It’s the first event of its type and with names like John James Jacoby, Frederick Townes, Dre Armeda, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Jake Goldman, Brad Williams, and more! It’s bound to be an incredible event so definitely expect to learn something and have a great time.

I’d also like to give a special shout out and thanks to the awesome and familiar faces here at WP Realm. Mario Preshev has a talk about the WP.org Theme Directory @ 8:00 UTC, Brian Krogsgard goes live @ 14:00 UTC, Noel Tock talks about WordPress & SaaS @ 16:00 and Tammie Lister will be talking BuddyPress @ 21:00 UTC. Make sure to catch their talks!

WordSesh will take place on Saturday, April 13, 2013, 00:00 – 24:00 UTC and there will be a total of 24 presentations: 1 every hour, on the hour, for 24 hours. Since WordSesh is a virtual event the schedule is in UTC to avoid any confusion. Here’s a nice tool to help you convert UTC times.

Not hardcore enough to stay up for the whole 24 hours? All sessions will be recorded and publish both on YouTube and WordSesh.org for later viewing. And make sure to stay up to date with the latest by following @WordSesh on Twitter.

Will you be tuning in Live?

A DTAP street

Using a DTAP street is all about managing the development and release of entirely new software or just for a newer release of the software already in production. When using a DTAP street in web development you are in fact using at least four environments and versions/copies of your website:

• Development — (for example, http://projectname.development.companyname.com)
  This is a true developers’ environment and the place where the actual code is written. Are more developers working simultaneously on the same project? If so, you can have several simultaneous development environments. Just use SVN of Git for version control and for merging code. The main purpose of this environment is to implement the code which can be tested by the developer himself.
• Testing — (for example, http://projectname.testing.companyname.com)
  The test environment is the next station for new code. Here, a tester (an interaction designer, for instance), tests the product and checks whether it works according to specifications; for this reason, this person should preferably not be the same person who wrote the code.
• Acceptance — (for example, http://projectname.acceptance.companyname.com)
  It should be fully identical to the production environment, and even run on the same server. All integrations with back end systems, third party systems and cache systems (and settings) should match the live website. This environment is often used to perform tests prior to taking the software into production. This too, is the station where your customer ‘accepts’ the changes; in other words, it serves as the customer’s test environment as well.
• Production — (for example, http://projectname.com)
  The production environment is your actual live website, to be used by your customer and his visitors. The main difference with acceptance is that there is no room for error here, and there should be no downtime.

One codebase to rule them all

Working with WordPress under DTAP means that you will have to run four separate installs of WordPress for every project and also running four databases. I’ve tried using fewer databases than four, for example using one database for development and testing; it really does not work well, since WordPress uses absolute URIs for your assets like Javascripts and CSS, and user generated content, such as images inside posts, will be scattered all over the place. Hence, I strongly recommend that you use a separate database for each install.

I want to keep my code completely portable between these environments; I hate deploying a site to another environment and have to fill out new database credentials in the wp-config.php or in any other setting. Since you are bound to forget it at some point, I use this simple code fragment in my wp-config.php for my (database) settings.

Migrating WordPress

Now that you have your program code portable between the environments, you will only need to concern yourself with the database. It’s not often that you will have to deploy an entire site to another environment – usually only at the first deploy, but since you are bound to run into this at least once, let me try to explain this a little further.

wp-config is now set up in such a way that WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL are already defined for you. This means that WordPress will use these values instead of any values taken from the wp_options table. The result is that after having deployed to another environment and after having executed a database import, WordPress should already be able to run. However, as mentioned before, WordPress uses absolute URLs inside posts and these must be changed too.

There are several ways to migrate WordPress, such as the Backup Buddy plugin. I like to use a database search and replace script (Daniël van de Giessen wrote a real nice one with a lot of options, that you can download from Github). Whatever you choose, at the very least, you should read the WordPress Codex on changing your sites’s URL and on moving WordPress to another server.

As to the URIs inside posts, there are ways to let WordPress work with them; read this article on how it can be done manually. I, however, tend to agree with Joost de Valk who argues that relative URIs might not be a good idea.

More goodies

DTAP can also be used for your content workflow; there is a commercial plugin called RAMP which allows you to deploy content between you DTAP-environments.

Back to you

What are your experiences with DTAP and WordPress? Do you even use it? What obstacles did you encounter and how did you tackle them?

Given all these variations, is another one needed?

The community in Portugal seems to think it is. Under the guidance of Nuno Morgadinho, from WidgiLabs, a new experiment is about to take place: the WordPress “Residency”.

