As seen on my local WP development environment

Sometimes you’ve created a site with WordPress standard (not single user), but have had allow the site owners or users to have full admin access to it.  You have plugin and theme dependencies, and if the site owner disables that plugin, you have problems.

For example, you’ve written a plugin that carries out a certain range of syndication functions for your client.  If the client accidentally disables it he will lose money, and you will have a call-out, potentially an angry one, when he finds out.  He wants admin access, but you know he’s dangerous with it.

So, since WordPress 2.8 you’ve had the facility to create a folder in wp-content called mu-plugins.  It will work just like the mu-plugins folder in WordPress MU – as in, any plugin placed there, will run automatically.  Activation code won’t fire off, but apart from that, so long as the plugin is correctly written, everything will work.

I’m not sure if this change is a part of allowing ‘must-use’ plugins support, as suggested in http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/10737 or if it’s also planned as part of the move towards merging WP single user and WP-MU.  Either way, it’s an incredibly useful tool for those of us who set up and configure sites for clients who are a little prone to fiddling.

Watch out for plugin updates – you can’t auto-update anything in mu-plugins, and you won’t receive any notifications.  Be aware that you have to stay on top of this by yourself, just like in the old days!

Slightly broken code, now fixed.

Those who follow WordPress closely will understand that a vulnerability has been found that, whilst not being especially dangerous, could be very annoying for some – especially for high-profile blogs.

By using a specially crafted URL, it’s possible for an attacker to force a reset of the admin password.  The attacker can’t know this admin password, it will be a random string, and this password will be e-mailed to the administrator of the blog.  However, there’s no denying that this could be annoying to the administrator.  More specifically, an administrator could be locked out of a block while some other exploits are tried, simply by resetting the password at short intervals.

So, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s an annoyance and in a few rare cases a potentially dangerous one.

To fix this vulnerability in older versions of WordPress, such as 2.7, you can manually change wp-login.php using the code shown in the Changeset on the WordPress Trac: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/11798 – ideally, you should upgrade to the just released WordPress 2.8.4 but if you have legacy reasons for staying with 2.7 (and many have, for example problems with widgets) then you may need to delay this.

If you need to view the slide notes (primarily for me, to be honest, but you may see some points that got cut during the presentation) you’ll have to visit the Slideshare site.

If you need to view the slide notes you’ll have to visit the Slideshare site. But the notes are really for me, so they’re a little messy.

Be there to get the latest news and network with the leading lights of WordPress in the UK

Last year we decided to keep quiet at WordCamp UK, on the whole, beyond a spot of sponsorship – simply because we didn’t have that much to talk about that we felt could be exciting.  But a year has changed a lot – WordPress is becoming popular for large scale blogging platforms such as The Telegraph Blogs, and for use as a news platform such as at Telecoms.com.

Large companies are, inherently, going to be a little more conservative in their approach to new technology – but once they see others making a move a cascade effect tends to kick in.  This, we believe, is what is starting to happen with WordPress.

So, because of what is happening, we’re giving two presentations at WordCamp UK this year…

WordPress in the Enterprise

This presentation will cover how WordPress is starting to be seen in the enterprise space, its potential, the pitfalls, and the opportunities available to WordPress developers and designers.  The presentation itself should last around 30-40 minutes, with a further 15 minutes of open discussion and Q&A before clearing the stage in preparation of the next talk.

WordPress in News & Media

WordPress is starting to show signs of adoption within the news industry not just as a blogging platform, but as a full featured news platform.  We will cover the strengths and weaknesses, problems found, what WP lacks out of the box, and demonstrate some of the ways in which a comprehensive news site can be built using our Caribou Theme that we built for Spectacu.la.  We will also be demonstrating the back-end we built for Telecoms.com which allow them to run a far more flexible WP news site than ever anticipated.

