WordPress: Building Better Relationships

Presentations

This is a talk that I gave on January 11, 2012 to the Harvard ABCD WWW group, which is a series of monthly meetings organized by Harvard staff to share ideas about the web and web technology. I had a great time preparing, giving the talk, and having a couple drinks afterward. (Thanks, Donna for inviting me.) Unfortunately, I tried to pack too much information into a 90 minutes talk, so if you have any questions let me know.

Description

For basic content publishing needs, the ease-of-use of WordPress shines. Unfortunately, once a project exceeds 500 pages, using WordPress is much less straightforward. How has Boston University made it work? From a technical standpoint, building relationships between content objects and creating simple to use UIs for managing the relationships is key. Once established, the semantic relationships can be coupled with bits of meta data to construct menus, indexes, facets, filters, and so much more. Using code examples, this talk will highlight essential parts of the WordPress API and demonstrate various techniques used in BU plugins and themes that help us build better large websites.

The slides from the presentation and a link to code for the proof-of-concept are below:

On Community…

Quotes

There is so much to learn from Matt Mullenweg’s approach to building a business around services and open source software. The following creed, which all new employees will be asked to sign, says a lot about Automattic and Matt’s values.

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

Read Matt’s full post…