WordCamp 2011

As an agency we’re pretty agnostic when it comes to our content management recommendations but recently we’ve found ourselves recommending WordPress time and again.

We work with a number of extremely talented and committed developers who pride themselves at being at the cutting edge of WordPress developments and one of them has just returned from WordCamp 2011 where he’s told us about a number of exciting developments which I’m going to touch upon here.

Content management for the faint hearted.

A common fear for clients is how easily they are going to be able to get to grips with the content management system.  WordPress already has a very elegant back-end (if you will) and is extremely intuitive, straightforward and easy to use.

It seems things might be about to get even easier with the introduction of a front end editorial plugin, which allows content to be updated ‘WYSIWYG’ style, on-the-fly, without even the need to enter the admin interface.

Even better, the list of content editable from the front end is pretty exhaustive and you can decide on the settings by post making sure the site ‘super-user’ remains in control.
Great for people who aren’t confident with the editing interface or haven’t got the time to learn.

We’ll certainly be making the most of this one with our clients in the coming weeks.

Managing your documents

Ok, it’s not particularly glamorous it has to be said, but hugely helpful.

This new plugin being developed as we speak uses the existing WordPress framework of revisions and taxonomy and by treating documents as a custom post type allows a sophisticated document management system where the latest version of each file is always available at a static URL.

For larger organisations with lots of documents to look after, this provides a simple way of tracking documents internally and externally with each version receiving its very own URL.  Find out more about it here.

A very simple way to post images

Still in early stages of development over at github, Very Simple PostImages is a super fast way of uploading multiple images to a gallery,without going into the Media Library pop-up.
This new plugin also allows the editor to select a featured image, to delete images from the gallery and also to drag and drop the images into position. It’s basically a nifty way to manage the two main WordPress ways of selecting images associated with a post – galleries and the Featured Image – in one place.

Watch this space…

The semantic web

Pardon?

It’s actually very simple and it boils down to making your data meaningful to machines rather than humans.

Let’s say you have a piece of content, like an address which has an HTML tag which tells it to be displayed in bold. That’s great. A person can read this content and they can understand what it’s saying to them-it’s an address.

The data itself however, only really communicates the values of ‘bold.’

The semantic web is a language of additional HTML tags which tell search engines exactly what the information is that they are looking at. In this example, it would have the ‘address’ tag to help search engines understand the content.

So essentially, it’s a new language of tags which spans a huge variety of content. Schema is one such implementation of the semantic web and you can see their full tag classification so far here.

So what is this good for?  Used well, it’s a big step in the right direction where usability is concerned. It creates more structure to the search environment and therefore a better search experience, leading people to the information they are looking for more quickly and accurately.

Enough geek talk for now. As you were.