Think of it as a mixture of the relaxed and informal atmosphere of a meetup, with the duration of a WordCamp, the holiday spirit of WP On Tour and the coding frenzy of a hackday. It’s a 3-day week-end for WordPress enthusiasts to meet and work on code, show each other what they’re working on, ask questions and generally get to know each other. It will take place in the beautiful city of Viana do Castelo, way up in the north of Portugal, from the 17th to the 19th of May. Sessions will be held at the Dinamo10 co-working space, and other social activities will be announced soon. It is mostly geared towards the portuguese community, but all are welcome, as most in attendance, if not all, speak English.

For 100€, anyone gets to attend the event, and the price includes housing, meals, snacks and coffee breaks, for the duration of the event, which seems more than fair (if you want to make your own housing and meal arrangements, there’s a 30€ 15€ ticket that only includes attendance, snacks and coffee breaks). In the spirit of WordCamps and all meeting formats mentioned above, it is important to note that the philosophy behind the residency is decidedly non-profit – the money goes to cover the expenses.

It’s the perfect example of making things happen quickly, without too much organisational overhead, relying on the WordPress spirit to make it a success.

I’m sure the idea can easily be replicated in other places, each with its particular flavour. Would you attend an event like this in your region? Would you organise one?

Just last month, our own Brian Krogsgard launched poststat.us; its purpose is to provide a central collation point for all the latest and greatest from across the WordPress universe, allowing registered users to vote on what they deem relevant.

My colleague at Metronet, Kaspars Dambis, decided that he was spending an awful lot of time reading feeds about WordPress and felt that it might helpful to the rest of us if there was not only a central point for finding posts, as with poststat.us, but also a central point for finding complete sites, including rankings and information, to help you figure out which ones to subscribe to. Enter WPRoll.com, a site with user submitted blogs, curated by Kaspars himself. It uses an algorithm to rank blogs up and down, based on a variety of factors and the listings are updated automatically as new posts are added. WPRoll.com provides URLs, RSS feed links or even OPML feed exports for importing into various feed readers. You can follow WPRoll on Twitter.

If you would like to see your blog listed, go submit it on WPRoll.com for inclusion in the listings.

bbPress 2.3 introduces forum-specific search functionality, so that your users are able to search your forum posts without interfering with your blog posts. It simplifies the fancy topic and reply editors, enabling only the functionality your users should see. Lastly, we’ve included more forum migration tools to help you transition to bbPress from Vanilla, Mingle, and SimplePress.

I must say, I’ve quite enjoyed seeing bbPress mature over the last couple of cycles and personally couldn’t be more thrilled to see that both BuddyPress and bbPress are growing up to be fine outstanding pieces of software.

Also, I hope bbPress 2.3 is finally deemed good enough to replace the bbPress forum software still used on .org and the international sites. We could use a better solution there ;).

BuddyPress 1.7 is going to be one of our most exciting releases to date. It comes packaged with the same theme compatibility that was introduced in bbPress 2.0, which means that BuddyPress will now work out-of-the-box with a majority of the WordPress themes available today.

Make sure you test this release candidate as much as you can because as you know, the 1.7 version is quite an upgrade. For more information, do check out the release post.

Every conference has unique challenges, depending on the people involved, where it’s located, and a thousand other factors. What i’m going to relate to you now are the lessons I’ve learned from drama in past WordCamp Miami events. Maybe you can relate, or maybe you can’t, but it might be entertaining.

Equipment failures (for speakers)

Have you ever been to a WordCamp where a speaker is getting ready for his/her presentation and something on their laptop won’t work with the projection system? Have you ever experienced problems with adaptors or USB drives not begin recognized by the host computer? (I’ve seen this outside of WordCamps as well, of course, but it’s rare at some conferences I’ve been to. These conferences usually have higher price tags for tickets, but I am not sure if there’s a connection). Regardless, the goal is to have smooth transitions between sessions. From what i’ve seen, asking speakers to simply bring their laptops with their slides doesn’t guarantee much. To attempt the smoothest transitions you should (1) communicate with your speakers early and often before the event, letting them know the game plan (such as the format of slides you prefer),  (2) have speakers email you slides prior to the event, and set them up on a single host computer (no mess, no stress) and (3) assign room captains whose only job is to check in with speakers and be able to handle problems immediately. For my next WordCamp, I am  practicing #1 down to a religion, giving #2 a degree of a shot, and #3 completely done. If I’m right, then we’ll see much smoother transitions than in previous editions.

