WordPress

Local stuff

I always like reading Andrew Brown‘s roundups of stuff that’s happening in his area – Lewisham – that he regularly posts to his blog. I haven’t the discipline to do anything regularly, but here are a couple of things I’ve been looking at recently.

First up is that I took another look at the website for my village – Broughton, near Kettering in Northamptonshire. Before you click the link be warned: it’s not a very modern design. Indeed, as I suspected, a quick ‘View Source’ shows that the thing is done in Frontpage (argh!). But ignore that…

…because the content in fabulous. It’s a really, really good community resource. There’s stuff for the Parish Council, loads and loads of photos and bits of history about the village. Elaine Bradshaw, who is behind the site, really has done a terrific job.

The only shame is that I can’t find any contact details for her on the site, firstly to congratulate her on what she has achieved, but also to wonder how much easier it would be if we WordPress’d the whole thing. Maybe stuck all the photos up on Flickr, made it easier for anyone in the village to contribute… If somehow you end up reading this, Elaine, do get in touch.

Secondly, on the way to work today I saw a large fluorescent sign, imploring those that saw it to ‘Save Naseby Battlefield!’. I wasn’t under the impression that the battlefield was under any threat, but apparently it is:

Power company E.ON is investigating the possibility of installing turbines close to the historic battlefield.

The proposals have been met with anger from historians, who are working on plans to boost the national reputation of Naseby by building a visitor centre at the battle site.

A further bit of digging revealed that the campaign has its own site, and it runs on WordPress! Stop Kelmarsh Windfarm is the name of the site, which I can’t help but feel is a rather negative slant on things (‘Save Naseby Battlefield’ sounds much nicer, I think).

It also confuses the hell out of me. I mean, wind farms are good things, right? But heritage stuff is important too… argh!

Upgrading…

…this blog to WordPress 2.5. Possible weirdness ahead!

Update: upgrade went fine, with the exception that my theme got overwritten, and my backup wasn’t complete. Hence why you might be looking at the boring old default theme. Am on the lookout for a new one, as rebuilding the old would be too depressing. Any suggestions gratefully received in the comments.

Update 2: giving the rather lovely Curved a run out at the moment. Any feedback on the new look?

WordPress 2.5

Went live for download over the weekend. Will be having a look at it over the next day or so. Looks a great release, with some much needed improvements, including:

  • Improved admin dashboard, which can now include widgets
  • Multi-file uploads
  • Search pages as well as posts with default search facility
  • Better tag management
  • Direct plugin upgrades – just click and your plugins will be upgraded for you
  •  Improved rich-text editor
  • Built in image galleries

So, plenty of stuff to get your teeth into. Neville Hobson has some great notes on upgrading.

OurPress: websites for the rest of us

OurPress

OurPress is a project I have been working on for aaaages, which stalled quite badly for a while. Essentially, the idea emerged in a discussion with Nick Booth in the comments of a blog post of his. We were talking about the paucity of options available to community groups to easily create open, social websites. At first I thought of Drupal, but soon moved on from there.
I had the idea of setting something up with the multi-user version of WordPress, called WordPressµ, which is what is used to run WordPress.com. Sites could be created either as blogs, or as static sites using WordPress pages. Help and guidance would be provided in getting stuff up and running, and customisation of templates would be possible, with the results being shared among the rest of the users too. I gave the idea the name OurPress, and was shocked to find the .org was still available. I snaffled it right away, as well as a few of the .whatever variants.

Then the project pretty much stalled, for two reasons. One, I forgot about it (probably because of Facebook or Twitter or something equally shiny); and two because I couldn’t find anywhere decent to host it. The trouble was that WordPressµ demands that you have something called ‘wildcard DNS’ to be able to create blogs at addresses like myblog.ourpress.org (for example). The other option is to have them at ourpress.org/myblog but problems can be created with static pages having the same name as blogs and the whole thing getting confused.

However, I recently returned to looking at the project, after a chat with Shane McCracken, and in my search for a host, I hit upon gold, or rather orange, in the form of A Small Orange. ASO are a bunch of cool guys in the US who happily host pretty much anything. They were quite happy to set up the wildcard DNS for me and when I asked if I could integrate with Google Apps, someone went ahead and amended all my MX records for me! Ace stuff!

Here’s the deal with the Google Apps: I get to have 200 accounts for free, so I can pretty much offer everyone who has an OurPress blog a free email account which will be blogname@ourpress.org. When I create the email account I will also setup an OurPress branded iGoogle page which will track web responses to the blog in question, so people have that important element set up even if they haven’t heard of RSS themselves before. Also, using Sites, I will give them access to a tonne of documentation about using the OurPress platform and blogging, social media etc.

Essentially, OurPress will be a completely contained and functional online platform to run community websites. And it’ll be free.

So who might want to use OurPress?

  • Community groups, whether based around a club or a village without any resources to put into developing a website
  • Individuals who want to start a site to create a community online
  • People who want to develop a project to help communities or civic life in general
  • Individuals who want to blog about their work within the community
  • Small charitable or not-for-profit organisations or projects that don’t want to invest in their own domain, hosting etc just yet
  • Local politicians, perhaps

The advantages of OurPress over, say, WordPress.com include:

  • Support in setup and running from me and anyone else who fancies getting involved (hint, hint)
  • The Google Apps integration
  • Folk will know that it is a ‘safe’ platform with no content hosted that will possibly reflect badly on them/their organisation
  • The creation of a community around all those on the platform
  • No adverts anywhere (and there are ads on WordPress.com, folks)

So where am I up to? I’ve installed WordPressµ and that’s about it. I need to get a look ‘n’ feel sorted for the homepage and arrange how the sign-up process will work for new blogs, but other than that, I am more or less there. Any comments or suggestions gratefully received!

How to paste stuff into WordPress

Most people have WordPress’ rich text editor turned on, because generally speaking, it makes life a lot easier. It does have its problems though – one is when embedding media from places like YouTube and SlideShare and the other is when copying and pasting content from other applications like (gasp!) Word. I’ll cover the latter here, and show how you can stop your formatting going all wonky when pasting in.

The secret is in an additional set of tools which can only be discovered when the ‘advanced toolbar’ is displayed. You can do this by clicking the little button that looks like this:

Advanced toolbar

This then pops open another row of icons which let you do all sorts of exciting things:

toolbar

They are, from left to right: select formatting from your stylesheet; underline (this is baaad); full justify text; choose font colour; paste without formatting; paste from Word (aha!); remove formatting; clean up code; insert symbol (like this: © for example); undo; and finally redo.

To paste text from Word, then, select and copy your text in the document in Word, then switch to your browser where you are posting from, and click the paste from Word icon. This will pop up another window for you to paste your text into, so do that and then  hit ‘Insert’. WordPress will then have a pretty good stab at converting your formatting into something it understands. Bingo!

If that doesn’t work, you are probably best off using the paste without formatting option, and then reformatting your text within the WordPress editor itself.

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