It would be neat if you could include a quiz widget within the article. The reader could take the quiz which would test their knowledge and then suggest content based on their responses. The news organization would collect useful demographic data to refine their editorial planning.

Fortunately, whether or not Google makes a commenting widget isn’t that big a deal on its own. Maybe they will or maybe they won’t, and maybe it’ll fail again or maybe it won’t. But the key lesson to take away here is that we know a few things are wrong with the trade press in the technology world:

• In tech financial coverage, there is a focus on valuation, deals and funding instead of markets, costs, profits, losses, revenues and sustainability.
• In tech executive coverage, there is a focus on personalities and drama instead of capabilities and execution.
• In tech product coverage, there is a focus on features and announcements instead of evaluating whether a product is meaningful and worthwhile.
• Technology trade press doesn’t treat our industry as a business, so much as a “scene”; If our industry had magazines, we’d have a lot of People but no Variety, a Rolling Stone, but no Billboard.

There are many more examples of the flaws, but these are obvious ones. What we may not know, though is that there’s another flaw:

• For all but the biggest tech stories, any individual article likely lacks enough information to make a decision about the topic of that article.

Anil Dash — Why you can’t trust tech press can’t teach you about the tech industry

At lunch, I learnt I was to lead a small group breakout on “the future of the CMS.” To keep the discussion going, we started out by brainstorming the things we liked and want to improve our respective software, and then did a roundtable to identify our six month personal goals.

Some things people like about their CMS:

• Drupal done well is easy to use; there are a ton of modules
• Affordability, open source is cheap
• Community to work with
• Many different homepage templates to choose from depending on the stories of the day

What people would like to improve (lots of conversation, as expected):

• Data portability
• More headless; produce output other than HTML
• Scalability, faster when many people are working in the admin
• Less steps for completing common, simple tasks
• Integration with story budgeting, calendaring; API for story flow
• Magical WYSIWYG editor; auto-save that works; track changes
• Support structured data / semantic markup
• Customization for story layout
• Small pieces loosely joined; better integration with other services

Given the short notice, I thought the breakout session went quite well. About twenty people showed up. In terms of what worked:

• Small group discussion; knew enough backgrounds to call out different people to talk
• Noted salient points on the whiteboard as a way of plotting direction
• I enjoyed the “what are you going to work on in the next six months” takeaways at the end

Next time, we should:

• Figure out the location ahead of time so we don’t waste time finding it
• Have people introduce themselves if they haven’t spoken yet
• Every fifteen minutes, have something for everyone to participate in so people don’t check out

Considering making the switch to WordPress? Join Daniel Bachhuber, code wrangler for Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP, to learn how to make open source work for your publication. We’ll discuss whether WordPress is the right fit for you, how to assess other options, and what steps you need to take if you’d like to make the switch.

Most of the people attending had been to at least one of my other sessions, so it was a quicker review of the slides and then more of a general Q&A session. A lot of the questions revolved around the different types of hosting, where you should go for support, etc.

You publish with WordPress, are comfortable with editing theme templates and making basic CSS changes, and you’re ready to take your site to the next level. Join Daniel Bachhuber, code wranger for Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP, to learn what you need to know. We’ll discuss topics like version control, performance and optimization, debugging, and other development best practices. This session will be geared towards the tech-savvy with a practical knowledge of WordPress.

It ended up being a little less ambitious. We started out with (the importance of) setting up a local environment, reviewed what makes a plugin, and introduced a few project ideas. Between a dozen and two dozen students attended; for almost all, the information was completely new.

The most important note on this subject: there are lots of jobs available.

Also, come hit us up with WordPress questions at our Happiness Bar!

Session notes are below the slides.

Do it locally

• Set up a sandbox
  • MAMP is an awesome way to get going on a Mac and there’s a way for Windows too
  • Sequel Pro allows you to easily access your database
  • Use ‘ack’ to find functions
    • Example: ack –before-context=10 –ignore-dir=wp-admin ‘function esc_’
    • Code is gospel. You might read tutorials or examples on the web that say one thing or the other; code will tell you the truth.
    • Reading code is a literacy of WordPress development. Dive into it to figure out what’s going on.
• Learn how to properly debug – fix those bugs as they’re happening
  • Enable WP_DEBUG in your local environment
    • It’s a quick and easy way to see what’s going wrong with your code for fatal errors
    • See PHP notices and other things you might normally miss
    • Make sure you’re using the best WordPress functions for the job
  • “5 ways to debug WordPress” and “Debugging WordPress” – Andrew Nacin
• Commit to version control and deploy to production
  • Why?
    • More easily communicate the changes you’re making with the rest of your team.
    • Work on multiple features at the same time.
    • Roll back if necessary; better than backups.
    • Automated deployment — no more copy and pasting over FTP.
  • What makes a good commit message:
    • Consider your audience: writing for coworkers and for historical purposes.
    • Explain why you made the change, not what it was. What it was should be self-explanatory from the code
    • Link to Trac tickets or other relevant conversation.

