The weekend of November 14, I took a trip down to Manhattan from my Native Boston to attend WordCamp NYC. I chose WPMU/BuddyPress track due to my latest work with Hunt and Gather

There’s a lot of WordPress royalty here – developers and thought leaders who are granularly famous inside of the *Press community. I’m hoping to get a chance to talk with them to show them my work and maybe ask a few quick questions.

On twitter, you can follow event tweets by following the #wcnyc hashtag. This is going to be useful throughout the conference. For example, it just told me about the book “Microtrends” and it’s relevance towards WPMU / BuddyPress.

I apologize if this is unclear or hard to follow. Admittedly, these notes are more for my own purposes than they are for somebody who didn’t attend the conference. However, I’m open to, and openly welcome discussionon any of these points.

Sessions I attended

Growing Community With BuddyPress

• BuddyPress != Facebook
• Facebook happens in front of everybody (i guess)
• BuddyPress all happens in front of a niche community
• Big advances in BuddyPress Groups coming – there’s going to be a whole session later about it
• Basically just an overview of BuddyPress features for people who aren’t familiar with the platform
• Site examples: Bugle Notes, We Earth, Nourish Network, Sports Grants
• The problem with using such a young technology as BuddyPress is that things change quickly, and drastically. Two recent examples are the handling of theming and the handling of groups / forums.
• Not supposed to edit the BuddyPress parent theme. It’s an override system. I can’t believe I missed that. Whoops.

User Authentication with WPMU in Existing Ecosystems

• External authentications such as LDAP, Shibboleth, OpenID, CAS
• LDAP and Shibboleth are time trusted technologies but are easily susceptible to social engineering.
• LDAB and Shibboleth does authentication and authorization, OpenID and CAS only do authorization.
• OpenID “works like paypal” meaning it takes you away briefly to an external site to perform the authentication.
• Expensive commercial authentication software doesn’t allow things like user facing password reset. Awesome!

• The plan – replace all user facing login stuff with wp-login.php

  • Use plugin to create alternate email address + cell phone field and lock down the primary email address.
  • Log into wordpress -> Check WP credentials -> if no WP credentials -> check external auth -> if match then provision account for WP.
• The idea of multiple usernames (email, secondary email, cell phone number) is interesting.
• “Older” users without email address (really?) can be authenticated via an SMS gateway.
• Was hoping for stuff about Facebook Connect but OH WELL!
• Info about Alternate Contact Info, WordPress Ticket Framework, wpSMS available at Maison Bisson’s site:

Beyond Sharing – Open Source Design

• Brought to you by Shift Space – pretty neat idea.
• Getting designers into a versioning system involves a lot of kicking and screaming.
• “You can always tell an open source project by the fact that it’s ugly.”
• One person, one path, one goal: No reason to collaborate. One person, multiple paths, one goal: Perfect environment for collaboration. The problem is that the more people join, the more goals there seem to be.
• The idea is to meet at a common point in the middle and all collectively move together towards our own goals on the SAME path, and then split off at a closer point.
• Chicken + Egg Problem: Designers are not involved in open source software because open source software is not good enough because designers are not involved in it. Also, we can’t force people to use bad tools as an ideologic statement.
• The nature of communication: A mutual language is chosen (say, english), a message is sent, and then decoded by the receiver (human or computer).
• Some “solutions” to consider:
  • Defining a language: graphic, color, layout, animation, interaction, etc.
  • Set collaboration standards.
  • Standards i.e. Grid systems and CSS frameworks
  • Research exists and is out there: Smashing Magazine’s example
  • Providing a strict set of assets can hinder innovation. However, the more assets you provide, the more liberating it becomes. Example: iPhone
  • Example: HappyCog’s leadership with the WordPress 2.5 admin panel and the wordpress team’s modifications in 2.7
  • Example: Wordpress Icon Design “competition” and the process by which the community chose icons. Not “yes” or “no” on each icon set but also “yes” or “no” on the metaphors.
  • When possible, use code. When possible, use a version control system.
  • Research! Style guides!
  • Everything seems to come down to vision and leadership.
• An inconsistent design fragments the message.
• The lecture returns to ShiftSpace but with an interesting idea: not just user generated content but user generated interfaces.

The rest of the program today is very Buddypress heavy. I didn’t take as many notes because I was doing some hands-on stuff with the devs and also trying to close some tickets for work since I was feeling inspired!

BuddyPress Group Extension API

• Andy Peatling is live building a plugin for us after a brief explanation of what an API is.
• Very awesome tutorial but not worth writing extensively about. It’s similar to the wordpress widget API. Basically going over what’s detailed here.

Developing BuddyPress as a Collaboration Hub

• Philosophy professor from CUNY speaking about the CUNY academic commons, which uses buddypress as the hub and WordPress, bbPress, and MediaWiki as the spokes.
• Custom plugin creation for bbPress mostly.
• Single sign on for WP-MW
• Getting the BuddyBar to show up in MediaWiki = using jQuery to call a post-slug that ONLY has the footer.php in it.
• Sometimes you just gotta write directly to the database… sometimes.

BuddyPress Templating

• BuddyPress’ templating system functions on an override system. Everything inherits from the parent theme, and every file you add will override the parent file.
• This solves problems where upgrades break stuff, etc
• Look in the *-templatetags.php file in each of the /wp-content/plugins/buddypress subfolders for the functions you want.

Tuning WordPress and the LAMP Stack for Speed and Stability

• Expecting too much traffic? Traffic too slow? (The answer should really always be YES)
• WP-SuperCache, obviously
• WP-Tuner
• “When your server slows down, you need to put as many tools in front of your face to give you things to try until you try it.”
• Try not to do writes on every page view.
• Cache expensive queries as serialized arrays in wp_options table – if you can store things in options, DO IT.
• Look into content delivery networks
• Unix commands: top or htop, apachetop, tail, less, mytop
• Claim: most problems are solved with MaxClients, ServerLimit, MaxRequestsPerChild
• https://launchpad.net/mysql-tuning-primer
• http://mmonit.com/monit/
• If all else fails, scale your hardware!

Hyperlocal Journalism, Meet BuddyPress

• BuddyPress + Open Registration
• Needs an active community manager that lives and breathes the Site
• Using PMs to issue assignments and edits, Member profiles to ensure some degree of accountability
• Some plugins: Post Google Map, Adminimize, Welcome Pack, WP Wall, TweetMeme
• Other cool hyperlocal tools: SeeClickFix, Outside.In