Other Reasons to Go to WordCamp UK 2009

1. It’s in Cardiff, capital of Wales.
2. Matt Mullenweg is attending – he’s effectively the lead of the WordPress project and is highly influential in the community.
3. Other notables such as Tony Scott, Peter Westwood, Simon Wheatley, Simon Dickson and Mike Little (who sometimes does some work for us) are presenting – and they always have something interesting to say.
4. You’ll be mixing with some of the coolest and nicest people in the software community.
5. The afterparty is always good fun!

We really look forward to seeing everyone at the WordCamp.  Myself and James Whitehead (our technical lead) will be attending.  If you have anything you’d like to see covered at the event, just comment here.

And, proudly, we’d like to say we had a little bit to do with the project.  Not a lot, mind – we provided some consultancy, some code snippets, advice and developer support now and then.  It’s the kind of project we’d have loved to have taken on in full, but the in-house team at the Telegraph were perfectly capable of doing the work and we always say that if you have the in-house skills then you shouldn’t spend a small fortune on external consultants and developers.

The Telegraph's blogs, running on WordPress MU

The site is a fairly typical MU implementation, but with a few interesting tweaks in the way they’ve configured.  Instead of giving each journalist their own blog, they’ve understood that some simply won’t be that active.  Instead, authors tend towards having a category of their own to work with.  So if you go to Shane Richmond’s blog, for instance, you’re actually seeing the Author Archive view that WordPress provides, within the general Technology Blog.

In fact, the flexibility of WordPress, the way you can output content differently according to category or author, all helped to contribute towards creating a platform that Telegraph Media feel they can grow with.

Challenges

One of the key things to think about with media blogs like this is that traffic can be astonishing.  A lot of questions were asked early on about scalability and performance in WordPress.  Because it’s a purely dynamic system, running more like an application than a group of static files, different approaches have to be taken with caching and performance.  The database server is one key area that always needs consideration – especially when you have to consider 200 concurrent users.

One interesting lesson learned is that with WordPress you have to be exceptionally careful about go-live processes.  Our standard process is to run two installs – one for pre-production and one for live.  There is never a beta running that suddenly finds itself running on a different domain name.

At the Telegraph we know that the way they did it was to run a beta on a subdomain prior to running a search and replace script (not sure if it was one of our own developer’s PHP database search and replace scripts that we use for migrations) and then point the domains right over to it.  That resulted in poor performance initially, even though load testing had confirmed everything to be OK.  Consequently the go-live was held back for a few days, but once WordPress had settled down performance picked up markedly.  The issue appears to be to do with cached variables not resetting on the move.  We’ll document our low-hassle approach to migrating WordPress installs shortly on this site.

The Future

Well, we can’t talk for what will happen at Telegraph Media in the future, but what we do see is increased interest in WordPress as a blogging tool for newspapers.  But beyond that it’s even more interesting – some groups like Informa Telecoms & Media are starting to use WordPress as complete news platforms.  For Informa we built the Telecoms.com site almost entirely from WordPress – this not only led to increased journalistic productivity, but increased traffic and reader engagement.  Seeing the comments section slowly spring to life as readers started to understand its potential has been a real joy to see.

We imagine that it will be magazines and local newspapers that make the first moves to WordPress as a news platform, but when will the first national do it?  We’d like to be there for them if they make the leap!  WordPress is fully capable thanks, in no part, to some of the excellent work in turning WP into what is essentially framework by Donncha O’Caoimh, a WordPress core developer, and others on the WordPress.org team.

If the interest in The Telegraph’s move by such important figures as Kevin Anderson at the Guardian, Simon Dickson (a WordPress friendly rival who specialises in e-Government sites), and others is anything to go by then WordPress is booming in the news sector.  Good!

So, what does this actually mean?  A new site usually comes with something different, and in this case we didn’t want to disappoint.