Wi-Fi

I’ll make this short and sweet, but i would like to point out that i’m the type of attendee that prefers Wi-Fi at a technology conference. As an event organizer, I don’t think it represents a threat to my attendees’ attention span (if people really want internet access, they’ll get it somehow). Whether you agree or not, make sure to let attendees aware of the situation BEFORE the event; if you don’t, it quickly becomes a top question asked around the event. The existence of Wi-Fi, what network to connect to and any passwords should be posted during the morning of the event (many make it a slide in the opening remarks or post signs in each room). Maybe it’s just Miami, but you would think WordCamps were the only place with Wi-Fi in the state.

Get your volunteers as soon as you can

It helps in planning to know how many hands you have available to help; as soon as you have WordCamp dates immediately start a mailing list sign-up form. When people purchase a ticket, make sure to ask them if they would like to help out (even if it’s for a few hours). You would surprised at how many people say yes (although that doesn’t mean that they’ll be able to, when the time comes). I’ve made mistakes in the past where asking for volunteers a few weeks before the event ended up not producing the best results. Not having volunteers for your volunteer coordinator (you do have one of those, right?) means that things like registration, crowd control, lunch, and cleanup will not go smoothly and create more stress than they should. This is especially true for registration, the typical trial by fire for many volunteers. For WordCamp Miami 2013, we started asking for volunteers about 3 months prior. This has resulted in getting more volunteers, and knowing more about what they want to do, so that we can assign them to tasks that they actually like doing.

Pick your organization committee early and create roles

Much like recruiting volunteers, you should define your core volunteer team as soon as possible. In fact, you should have this BEFORE your event gets a date or venue. These people should be very reliable, and most likely people you’ll find in your local meetups. On top of that, put each one in charge of a “big thing”; WordCamp Miami has a sponsorship coordinator, a volunteers coordinator, a marketing coordinator, a food/party coordinator (er, I mean “entertainment coordinator”), and so forth. Start a central planning website (Basecamp or a P2 theme has been used for WordCamp Miami) and make sure each of your core organizers can see their “to-do” lists. I’m happy to say that WordCamp Miami, this year, has a much improved organization team and I’ve already seen its benefits.

You can never have enough signs

Ok, you can, but if you think like this, you’ll get it right. I can’t tell you how many WordCamps I’ve attended (especially on college campuses) where you don’t know where to go — either for rooms, lunch or for registration itself. Granted, if people are wandering around like sheep for a short time until they get their bearings, it’s not the end of the world, but how difficult is it to put up a $1 sign as well? WordCamp Miami does have rooms in two different buildings this year — similar to last year — and people get confused about what is in which building. This year we’ve made sure to have plenty of specific  large signs, and if that doesn’t work we’ll draw footprints on the ground for people to follow for next year.

T-Shirts are like gold

Everyone likes a free t-shirt; it’s the traditional souvenir. In Miami, however, you would think they were made out of gold. The mistakes from which I’ve learned in this department were: don’t give out t-shirts during the event, especially if not everyone at the event was guaranteed a t-shirt (last-minute ticket sales make it difficult to ensure that you have enough t-shirts, in the right sizes). People who weren’t guaranteed a t-shirt can get annoyed when you tell them to wait, and leaving t-shirts out for anyone to take on the honor system is a bad idea (sorry if I’ve shattered your faith in humanity). Give t-shirts out when people register to solve these problems. You might be thinking that all of this is obvious, but it took a while for us at WordCamp Miami to adopt these guidelines; not because we didn’t think of it, but because something prevented us from being  prepared and organized at registration, to distribute the t-shirts  (it’s a long story; last year, due to venue issues we had to rush registration). Also make sure to provide t-shirts in both men’s and women’s sizes. For some reason, in some areas, women’s sizes cost more (this isn’t a fault to any WordCamp organizers or even the t-shirt people they order from). That’s a “fail”, but pony up the few extra bucks, because WordCamps should target both equally.

Don’t panic

I have tried to touch on a few small lessons, the ones sometimes you don’t think about until you are told about them AFTER the event is over. WordCamps, among other things, are an experience, and anything to make the experience smooth and better, benefits all. Do remember what I said at the start of this post — about problems being or not being a big deal. It’s important to know what to focus on, while a WordCamp is in progress. If something DOES go wrong, don’t panic and look at it from a 10,000 foot perspective: should you stress that a speaker needs to borrow a laptop at the last minute? Probably not, because it’s likely that there is another laptop available. Stressing because you can’t find your coordinators during the event, to help address some issues? Ok, stress a little there (I solved that problem last year with walkie-talkies).

Organizing WordCamps is hard work, but you should be able to enjoy most of the experience. A bit of pre-planning and help from your fellow trusted coordinators and volunteers can go a long way.

In short: upgrade. I know some developers out there are saying that we can’t “require” people to upgrade, well, I disagree. He compares it to Apple not forcing you to buy a new Mac when it breaks. The difference there is that we’re not talking about hardware. We’re talking about software. Apple regularly asks you to upgrade your system to fix battery issues or other issues.

