I am in the middle of a project and will keep this short… but  wanted to mention again how great WP works as a basic CMS.

For instance, you can create custom meta boxes:

add_action(‘admin_menu’, ‘create_color_meta’);

add_action(’save_post’, ’save_color_meta’);

These replace the need to have the client use the Custom Field box – in fact, feel free to delete the Custom Field box:

remove_meta_box(‘postcustom’,'post’,'normal’);

For this project I created two custom Meta boxes. The top one allows the client to change the background color (it even verifies the hex code). The bottom one allows the inclusion of a custom Flickr Set. It actually captures 2 fields, the type and the set ID.

Note: These are not plugins – it’s just extra code placed in functions.php:

Presentation

• Download the slides
• Download the handout

Videos

• Panther Goes to College
• Panther: PCC is Tobacco Free
• Twit Panther
• Poppe On Copyright

Enables you to give a link to anonymous users for public preview of a post before it is published.

Download

Download the file from wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-preview/

Credit

Where credit is due: This plugin is just an updated/modified/simplified version of Public Post Preview 1.3 by Matt Martz and Jonathan Dingman

Description

Have you ever been writing a post with the help of someone who does not have access to your blog and needed to give them the ability to preview it before publishing? This plugin takes care of that by generating a simple URL that can be given out for public preview.

Where credit is due: This plugin is a updated/modified/simplified version of Public Post Preview 1.3 by Matt Martz and Jonathan Dingman

Core Changes:
1. Completely removed the use of “nonce” variable. Posts marked preview are now accessible by multiple anonymous users. There is no longer a 24hr time limit.
1. Public_Post_Preview used the option variable as an array to store preview state – genius! However, it’s use seemed backwards with an empty item == preview true. This logic was reversed so: simple_array[,,true,,true] now means that p=1 and p=4 have previews. This also allows for the preview to be turned off by default.
1. Removed extra variables for a cleaner URI: http://www.yourblog.com/?p=1502&preview=true

Installation

1. Upload the `simple-preview` folder to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory or install directly through the plugin installer.
1. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress or by using the link provided by the plugin installer

Announces new posts (from a selected category) on twitter.

Download

Download the file from wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitcategory/

Updated 2010-03-02

The plugin has been updated based on requests from the comments below. It now supports [post] and URL shortening from Tinyurl, IsGd and Bitly!

How to install:

Download and unzip the folder twitcategory.

Upload twitcategory to the /wp-content/plugins directory.

Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in Wordpress Admin (you may need to be using a wordpress administrator)

Please note that TwitCategory will create a table in your wordpress database called ‘twitcategory’. It will clobber any previous table with that name.

Fill in your twitter account information in the twitcategory configuration menu found in the Manage menu in Wordpress Admin.

Where credit is due:

This plugin is a updated/modified version of Twitpress by Thomas Purnell  (email : tom@thomaspurnell.com)
Twitpress v0.3.2 – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitpress/
We should all thank Thomas fro creating the great plugin and releasing it under a GPLlicense!

Web forms rock

They are easily accessible, can feed information directly to a database and replace tree-killing paper versions.

Web forms suck

They are difficult to style, require massive validation and and the elements look drastically different on each browser.

And don’t get me started on accessibility.

OK, get me started…

It takes a lot of work to make forms accessible to those using assistance devices.

Yet, it is worth it – people with differing levels of sight and mobility deserve to be able to use your form. And sometimes, your form becomes the only option when they can’t interact with the paper version.

So webmonkeys, please think about:

• Proper fieldset nesting.
• Labels and titles that make sense.
• TabIndex when appropriate.
• Validation that works with screen readers.

But, even with all that – some users will be frustrated by the computers lack of cooperation. For instance…

On a Mac (OSX), using tab to navigate FAILS

You see, buried deep in the system preferences (the computer’s, not the browser’s) is a setting for “Full Keyboard Access” that is set, by standard, to skip select, and radio button inputs.

FireFox seems to respect this and skips those elements. Good for FireFox. Bad for users.

The funny thing is that Safari partially ignores it and allows you to tab to select inputs. However, radio buttons are still out.

So, let your users know where to chance this setting:

Computer System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts > Look to the bottom at “Full Keyboard Access” and select “All Controls”

… but of course the setting to recognize radio buttons IS A RADIO BUTTON!

So, good luck navigating to it via the keyboard.

I am a bit of an idiot when it comes to print typography. On the web the choices have historically been limited and knowing the difference between san/serif has been enough. But, the times are slowly changing…

The Classic Resource

A coworker introduced me to this nice little cheat sheet was created in 1992. Although dated, many of the widely used web fonts are listed.  In the chart, a number from 1 to 3 appears where each pair intersects. 1 means that the two fonts are compatible, 2 means that with proper implementation the two fonts could work well together, and 3 means that they will clash.

The chart is very useful, but is presented in such a way that would make Tufte cry. Issues include:

• No representation of what the font actually look like
• Numbers 1-3 are not good visual indicators of good-bad
• Very, very hard to figure out what row/column you are on.
• What is Text vs. Display anyway?
• Why does Quorum come before Optima in an ordered list.

Time for an Update

I put together an interactive draft that you can find here (the image below is not interactive). Not all the issues are solved in this 0.1 version, but it is much more useful.