WordPress Focus

New site, new features, new challenges

One of the biggest changes you’ll see now is that we’re focussing more strongly on our WordPress practice.  We’ve always believed in WordPress as a CMS, and have used it as such for both our own and our client sites since 2006, but it’s only recently that the market has caught up with us.  We were the first UK practice to be approved for listing on Automattic’s WordPress Consultants List, and we believe that we’re either the country’s leading WordPress developers or very close to it.

More Products

We’ve also added some new products to our site:

1. A wider range of WordPress related training courses
2. Google Adwords Packages
3. Web Development services

There is, of course, more to come online in the coming year.  If you’re wondering what, just watch the news section of this site…

More Information

There’ll also be more information on this site.  We’ve created sections for a Portfolio and for Case Studies – the Portfolio part giving a light view of our work, while the Case Studies section gives in depth coverage of our selected items of work, showing how we did the work and the advantages that we’ve brought to our clients.

Client Section

Clients, and those on support contracts, will have access to our new Client Section which uses the excellent Mantis Bug Tracker.

Whizzy Bits

We wanted to get a lot of information onto our home page without overwhelming visitors with a large amount of text.  This is beneficial from the point of view of search engines, but also gives visitors quick access to a lot of information.  So we’ve used lots of lovely jQuery to make this an interactive space that gives prominence to the latest content whilst making other content still easy to find.

Telecoms.com uses WordPress Interconnect IT's extensions and theme technology as a flexible news platform

Overview

When we were approached by Informa Telecoms & Media Ltd (part of Informa plc) about whether WordPress could be used as a fully fledged news platform suitable for replacing their Telecoms.com site, we hesitated, but not for very long.  Following a full analysis of their requirements we were able to confirm that in combination with some of our own technology, plus some new development, we could create a very flexible WordPress based news platform that allowed for excellent productivity for the Telecoms.com team.

Analysis

One of the biggest problems that Telecoms.com had experienced with their previous Java based system was that there was relatively little flexibility built into the system.  Most changes meant going back to the developers with a formal request.  This was both expensive (developers usually are), time consuming and, worst of all, meant that the site could not respond quickly to events in the market place.

What was needed was an ability to create new sections on the site, quickly, without use of expensive development staff.  We had already proven this technology with our Caribou News Theme that we offer freely as a GPL project through our Spectacu.la site, and this helped us to assure the Informa TM team that we were able to match their requirements.

Planning & Design

We worked with the Telecoms.com team initially to supply a range of mock-ups.  However, although they were effective, they weren’t exactly what was wanted by the team.  In order to expedite matters we agreed to work with a third party design agency, Coast Digital, who supplied excellent designs in Fireworks format.  These took some of our ideas and built upon them to create the sophisticated and attractive site that is now visible.

At the same time, we planned the structure of the site and how its framework would allow the client to manage content.  We decided that although the Caribou sections system is useful the full requirements as planned meant that we decided to use a page based widget driven system for the site.  This would allow the client to create pages using the section page template that is part of the theme and this would initiate a series of widget spaces which would become available in the WordPress back-end.  Once available, various standard and custom widgets, appropriately styled, could be dropped in place.

The Sections System

The Interconnect IT category listing plugin in action.

The ability to create sections full of widget spaces is only useful if you have suitable widgets to place there.  One of the biggest parts of the project was creating and styling a wide range of widgets that allowed the site adminstrators to quickly create a new section and populate it with content.  The primary key to this is Interconnect IT’s Category Lister Widget which allows a client to select content according to logical category criteria.  You could have a set of regional categories and a set of format categories and choose items that are in both.

In this case, there are a range of format categories such as News, Opinion and so on, and a continental based region categorisation.  If the client wishes to select content that is news based from America, they simply choose those two categories and any content that matches the criteria will be displayed.

The key advantage to this is that a new section can be created within minutes.  For example, should there be a business need to create a Nokia section, the client could create a category for Nokia, and then select content that is News and Nokia for one widget, Opinion and Nokia for another, and so on.  They then add the navigation to the section using the menu builder plugin we modified for the purpose, and the section becomes ‘live’.  The whole job of creating a Nokia news and information section could be carried it in less than quarter of a section.  For a responsive news site this facility is extremely important.