My thinking is pretty much the same as Joost’s in that we have to agree with that the line has to be drawn somewhere. Do you agree with his take on where that line should be? Is one version behind really fair?

DP Dashboard plugin

On installing the DP Dashboard plugin, I was immediately struck by a stunning change to my admin panel. My initial impressions ranged from “oh that’s weird” to “ohhh, shiny, I like that!”.

The good

The regular greys and blues with small fonts have been replaced with a much whiter, larger, simpler look. I am no UI or design expert, but I know what I like, and I quite like the visual look Tung has achieved. It reminds me a lot of the latest WordPress default themes which have proven to be very popular.

Impressions of others

I have shown the dashboard to others in my office and they all responded with nice comments about the design; words like “clean”, “clear” and “uncluttered” were muttered on seeing it for the first time. I’m writing this post within the WP Realm admin panel right now, and am missing the bolder, brighter design provided by the DP Dashboard plugin.

User interface

Something I found particularly pleasant about this admin theme, is that I didn’t need to relearn anything. It uses exactly the same skeletal setup as WordPress core. Everything is where you expect it to be and there are no unpleasant surprises. I have tried other dashboard plugins over the years, usually becoming disoriented while attempting to find my way around as they had moved things to new locations. Tung’s plugin however, is very easy to switch to and is mostly just a visual styling change with no functional changes.

Logo

There is a prominent DevPress logo in the top left hand corner of the admin panel. It looks great, but is probably not appropriate for most sites. You can easily change this to another logo of your choice by following the instructions in the plugins’ readme.txt file.

The bad

When I first tested this plugin, it had a lot of bugs. Some of them were show stoppers, which made it quite infuriating to use. However, on sending through a draft of this blog post to Tung, he promptly went through and fixed most of them! Since that update, the plugin has been very pleasurable to use.

Icons

The icons used in DP Admin are the same as those used in the regular WordPress admin panel. These seem out of place in the brighter, bolder DP Dashboard. Some flatter custom icons, perhaps similar in concept to those discussed in WordPress Trac and included in WordPress trunk recently would be more suitable.

Upgrades

Upgrades of DP Admin are currently a pain point, as it not only lacks an auto-update functionality, but also the instructions for changing logos involves hacking the plugin’s core files, which causes breakages during the upgrade process. Thankfully, Tung has confirmed that he will iron out this problem for one of the upcoming releases and logos will not need to be updated each time.

MP6 admin plugin

The MP6 plugin is brand new and was released after I began writing this post. It is intended as a test bed rather than as a usable plugin, so a direct comparison between the two is not fair.

My first impressions of the MP6 plugin are not as favourable as for DP Admin, but that is to be expected since it is a brand new project. It feels similar to the existing admin design which I’ve always liked, but the dark sidebar feels a little too abrupt. DP Dashboard uses a much larger font sizing and a very clean white design, whereas MP6 (currently) is darker than the existing design and has a similar font sizing.

The problem with WordPress admin themes

I have a first hand experience of the pains of writing themes for the WordPress admin panel; I was the first to publish an admin theme after the total dashboard redesign of WordPress 2.5. Fast forward to WordPress 2.7 and the original design was completely thrown out the door again, rendering my admin theme useless and in need of a complete rewrite. This isn’t a criticism of WordPress, since refinement of the admin panel is necessary. However it does illustrate the problems of using an admin plugin, rather than relying on the core styling. If the developer does not maintain the plugin through major releases, then its design will be lost. The beauty of using the MP6 plugin is that it may eventually end up in WordPress core, so that may not be a problem. The downside of MP6 is that since it is a test-bed, there is a very likely chance of major bugs being present.

Tung has guaranteed that his plugin will be upgraded through major releases in the forseeable future, and since DP Dashboard plugin is a paid service, Tung will have a major (monetary) reason to justify spending a lot of time maintaining updates for future releases. So hopefully this will not be a problem for the DP Dashboard plugin.

Conclusion

I’ve been running DP Dashboard on all of my local and live WordPress installations for the past few weeks. It’s not necessarily any more practical than the current admin theme, but it is more pleasant on the eyes. I’m really enjoying the change of scenery and I recommend you try it out too. I’ve only tested MP6 locally, and so far don’t see any benefits over the existing admin design, but I’m sure that will change very soon as development is ramped up.

What do you think?

If you try out either of these plugin yourself, please leave a comment here about your experience. I’d love to hear opinions from others on these (or other) admin panel plugins or the direction you think WordPress core should take the admin design in.