By the way: display (denoted by columns) means headings and text (denoted by rows) means body text, etc…

Note: I was just introduced to confluence a few weeks ago, so there may be better ways to do all this. This is just what I have found as a newb confluence admin who has experience theming  other apps.

Confluence is the enterprise wiki designed to “make it easy for you and your team to share information with each other, and with the world”. And, we have decided to set up an installation fro PCC. Eventually, it will live at spaces.pcc.edu and allow for better documentation and collaboration between departments. At least, that is the plan…

Right now, I am just trying to skin the thing. There seem to give you a dozen options to do this (Themes, Colour Scheme, Layouts, Stylesheet, Global Logo, Custom HTML, Plugins….), but each has it’s own issues. And even the documentation is sporadic.

Maybe, I am just spoiled by Automattic’s documentation for Wordpress.

Best Solution?

So far, the best advice came from this blog post that talks about building/rebuilding a theme plugin.

Here is my current workflow:

1. 1) Dowload a plugin theme .jar like Clickr
2. 2) Unjar it: jar -xvf clickr-theme-plugin-2.5.jar
3. 3) Modify name/version properties in atlassian-plugin.xml and clickr.properties
4. 4) Modify code (carefully)
5. 5) Rejar: jar -cvf pcc-theme.jar *
6. 6) Upload using  Dashboard > Administration > Plugin Manager

And then repeat 4-6 each time you make a chance.

Note that the plugin info seems to be cached. If you want to change the version # or plugin description, you will need to remove and then re-upload the plugin.

The Project

As part of the web team, I create and update dozens of pages every week. However, our newest launch, the updated PCC Foundation site, is something special.  Marketing had designated the foundation a co-brand. Meaning that it needs to maintain a strong relationship to, but is not a subsection of the college. This makes a lot of  sense organizationally and allowed us to do some cool stuff when designing the website.

This project was also special, due to the very short time line – as contact was initiated only 6 weeks prior to the needed launch. To streamline everything, we created a series of documents that noted the simultaneous content, architecture and design paths. Due dates and sign off points were highlighted (and stressed). With lots of hard work and clear communication via our liaison in the foundation, the project came together well and went live last Thursday, during a brand launch reception.

Some Initial Feedback

There are still a few thing that we need to complete, but godd feedback is already coming in:

“Just got my first look at our new Web site — it is wonderful, beautiful, fabulous, not to mention easy-to-use, attractive, and supportive of our mission. Thank you, Web Team, for all your work, and thank you for completing the Web site in such a short time. You have created a site that will help us raise scholarship and program funds that will support students and the work of PCC faculty and staff. On their behalf, thank you, thank you!!”

“hey guys, site looks AMAZING and i’m already getting comments about it!”

First, here are the resources

• Audio Recording: high (53MB), Med (27MB),  or Low (13MB)
• 2009 Presentation slides: keynote format or plain old pdf
• Original post with links to code and demos
  

Now some notes:

The audio for the presentation was recorded with a little sansa express recorder. Even with the limitations of the mic and the hum in the room, most of the recording is clear enough to understand. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to create a transcript for this one, but there is a recording from my session at the HighEdWeb conference that includes a transcript on the same topic.

Listening to the presentation audio now, I realize that there are several corrections that need to be made:

00:13:14 – “people who won’t use the keyboard”

Prefacing the need to include access keys, I started by saying “We also need to think about people who won’t use the keyboard”. That should have been “people who won’t use the mouse” – I corrected myself later, but just wanted to point out the mistake.

00:30:33 – H.264 Version and Adoption Rates

I stated wrong version number and adoption rates. The update that included H.264 was actually Flash Player 9 Update 3 (v 9.0.115.0) shipped on December 3, 2007. Check out this article on the adobe website for all the cool specs and reasons that H.264 rocks as a codac.

It is also importand to note that 98% is our user base for flash versions 9 & 10. I just took a closer look at the www.pcc.edu stats and found out the following:

For this month Feb 1st to 26th:

• 744,300: total visitors with flash
• 411,916: version 10 installed
• 314,117: version 9 installed (so 98% have version 9+)
• 242,782: version >= 9.0 r115 (so only 88% have the ability to view H246 online)

00:33:01 – DragonSpeak only 90% accurate with trained voice

So this is unconfirmed, but I found out that other schools have had much better success with the newest version. This came up during the impromptu accessibility session at eLearning. Supposedly, you can get 95% accuracy or more with the new versions and a clean recording. This may be worth looking into. I wonder how this recording would do.

Dr. Deborah Newton and Ryan Schrenk,
MSU – Great Falls College of Technology

Starts with a bunch of online tools to break the ice. None really have to do with the topic at hand, but interesting none-the-less.

Slides are on slideshare.

Now to the session at hand…

Huge growth in distance learning. I hear that.

Working on integrated system of support

• Single point of contact for student.
• Packaged evaluation with end of course assessment. However, only 700 responses for  2000 students.
• How do you meet students “at the door” when at a distance. Created online advising course.

Challenges

• Making early contact – they start by calling every student by telephone.

In advising room:

• Portal for links to advising information on the website. (not recreating content)
• Advising sheets per program.
• Advising Dropbox – fill out and submit advising sheet each term.
• Discussion board – student driven topics.