Rumors of a WordCamp Sacramento started in 2012, after I rebooted the WordPress Sacramento Meetup. Fast forward to 2015: there are 4 meetup organizers and northern California’s WordCamp San Francisco has been displaced by WordCamp US. The Art Institute of Sacramento volunteered its campus for an event, a professor offered himself as lead organizer, and indispensable local leaders stepped up to take an active role.
10up is thrilled to sponsor WordCamp NYC 2015 this weekend in Brooklyn. This year, Chief Executive Officer John Eckman and I are presenting, with Director of Platform Experience Helen Hou-Sandi in attendance.
In “Modernizing WordPress Search with Elasticsearch”, I’ll cover the benefits of Elasticsearch and teach attendees how to use ElasticPress: a 10up plugin that integrates WordPress with Elasticsearch, and significantly improves search results, relevancy, ranking, and filtering within WordPress.
John’s presentation, “The Enterprise Disconnect: WordPress and the Complexity of Simplicity”, will cover the challenges of advocating for WordPress in the enterprise, and different perspectives inside and outside the WordPress community. John will propose approaches that preserve the simplicity of WordPress, while better exposing enterprises to powerful solutions which can be built atop the platform.
This year, Lead Web Engineer Eric Mann and I are attending and speaking at ZendCon, the largest global gathering of the PHP community, on October 19-22, 2015 in Las Vegas. ZendCon brings together industry thought leaders, recognized PHP experts, enterprise PHP adopters, as well as independent developers for four days of professional development and networking.
On October 19, Eric will present his first talk, “Sandboxing your Development Environment with Vagrant”, which covers best practices in developer-side virtualization and some of the options available for runtime system configuration. On Wednesday, he’s talking about WordPress and unit testing in “A Tale of Two Test Suites.” Eric will cover fundamentals like API mocking, and comparing and contrasting the standard WordPress integration test suite with mock-powered unit testing alternatives.
Also on Wednesday, I’ll present “Best Practices for WordPress Enterprise”. I’ll explain how 10up successfully builds highly efficient and scalable WordPress websites for some of the world’s largest companies and organizations. Although I’m focusing on engineering, I’ll also touch on team coordination and workflows.
It’s easy to take open-source software for granted, and to forget that the Internet we use every day depends in part on the freely donated work of thousands of programmers. If open-source software is at the heart of the Internet, then we might need to examine it from time to time to make sure it’s not bleeding.
I’m proud to be a part of 10up because we are eager to support a platform we use heavily and that powers a significant percentage of the web. I am sponsored full-time as one of the six lead developers of WordPress, and am very excited to announce further expansion of our support for WordPress. As a fellow committer for WordPress, Drew Jaynes will now also be enabled to work full-time on WordPress. Drew has been instrumental in creating awareness, standards, and output in our developer documentation, as well as contributing in many other areas in the core software and in community projects such as the WordPress.org site itself.
As a part of this expansion, we’ve created a Platform Engineer position and transitioned Drew to his new title. While we’re not currently hiring for the position, we’ve intentionally left the title open-ended as we continue to grow our support for and even build web platforms. We’ve dedicated significant resources to WordPress as well as projects like sanitize.css and VVV, and envision a future in which we continue to do the same elsewhere.
10up also has the rare opportunity to take advantage of a confluence of timing, a core WordPress initiative, and an employee who already runs the effort. We are doing this by donating 100 hours of Scott Kingsley Clark’s company time to the ongoing Fields API project, starting today. Scott has already assembled a strong group of contributors and laid a solid foundation and roadmap, and we feel strongly that supporting this initiative will help move it into a viable state for potential inclusion in a near-future release of WordPress. As a company with a central mission of creating great publishing experiences, the user and developer experiences a fields API can improve are something we are particularly well-versed in.
Editor’s Note: This summary and report was co-authored by Lead Audience & Revenue Strategist Ben Ilfeld and President & Founder Jake Goldman.
On September 16, Apple launched iOS 9 with a suite of enhancements. One buried feature has the web content industry talking: content blocking. The immediate and obvious use case being blocking of ads and third-party scripts often used for site metrics. Less than one week in, a $0.99 ad blocker is atop the iOS App Store’s paid app charts, and a $3.99 ad blocker trails right behind it.
Much has been said about the ethical implications and hypothetical impact. Clients who look to 10up for web and online revenue strategies were, naturally, less interested in debating whether content blocking is fair, and more interested in modeling their potential impact and adapting. While we couldn’t help touching on the ethics – an open web is core to 10up’s DNA – we focused on analyzing technical realities, data informed predictions, practical industry implications, and potential strategies publishers can apply to face a changing landscape.
A newly hired UX Designer once quipped, “I could spend all day obsessing about word choices.” It’s true, we could! Those small fragments of text—a phrase, a sentence fragment, or even a word—can make an interface really work. We call it microcopy.
Microcopy sits unobtrusively alongside user interface, ready to provide contextual information for a user that needs that extra bit of help or information. It makes visitors feel confident and can help reinforce a client’s brand through tone and style. Typically you see microcopy near interactive elements. Here are some prototypical examples of microcopy found online:
Status Messages: Google drive keeps you informed that your hard work is okay.
Form Help: WordPress admin
Forms: Hotels.com lets you know what you can search for.
Expectations: BBC lets potential signups know that it won’t post to your feeds.
“Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word… Don’t be deceived by the size of microcopy. It can make or break an interface.”
When it comes to providing enterprise-class cloud solutions for video delivery and monetization, Brightcove is the biggest game in town.
10up recently teamed up with Brightcove to create Brightcove Video Connect: a beautiful WordPress plugin that leverages the new Video Cloud API to power an intuitive experience for content creators designed to look and feel like an organic extension of WordPress. The plugin features the functionality that media publishers value most, such as easy video uploads and playlist management. We even designed the plugin with extensibility in mind, so that major media companies with unique workflows and presentation requirements can customize and extend their experience.
In keeping with our commitments and contributions to important open source projects, we’re proud to take on stewardship of sanitize.css. An incredibly popular project by 10up’er Jonathan Neal, sanitize.css makes it easier to engineer website front ends that render consistently across popular browsers.
Elegant in its simplicity and superbly documented, the project already more than meets our engineering standards. More importantly, tools like sanitize.css serve 10up’s mission to create outstanding, dependable content-centric website experiences from front to back, for our clients, and for a bigger open web.
I’m very excited this week for the Design and Content Conference in Vancouver BC. The conference theme is “Designers and Content Strategists: We’re Better Together,” and the speakers list is a who’s-who of the web design and content strategy worlds, including Ethan Marcotte and Karen McGrane, whose Content Strategy for Mobile was the first detailed, extended discussion of how design and content come together in a multi-device world.
For me, the most important shifts in the web design and development industry in the last decade have been:
The acknowledgement of the impact responsive web design has on the design process, activities, and outputs (See Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design and Responsive Web Design).
As these authors pointed out, neither concept was entirely new. Ethan’s article referenced “A Dao of Web Design” which prescribed “pages which are accessible, regardless of the browser, platform or screen that your reader chooses or must use.”
WordCamp Europe is this weekend, and four 10uppers have made the trek to Seville, Spain to mingle and share insights.
I will be presenting on Friday on the experience of setting up WordPress for new users, raising questions about how WordPress can continue to drive adoption by catering to that audience. I’ll also be teaching attendees how to write documentation for the handbooks, inline docs, and examples for the code reference.
Jake Goldman on
Taylor Lovett
Helen Hou-Sandi
Ben Ilfeld
Taylor Dewey
Jaimee Ratliff
John Eckman
Drew Jaynes