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.

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!