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Unicorn Heaven! Highlights From WordCamp Edinburgh 2017

Posted: Updated: by Claire Brotherton
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Wapuunicorn t-shirt with Heather Burns

WordCamp Edinburgh 2017 took place at Codebase last weekend, and it was a fantastic experience.

My first WordCamp was Edinburgh 2012. We were overdue another one in my home city – the last WordCamp Edinburgh was in 2015.

Here are my highlights from the weekend.

Expect unicorns but not much sunshine!

Democratising Democracy: Lessons from using WordPress for civic engagement – Leah Lockhart

Leah LockhartLeah’s keynote focused on how WordPress is used among communities, for communication, education and engagement.

Leah explained that a person-centred approach is not the norm for councils, charities and community groups. As well as social media, WordPress sites can be a powerful tool to help voices in the local community be heard who would otherwise not get their say. (A notable example is the Grenfell Action Group, hosted on WordPress.com.)

One aim Leah has for the future is to run local WordPress surgeries to upskill people to run their own sites successfully.

Follow up with Leah Lockhart

Read about Leah’s first two months in post as Demsoc Scotland’s Digital Engagement Officer

Read Leah’s blog post on WordPress for civic engagement

Follow Leah on Twitter

Boilerplating WordPress – Dave Green

Dave Green wearing a WordCamp Edinburgh 2017 t-shirt and lanyard

Dave spoke about how to save time and effort setting up new WordPress installs by using boilerplate code. He’s the lead developer of the Kapow! boilerplate for WordPress.

I was especially excited to hear about his setup script for WordPress installs which can create a new site in 6 minutes!

Tools he uses include:

  • VVV as a local development environment
  • Grunt
  • Modernizr
  • SCSS
  • Bourbon + Neat framework
  • Underscores or Roots theme

The aim is to keep code clean and lean, avoid repetition and keep folders out of the root as much as possible. Core data for a project is written into a plugin which will contain custom post types, meta boxes, customizer settings and more.

How to Survive as a New WordPress Service Provider: 7 Lessons from the field – CJ Andrew

CJ shared his experience of selling WordPress services. He works building storefronts for WooCommerce websites. Nothing else. That’s it.

CJ Andrew

His 7 lessons were:

  1. Always Be Competent. List the things you want to learn and make time to do them. Do a completency asseessment every couple of months.
  2. Margin Matters. Don’t work 12 hour days. Do less and achieve more.
  3. Feed the Pipeline. He always has 3 active projects at one time and 10 leads which he nurtures until it’s time to do their project.
  4. Target Self-Actualization.Figure our your true purpose. Make sure you add value to the world.
  5. Separate Yourself. You are more than your expertise. One time he phoned a client and just listened to how their week went. At the end of the call the client agreed to send payment!
  6. Identify with your nature. What type of service provider are you? Tip – consultants get paid more.
  7. Prioritize Your Ideal Job. Do work you love and will make you happy.

Support is really important, whether that’s from family, friends or online communities.

Recommended reading for freelancers

Delivering Happiness – Tony Hsieh

The Year Without Pants – Scott Berkun (an insight into WordPress.com)

Follow up with CJ Andrew

CJ’s slides on How To Survive As A New WordPress Service Provider

Follow CJ Andrew on Twitter

To Infinity and Beyond – Making WordPress Fly with Jetpack- Kayleigh Thorpe

Kayleigh ThorpeKayleigh works for 34SP.com – the main WordCamp Edinburgh sponsor. She is a big fan of the Jetpack plugin. Jetpack provides much of the functionality on WordPress.com and is available as a standalone plugin for self-hosted sites.

Her three favourite features are:

  1. Photon – image caching to speed up performance.
  2. Custom Post Types (Testimonials and Portfolios) which are supported by different themes.
  3. Contact Form with a drag and drop editor.

Jetpack has many other functions including site stats, social sharing, site protection and more, but don’t go crazy and enable everything! Just use what you need. 🙂

Follow up with Kayleigh Thorpe

Kayleigh has a site at AlbinoFriut.com and you can read her post on WordCamp Edinburgh here.

