Is WordPress a Product or a Community?
WordPress fans often cite “the community” as one of WordPress’s main selling points. Makers get excited by the prospect of participating in the development, design, and support of the WordPress software product (zomg 30% of the web). Yet the prospect of participation doesn’t hold the same charm for organizational decisionmakers who are choosing which software products to build their business on. How can we argue for WordPress as a business solution when an honest look at history shows that community-driven projects don’t necessarily, or even usually, result in superior products? How can we conceive of WordPress so that we’re realistic about the shortcomings of the community development process, without selling short WordPress’s strengths as a product?
Making Images Smarter
Handling media at scale is a challenge. A seemingly small design tweak could result in days and days of recrunching media. There is also the performance implications out of respect for our audience. This talk will cover how we made our dumb static assets smarter with dynamic capabilities that gives us more creative freedom while also making our sites more performant for our visitors. We’re also open sourcing our work so any publisher can eliminate the need to recrunch media.
The Easy (and Sane) Way to Create Responsive HTML Emails
Creating HTML Emails (especially ones that are responsive) is awful work. The markup involved brings back nightmares from creating websites in Geocities back in 1996 (at least for me). In this session, I will introduce you to Foundation for Emails 2: a framework that allows you to quickly, easily, and sanely build responsive HTML emails that are easy to edit, update, and maintain. I will show you how to get started using npm to create your project, and the simple markup and grid system that automagically makes your email layouts wonderfully responsive. Also, you can use Sass (how cool is that?!).
At PMC we built our updated WWD.com Digital Daily email publication with Foundation for Emails 2. I will show some of the approaches I used leveraging Foundation for Emails partials to keep me from repeating code. I’ll also show how I organized this project to allow for other publications (and brands in our company) to expand what I started and use elements that have already been built.
Solving Content Reuse and Syndication
These days, most publishers have more than one website under their umbrella. That can take many forms: several newspapers or magazines under one owner; an old print-centric brand married to a digital-first property; a network of affiliate TV or radio stations; a set of sites targeting niches; or a massive publishing operation with several sites glued together (e.g. news, editorial, blogs, and sports running on sandboxed site).
And yet, when it comes to sharing news and other content across those properties, WordPress, like most Content Management Systems, doesn’t do much to address that problem out of the box.
Having solved variations of this same problem over and over again for clients that include a radio network with 60+ stations, one of largest Bay Area unicorns with a huge collection of geographically targeted blogs (among others), and a massively popular network of 5 enthusiast geek blogs, 10up finally put together its lessons learned and created Distributor.
Distributor is a free WordPress plugin that makes it easy to syndicate and reuse content across multiple websites — whether in a single multisite or across the web using the REST API.
There’s something for every publisher in this talk: UX design / problem solving, REST API use case, content strategy, SEO best practice (for content reuse), tools for managing websites, and even developer tips.