WordCamp Boston 2011

Since 2007, faculty and students at Abilene Christian University have focused on the impact of mobile devices on learning, in and out of the classroom. One early limitation was the reluctance of learning management systems to see mobile computing as a viable platform, so we turned to WordPress as an alternative LMS.

To be successful, the solution needed to allow mobile users to be producers as well as recipients of course content. The presentation will look at several aspects of our WordPress deployment, including campus portal integration, mobile access through WPtouch, and a custom Post by Email system linking Gmail and Postie.

Blogs are not new tools, but coupled with the mobile capabilities of students and faculty, the ACU Blogs program has inspired new approaches to familiar teaching challenges.

• ACU Blogs home

The ability to register new sidebars was introduced in WordPress version 2.2. You can’t find a design or theme without them anymore, so as a themer, this is one of the things you must know how to do. Sidebars are mostly recognized as the sections of blocks of content on the left or right of a website. You can use them to show your latest blog post, a list of links to the other pages on your website, static text, etc. By learning how to create sidebars, we can use them as more than what they are known for.

In this talk, I will show some PHP code involved in creating and managing sidebars. I will also go over some plugins associated with creating and managing sidebars and others that aid in management of widgets.

Boston University began tinkering with WordPress in 2007. Today our highly customized web-publishing platform serves 1,000+ websites, ranging from blogs to behemoths, and 60+ themes, ranging from bespoke to basic.

BU’s culture of free thought extends to the creative team and has lead to increasingly diverse site designs. But how do we sustain the creation of inventive visitor experiences without overcomplicating content management?

Learn about the smart choices and stupid mistakes – both creative and technical — we’ve made along the way to building the most ambitious WordPress installation in HigherEd.

Anyone who makes a living with WordPress has dealt with a bad client relationship. We as as designers / developers understand that clients don’t always understand exactly what it is that we do, but have any of us taken the time to understand what roles they should (and shouldn’t) play in the process? What I plan on going through are some humorous examples real-life examples of issues I’ve run into in the 2 years of full-time freelance work and some of the audience stories (if time allows). Taking some of those examples, walking through the process and what could have possibly been done to avoid the issue, or at least make it a bit easier. I will also be breaking down potentially “problem” clients into 3 categories, Freaks, Nerds, and Romantics. Each one has their own red flags, and ways to avoid some common mistakes with how they operate.

And I’ll probably make a bacon reference or two.

Your site is about your content. How do we optimize for all the different devices out there but still keep our brand? Do we even optimize at all? What are different ways we can look at how our content is handled? We are going to take a look at different techniques out there including: responsive web design, media queries, dealing with video, touch, and other various plugins & CSS tricks to truly display your site and your content in the best possible manner in any given scenario.