcnyc slides from the event and eventually the videos will be available online as well.

Sponsors

Jean-Pierre Welch and Chris Carvey chat with Austin Gunter of WPEngine during lunch on Sunday at WordCamp New York CitySpecial shoutout to the WordCamp NYC 2012 sponsors for the free swag and the support. Especially the @WPEngine guys who gave any #wcnyc attendee that was interested a free personal account for life! I got into a great dialogue with their team and they’re really committed to sponsoring and promoting WordCamps across the country. Check them out if you’re interested in a hosting company that believes in WordPress. The t-shirts were printed up by Graf-X Unlimited in Brooklyn. Please visit, support and tweet about the sponsors of our event to encourage them for the future.

Other Recaps, Please Comment

If I have left out anything important, if you see any glaring typos let me know. Also, if you have your own WordCamp recap, please comment, shoot me an email, or hit me up on twitter (@chrisdigital) I’ll update the post:

1. Zachery Hogan : WordCamp NYC 2012 Has Come and Gone

2. Sarah Gooding : 12 Fantastic Presentations from WordCamp NYC

3. Austin Gunter : WORDCAMP 2012 RECAP

4. Artiatesia Deal : WordCamp New York City 2012 Recap from a Volunteer POV

5. Content Robot @ WordCamp NYC 2012

6. Nancy Loderick : WordCamp NYC 2012 – An Excellent Adventure

7. Hal Goodtree : Top Tip from WordCamp New York City

8. Poka Yoke Design : Attending The WordCamp NYC 2012 Conference

9. Mike Toppa : WordCamp New York City 2012

Read more on ChrisDigital’s Digital Designer Blog:

1. The Importance of Social Media and Your Online Persona

2. Responsive Design: WordPress NYC Meetup Recap

3. NYC Tech Startup Tour Meetup Recap: ideeli and Skillshare

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: #wcnyc, #wpnyc, Baruch College, Slide Presentations, Wordcamp, WordCamp New York, WordCamp NYC 2012