WordCamp: Developers is an one-day technology conference by developers for developers. Held in Vancouver, BC, WordCamp: Developers is slated to take place as part of the Vancouver Open Source Week on May 5, 2011.

The conference will feature 2 tracks, one targeting WordPress UX topics and issues, and the other targeting strictly development issues. The day will also be host to a WordPress Un-Conference where participants are encouraged to pitch talks and join in discussion.

The conference is open to all WordPress Developers and Designers interested in learning about practical, applied WordPress development by industry thought leaders and local WordPress practitioners.

WordCamp:Developers is part of the Vancouver Open Source Week.

We hope to see you there!

http://wordcampdevelopers.com/

I have seen some front page posts recently on that site, Reddit.com, of the ugly and the beautiful in server collocation facilities.  Here we see the expressions of genius and a cluttered mind.

First the ugly:

Now the Beautiful:

Here are my photos, taken in an empty colo facility, just sitting there, waiting for a reason to go to work. The collocation facility was built, and then never used:

This location is in a Canadian town, originally built by 360 Networks, which built a number of these buildings, built to identical spec, to service its fiber optic trunk line.  360 is long gone and the property was part of an assets liquidation deal. The photos are from about a year ago, and I dont know what happened to the property. But what you are looking at is a beautiful dream job, with a super redundant clean power system, with a truck sized diesel gen set to feed the batteries. And its right beside a railway track, so you could even roll up a diesel car beside the generator for long term supply. Naturally, all the power is routed through the battery bank, the facility has air cleaning and conditioning, cooling, and the location can be cooled by ambient air 8 months of the year. It has a secure entry system, high quality trunk line, pure copper and silver components in the power system; the bank of batteries alone must be worth over a million dollars.

The collocation facility was built, and then never used…

Re: “Flashy Website, Cheap Backend”

http://www.globaltvbc.com/video/index.html?releasePID=F2c99hC0V1kc4WrGZu0sZguKx_83_IuT

Editors,
As a web developer experienced with WordPress, I know you have made errors in your understanding of the software. If the mayor has really broken some law with regards to the bidding process, then that is another matter. It is however hard for people to find good, skilled web developers and themers, on a per project basis, when a quality website is needed.

A quick consultation of the home page of http://wordpress.org would show you that this free open source software is used by the New York Times, Wired.com, and many many other individuals and corporations much larger than Global TV. Suffice to say if it is a good choice for NYT then it is probably a good software choice for Mayor Robertson. Actually it is not even so much about the software, but the developers who take steps to ‘harden’ the software from security intrusions during the development and deployment process.

It is a shame that a member of the press such as Global TV does not understand the parallels between freedom of speech and of the press, and the openness of the Free Open Source Software community, and how both are so effective in exposing lies and moving towards the truth.

Free Open Source Software such as WordPress is free as in speech, not free as in beer. Indeed, WordPress is just one software package among thousands of others that the Internet and the World Wide Web rest upon. But I realise by the comments in your report that you are unaware of the massive worldwide movement to create and distribute Free Open Source Software. While the cost of the software may be a factor for the contractors, as it is in every other business, it is the openness that is really important. The openness of the software and the community allow for the exposure of security problems, and then expedites their repair to the entire community of WordPress users. It also allows for such things as the enforcement of high technical standards, and the independent development and release of thousands of additional software add-ons to boost and customise software functionality.

Shawn Moore of thinkprofits.com claims in the news piece that he can quickly hack and steal information submitted through the contact form on Gregor Robertson’s website. Instead of just claiming this, he should prove it. I say this because security breaches in general take more time to manifest themselves than Moore implied when he said ‘quickly’. And if Moore does know of a current security exploit WordPress, he should do the right thing and contribute the exploit to the WordPress development community, or to the head company behind WordPress, Automaticc, so that the patch may be written and released.

It is a shame that a member of the press such as Global TV does not understand the parallels between freedom of speech and of the press, and the openness of the Free Open Source Software community, and how both are so effective in exposing lies and moving towards the truth. You should be really educating your viewers on the benefits of Free Open Source Software instead of insinuating that WordPress is merely a ‘cheap’ alternative.