Getting a new section built would take weeks and was a complicated task. Now we can do it on the fly. It allows us so much more freedom and opportunity to do innovative things, and neatly get rid of stuff that doesn’t work out.

James Middleton, Managing Editor of Telecoms.com on the advantages of the new system.

Plugins

One thing we warn all sites against is something we call ‘pluginitis’ which is where a site owner keeps adding various plugins, some of which may interact with one another in unexpected ways.  We believe that most sites rarely need more than ten or so plugins to function in a way that is suitable for needs.

We supply a set of Interconnect IT only plugins, which add news specific functionality and optimisations to WordPress, such as theme specific image resizing, alternative post titles, category selection, and standfirst capabilities.  These plugins are only available from Interconnect IT for projects that we lead, and are not available through third parties.

We also selected various plugins which were already available in the GPL sphere which added appropriate functionality, such as Lester Chan’s popular WP-Polls Plugin, the Add This social bookmarking plugin, and WordPress Popular Posts amongst others.  All were selected and tested for performance, reliability and quality before being applied.  Other plugins were also used, but most required modification to fulfil their requirements and we expect to feed this code back into the community in due course.

One thing that we never do, and for which there is rarely any need, is to modify the WordPress core.  This helps reduce maintenance issues and costs in the future.

Hosting & Performance

The Telecoms.com site in all its glory, showing the richness of content on the front page - there are many other similar pages on the site

For hosting, systems administration and load testing we worked with Kumina N.L. who have since become a company with which we partner by choice.  They provided a robust four way, load balanced hosting solution and carried out load-testing to ensure the servers were capable of handling peak traffics that can come to any news site.  The infrastructure relies on a Debian based AMP stack and has proven to be extremely robust.

One thing we did learn is that when content is pulled from a third party site (for example, adverts) site loading times can be slowed by factors outside your control.  To resolve this in future implementations of such sites Interconnect IT is in the process of developing post-loading technology which will create a widget that seeks external content only after all other important content has been loaded rather than using the conventional approach of loading content in strict order.

Traffic Growth

Although actual figures for Telecoms.com’s traffic are confidential business information, they have told us that after two months visitor numbers and page views have grown by approximately 30% to 50%, depending on the metrics used.  The analytics suggest that site ’stickiness’ and engagement have increased markedly thanks to the improved design, adoption of threaded comments (allowing for discussions to take place on news), most popular news information, and related content teasers.

WordPress Advantages

WordPress has succeeded in becoming a successful blogging platform over the past six years, but beyond that it has started to show the flexibility of the framework it provides.  The ease of use required by bloggers, coupled with a sophisticated theme and plugin framework has allowed the system to go far beyond its original means.

When good developers mix with WordPress the results can be impressive and help to create professional news sites for budgets that, including development and implementation, often cost less than the traditional CMS systems once used.  As a consequence interest in WordPress has mushroomed significantly.  While interest is still primarily focussed on use of WordPress for blogging platforms, Telecoms.com has shown its power when used as a news platform also.

By comparison [to the previous system], Wordpress is a dream, and the best thing is, less technical users find it intuitive and easy to get along with. As a successful blogging platform you can tell a lot of time and effort has been invested in making it a slick and productive tool, and that translates well when using it as a business CMS too.

James Middleton

Support & Maintenance

Since going live the system has proven to be robust and simple to use.  In fact, it proved so robust that there was no need for an ongoing support contract from us for our code.  This is often the case with our work and we make little money from support – while this may seem like poor business sense, we believe that building for reliability and performance helps us to keep our clients coming back to us time and time again.  We anticipate working with Informa on future projects.

