Fairly Painless WordPress 2.8 upgrades

I had the “privilege” of updating 47 websites today to the new WordPress 2.8 version. All of these sites were updated from version 2.7 or 2.71 so as you can imagine, there were no major issues. While taking care of these updates, I also took a look at all of the plugin upgrades and discovered only three plugins that were slightly problematic.

Following the upgrade and applying the latest patch CForms failed to work properly and the following error popped up:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class cf_mail in .../public_html/wp-content/plugins/cforms/lib_email.php on line 3

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Open Web Vancouver opens with a Pirate Party and a look at Women in Open Source

I must confess, I wasn’t expecting much from the Open Web Vancouver conference. I read the schedule, and perhaps the strong emphasis on Drupal turned me off, but I didn’t find myself salivating like I do when I go to An Event Apart’s website. And as the saying goes, you pay for what you get; so how good can a $150 conference be? Today’s conference proved me wrong.

This morning’s session was opened by two keynote speakers and left me inspired and eager to learn more about the Open Source community.

The first keynote was given by Rick Falkvinge on one of Sweden’s political party, the Pirate Party, whose platform is to reform laws regarding copyrights and patents and other civil liberties issues. The Pirate Party succeeded in gaining popularity and attention simply by using the Internet and very little money. In fact their campaign budget during the last election consisted of only $50K. As a result of the communication tools and methods they’ve used, they are now the political party with the largest percentage of voters 30 years old and younger. This of course as alarmed other politicians who have never been able to reach out to this age group.

Now that the Pirate Party has secured a seat in the European Parliament, it will be interesting to see if other political parties start discussing issues such as privacy and file sharing. Just like Al Gore has put Global Warming on everyone’s mind, Rick Falvinge is spreading the word about what needs to be done to create a better online world for all of us and he deserved the standing ovation which followed his presentation.

Following this great keynote, came Angie Byron who spoke about Women in Open Source or rather lack of. I was a bit surprised that this topic was chosen and discussed. I’ve been working as a so called “geek” for a over a decade and never experienced any sexism at work or conference and Angie admitted herself that until she started researching the numbers, didn’t think there was a problem either. Turns out the percentage of women in Open Source is staggeringly low. The reasons and solutions that were discussed were obvious and applicable to all minorities, not just women. At least they felt obvious to me, but a few hours later, I read about the incident at Flashbelt’s conference just a few days ago. It seems like a lot of boys think that the saying boys will be boys still stands and should simply be accepted.

Angie provided great advice on how to create a safe and inviting community and how to stop tolerating bullshit. The gem, for me, were her views on contribution to Open Source. Having worked with Open Source during all of my coding years, I’ve realised that I’ve used the stuff, but never really contributed. Providing contribution whether it be marketing, documenting, designing and of course coding, is a great way to empower yourself and feel like you are part of the team.

I look forward to learn more during tomorrow’s event.

The Challenge Series built on WordPress

I was very pleased to read a recent article on the WordPress blog about Ford choosing the WordPress platform for their new website: “The Ford Story“. This new website aims to show Ford’s commitment towards getting new, high-quality, fuel-efficient cars and trucks on the road and uses WordPress as a CMS to deliver a wide variety of static content, videos, photos, and dynamic updates.

I recently came to the same decision when building a website for the Challenge Series which is a celebration of the planning, design and building of Vancouver’s first sustainable neighbourhood – Millennium Water: The Southeast False Creek Olympic Village.

Published as an online book, the first of eight chapters was recently launched and, just like The Ford Story, uses WordPress as a CMS to deliver a wide variety of static content, downloadable documents and photos. Future issues will also include videos. When I was first introduced to this project, I instantly thought of WordPress as the CMS for this website, but wondered if perhaps Drupal or some other CMS might be a better platform. The design of the home page alone proved somewhat challenging and uses a large number of custom fields, but with proper training and the use of simple HTML, I think that the website is fairly easy to maintain and look forward to seeing how it progresses and develops. Finding out that companies like Ford also choose WordPress has convinced me that I’ve made a good decision.

Ask the Experts

Have you ever had a marketing, branding or web strategy question but were afraid to ask? We’ll be hosting our next “Ask the Experts” panel on June 3rd at the YWCA on Beatty Street, where you can come along and ask anything you want.

• Liz Gaige from Market Navigators will address marketing inquiries
• Mhairi Petrovic from Out-smarts will be on-hand to speak about social networking
• Ryan Thompson from Twin Fish Creative will provide answers about branding
• while I’ll be discussing web design and development.

These panels are casual and informal. Simply register, show up and join the conversation. Organized as round-tables, we like to keep these small, so that you have the chance to ask your questions and hear what others have to say. These are ideal for budding entrepreneurs, individuals wanting to launch themselves in a new venture or existing companies who may be stuck and not sure where to go next.

We are currently holding a 2-for-1 promo, so bring a friend or colleague along. Hope to see you there.