Anatomy of a plugin

• First, a quick introduction to PHP
  • functions, variables, and how the code is executed
• What are plugins then?
  • Description
  • Functions and variables
  • Do something useful
• How to audit a plugin
  • Reviewing on WordPress.org
    • Compatible with most recent version of WordPress?
    • Regular release cycle with clear changelog
    • Positive dialog in the WordPress.org forums
    • Reputable plugin author has other plugins released
    • Licensed under the GPL
  • Install it locally and test it out. Make sure it does what you want it to do.
  • Formal code review?
    • Follows best practices and coding standards
    • Uses core APIs and the proper hook
    • Secure and performant
  • Common problems with plugins
    • Doesn’t do what you need it to
    • Plays poorly with the rest of your site
    • Performance problems with queries or remote requests
    • Security holes
• How to write your own plugin

What to do?

• Making your design responsive across many screens
  • What is responsive design?
    • Design for many different browser widths
    • Different than creating a mobile-specific website
  • Examples
    • Smashing Magazine: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
    • BU Pipe Dream: http://www.bupipedream.com/
• Multi-format publishing (post formatsand custom post types)
  • Post formats:
    • Customize the presentation of your content based on the type of content
    • Types include links, galleries, videos, statuses, audio, etc.
  • Custom post types allow you define arbitrary content types
  • Examples:
    • ONA11 conference website uses custom post types and post formats: http://ona11.journalists.org/sessions/friday-lunch-keynote-a-conversation-on-the-front-lines-of-the-arab-revolution/
    • WSJ Story Streams: http://stream.wsj.com/story/oscars-2012/SS-2-112/
• Moar plugins!
  • Edit Flow
  • Zoninator
  • JSON API
• Multisite blog network
  • Let students create sites for their organizations, etc.
  • Quick introduction to multisite
• Follow the five tenets to mastering WordPress development
• Read others’ code and have others read yours; work in public on Github

Elizabeth Eisenstein, our leading Gutenberg scholar, says that after the press, people no longer needed to use rhyme as a tool to memorize recipes and other such information. Instead, we now relied on text printed on paper. I have no doubt that curmudgeons at the time lamented lost skills. Text became our new collective memory. Sound familiar? Google is simply an even more effective cultural memory machine. I think it has already made us a more fact-based; when in doubt about a fact, we no longer have to trudge to the library but can expect to find the answer in seconds.

[...]

The real need for education in the economy will be re-education. As industries go through disruption and jobs are lost forever, people will need to be retrained for new roles. Our present educational structure is not built for that but in that I see great entrepreneurial opportunity.

Jeff Jarvis — Rewired youth?

So, you’ve heard of WordPress before, possibly used it for your personal portfolio, and want to learn everything there is to know about it. Well, everything we can cover in a hour at least Join Daniel Bachhuber, code wrangler for Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP, as we cover the WordPress interface, key concepts like themes, plugins, PHP and MySQL, and how to choose a good web host and design for your site. This session will be geared towards those with limited familiarity who want to learn more.

It was a quick introduction to the WordPress project, key terminology you’d hear, and then a tour through the WordPress admin. The room was packed with maybe 30-40 people which was sweet. Tomorrow is “Hacking WordPress in the Newsroom” and Tuesday is “Making the Switch to WordPress.”

The function of a newsroom in the future is to coordinate the voices of the world to produce a coherent news product. That job will be done in very much the model that Tumblr is doing it. You could have started with a blogging community or you could have started with a news organization, but they’re both heading to the same place.

The Times of course has the best newsroom. So why don’t they evolve a blogging platform like Tumblr’s? They should have. I’ve been begging them to do it since the mid-90s. There’s still time to gather some of the leftover energy in the web, and to be prepared to catch some of the deserters when Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter et al stumble at growing into the space formerly occupied exclusively by the Times, Wash Post, etc.

But less time remains all the time.

Dave Winer — NYT growing the wrong way.

Currently, works of journalism (articles, videos, galleries, graphics, etc.) no matter what subject (news, sports, entertainment, business, features, investigations, etc.) are quantitatively measured the same. An investigative piece that might be nowhere near as popular in pageviews across a mass audience (yes, sometimes, they can be) is quantitatively measured the same way a celebrity death story is. Either story could make a sensational splash, truly connect emotionally with readers, or both. Each has value, but there are different kinds of values across different subjects journalists cover.

If we value impactful accountability journalism, why are we quantitatively equating it one-to-one to entertainingly impactful news? For example, when an investigation is published that saves taxpayer money or even human lives, we should instead try to measure these in a more multi-dimensional way — instead of merely the simplistic ones — and measure them differently from journalism works that have different goals. We should do this not just because the quantification would be more accurate (again, still imperfect), but because it would be a better model of the complex real-world response.

Greg Linch — Quantifying impact: A better metric for measuring journalism.

What is more frustrating to me than a lack of solid content categorization is that there is no single CMS out there that allows you to indicate follow-ups, updates, series, retractions, corrections and responses. Now that would be interesting metadata and it’d really allow us to keep readers in the loop and give them updates to stories they care about. Much more useful than telling me that this story is an education story and that that story is about air travel.

Stijn Debrouwere — Taxonomies don’t matter anymore