As I said in the beginning, I dont know if the mayor broke any laws or not. But please understand that good developers may be harder to come across than you think. Neither are they cheap. Please also educate yourselves on the benefits of Free Open Source software because it is in use widely and in many roles across the Internet.

The HST is now law here, at least for the present time. For selling things on the web, and setting up your tax rates, to be current with July 1 2010 here is what needs to be set up to tax products in shopping carts:

• GST Only: 5%
  • Alberta
  • Quebec
  • Manitoba
  • Saskatchewan
  • Prince Edward Island
  • Nunavut
  • Yukon Territories
  • Northwest Territories
• HST 12%
  • British Columbia
• HST 13%
  • Ontario
  • New Brunswick
  • Newfoundland
• HST 15%
  • Nova Scotia

From what I have learned, you charge the buyer the tax rate relevant to their local. You may be in BC but you charge them HST 15% because they live in Nova Scotia.

Disclaimer:  I am not a fan of taxes. Just trying to help fellow developers out.

I recently launched a new project, GourmetPregnancy.com. Its a website in support of the new book ‘The Gourmet Pregnancy’, by Leah Douglas. The book features sumptuous and creative recipes for foodie expecting moms. This project had been in the works since January, and after seeing an initial layout provided by Mike Douglas, I went to work adapting the layout to the theme, enabled plugins, and configuring things in a subdomain.

GourmetPregnancy.com website

Notes for development

When creating a WordPress site, I now generally attempt to pull in all the resources I can in one go, as I find this saves a large amount of time. I have a small project in github for automated installation of WordPress, which I would like to keep telling people about. Grabbing all the resources for a project is a very regular, standard task, and this process can be automated. There are other projects like it for other applications, like Drush for Drupal.

When developers get into new packages, they start off by downloading zips and tarballs. A little more skill and confidence and people start pulling down the software from the SVN or CVS repository. My github project is a shell script with the commands captured for obtaining the WordPress core, as well as a host of the common plugins and themes that I am going to use. Its a very simple idea, but one that is a huge time saver when you use it. It takes about 2.5 minutes for the script to run on my local Ubuntu desktop, in the shell. Its not perfect, but it is just meant to be a massive time saver over the tedium of grabbing the source, and then browsing through plugins and themes. A script like this can save untold hours.

So after that the site was a matter of layout and enabling plugins, creating a copy of the arras theme to hack on, configuring the cforms contact form page, and a host of layout fixes, for which Joe Hewitt’s Firebug plugin for Firefox is invaluable. Even so, there are multiple style sheets in the system and it was found lower down in the details that there was 1 or 2 conflicts. The Arras theme is more of a ‘feature’ theme as opposed to a ‘news’ theme, but still we spruced it up by removing columns and expanding the main area. Incidentally, the cformsII plugin required a complete rebuilding when the site was launched in the root domain. It didnt like me hacking the serialized array directly in the db.

You replace the instance of ‘the_excerpt();’ with ‘the_content();’ to get your full posts for the category. Search engines and users will thank you for it.

The home page in the theme has a Jquery slide show and dynamic feature boxes. There is always a question of the tools you have to do the presentation and we decided to swap out the slide show for a flash object, and replace the lower boxes with static content, since they will never change. The theme does provide for page & post options in in the slide show and sections on the page, and the options within the theme and plugins would have an influence over the content design, meaning what content gets defined as pages and posts. There is the time factor to consider in straightening out all the little issues between our layout and their theme, so after some investigation the static chunks and flash object was how we did it.

The header navigation took some time to master, but it came out looking nicely. The multi-level navigation plugin was in the end, not needed.

The book page has a light box plugin working, which works quite well.

The site has two post categories, News & Reviews and Recipes. The one important change for posts was a simple one line change to the template. It seems that in WordPress themes the post category listing displays only an excerpt by default. This doesn’t do much for usability or page ranking. Home pages, as I have on other news & blog themed WordPress sites, show the latest posts from all categories. You would expect that navigating to a given category should present like the home page, but only for that given category. That is not the case, but the fix is a one liner. You replace the instance of ‘the_excerpt();’ with ‘the_content();’ to get your full posts for the category. Search engines and users will thank you for it.