Conclusion

WordPress, coupled with Interconnect IT’s additional technology has led to a strong, high-performance website which has significantly exceeded the expectations of the client.  WordPress has now proven itself as a platform for content far beyond blogging at Informa and we believe they are now likely to use the platform on future projects.  Since then, Interconnect IT has been approached by, and entered into discussions with, a number of other news organisations with a view to developing WordPress usage within their organisations.

Sniff Petrol is an anarchic motor industry and motorsport satire site

Overview

1. Over 120,000 posts viewed per week
2. Well controlled costs
3. High availability
4. Large peaks in traffic handled well when a new ‘edition’ is released
5. Highly responsive site

Analysis

Sniff Petrol is a well known and highly regarded satirical site with its focus on motorsport and the car industry. After six years, however, updating the site had increasingly become something of a chore for the site owner.

At this point friends had recommended producing a blog style site. Unfortunately, creating an attractive and interesting blog theme that moved the design of the site forwards rather than backwards had proved problematic for Sniff Petrol. This is where Interconnect IT were able to become involved, solving a whole raft of problems.

The problems solved can easily be listed:

1. Difficulty in making updates
2. Lack of creative freedom
3. Having to maintain a separate archive page by hand
4. A need for a more modern design that connects with the old site
5. RSS Feeds to allow visitors to keep up with changes to the site
6. Analytics to allow monitoring of traffic and to see which features are most popular

We also wanted to make sure that the site could be accessible to the widest range of users possible, using many different platforms.

With these criteria in mind, we created a standard blog layout with floating panels for the content, lying on an orange ‘page’, and with navigation elements shown on the page through cut-out panels. This gives the site a contemporary, layered feel.

Elements on the site are now managed dynamically – so for example, if the owner wishes to create a new category for articles, it won’t appear in the navigation panel until it’s populated with content. Then, if a visitor selects this category, it is highlighted, helping the visitor to know where in the site they’ve found themselves.

The underlying publishing platform is WordPress, a popular blogging and web publishing tool that’s put many millions of websites online. By plugging into its APIs we are able to add extra functionality without causing legacy problems in the future.

WordPress allows a range of blogging functions which help the professional blogger – for example, the ability to post date features means that content can be published automatically once the date has arrived. Useful for embargoed press releases, for example.  This helps Sniff Petrol to batch output up ready for editions, which is the working method preferred for the site.

Other useful facilities include the ability to assign posts to different ‘users’ – on Sniff Petrol a users like Crazy Dave Coulthard, D.I. Blundell and Carcoat Damphands have been defined, and posts can then be written with them as the author.

Traffic Improvement

In order to deal with the greater technical requirements of the new site, as well as ensuring higher availability and regular backups, it was decided to move everything on to Interconnect IT’s servers. The initial load was high, with over 6,000 visitors per day within just a few days. People around the world quickly learned that there was a new version of the site and traffic climbed exponentially at first. A sudden increase in traffic can sometimes be disastrous to a blog, but our well specified server barely noticed the change.

Overall, with like-on-like comparisons, the site has seen an increase in visits by over 100% – measured in the short term. It’s likely that due to the more regularly updated content that, in the long term, the site’s traffic will grow considerably.

Months Later…

Site traffic continued to climb, and is now steadily at 600% over the original visitor levels. This meant some tweaking to maintain server performance and keep bandwidth bills reasonable. This huge increase in visitors has happened because not only is the site updated more regularly than before, it’s also easier to keep track off – there are 3,000 visits a day from RSS readers alone.

In 2009…

The site is continuing to perform and grow. Sniff Petrol’s use of Twitter, coupled with a Twitter widget in the sidebar, has helped bring the site to a new audience. Updates ended up going back to a monthly basis, but the ease of use with WordPress means that the site’s owner continues to enjoy posting to it on a regular basis.

If you’d like a site like this one, why not contact us on 0151 331 5140 (+44 151 331 5140 from outside the UK) or complete our contact form for a free initial consultation.