Follow Kayleigh on Twitter

Hands-on WooCommerce Woorkshop – Luminus Olumide Alabi, CJ Andrew

Luminus works for Auttomatic, who bought the WooCommerce ecommerce plugin last year.

Luminus and CJ built a simple WooCommerce demo site from scratch and answered questions from the audience.

We learned things like:

Shipping zones

If you’re in the USA you can set a range of zip codes as a shipping zone because they’re numeric. In the UK we have to list out postcodes, though we can use asterisks as wildcards.

Setting up a WooCommerce free shipping zone with Edinburgh postcodes

If no shipping zone is set for an area, the person can’t place an order and will get a message “There is no shipping method”. This can be customized with a filter or a translation plugin like Loco Translate.

Variable products

Products that are prepacked in a certain number e.g sausages are entered as variable products.

50 variations can be set automatically. Each has its own price and image.

Products can be imported in CSV format. If updating existing products, the image column should only have a filename, not a full URL.

Order numbers

Order number is a post type, so the fifth order may not be numbered #5.

Sequential Order Numbers is a plugin which puts orders in number order (1, 2, 3, 4 etc.). There’s a pro extension for it too.

Downloadable products

To protect products from direct linking, you can:

  • Use WooCommerce Force Downloads setting
  • Block the URL with .htaccess
  • Host the product with Amazon S3

MailCatcher is a useful tool to check emails sent by WooCommerce on localhost.

Follow up with Luminus Alabi

Read Luminus’ blog

Follow Luminus on Twitter

Are Twitter threads killing blogs? – Franz Vitulli

Franz noticed that long Facebook and Twitter conversations were becoming more common and wondered if they spelt the death-knell for blogs.

The answer is NO – long-form content is not going away.

Social media has a shorter shelf life and we don’t have the same ownership rights over social media compared to our own blog content.

Facebook doesn’t allow content to be indexed by search engines; we can only interact with it when logged into their platform.

If a platform dies, we lose all our content there (like Blab).

Social platforms are useful as a testing ground for ideas to create long form content.

And when we share blog posts, it’s not enough to say:

Read my new post! Check it out!

Follow up with Franz Vitulli

Visit Franz’s website

Follow Franz on Twitter

Using WordPress to create social change – Bridget Hamilton

Bridget Hamilton - Using WordPress to create Social Change

Sunday’s opening keynote was my favourite talk of the weekend as we moved beyond the theoretical to see examples of using WordPress in the wild.

In addition to working a full-time job, Bridget runs Verbal Remedy, a project dedicated to tackling tough issues through blogs and discussion online.

Bridget’s activism started at age 10 when her mum got a letter from the school saying that girls were not allowed to play on the school’s football fields. A position her mum secretly agreed with!

Verbal Remedy runs with a team of about 25 volunteer contributors. The challenge is to recruit new blood and keep the existing writers on board.

Bridget’s writing tips were:

  • Write what you know.
  • Just get up and do it.
  • Use words your audience will understand.
  • Say something different.
  • Take criticism on board.

Bridget spoke with pride of the project’s successes along the way, including:

  • A grant to run a campaign on sexual consent for 16-25 year-olds.
  • A documentary, “Seeing Red” on the tampon tax.
  • A question submitted on their behalf by an MP about partner homicide.
  • One of their contributors, Saffron, included in a BBC3 documentary about nonbinary people.

Follow up with Bridget Hamilton

Visit the Verbal Remedy site

Follow Bridget on Twitter

Using a REST API for Absolute Beginners – Tom Nowell

This was a more techy talk, but Tom managed to deliver it without blinding us with too many acronyms!

I won’t go into depth as it was code-heavy, so be sure to check out the slides.

Tom J Nowell talks the REST API

Follow up with Tom J Nowell

Read Tom’s blog post on making simple REST endpoint.

View Tom’s slides on using REST APIs for Absolute Beginners

Follow Tom on Twitter

Making popular WordPress plugins more accessible – Me!

I missed my chance to speak at the last Edinburgh WordCamp so it was good to get the opportunity this time.

Claire Brotherton at WordCamp Edinburgh 2017
Me speaking at WordCamp Edinburgh 2017. Photo by Ahmed Khalifa

I chose to speak about WordPress plugin accessibility (from a keyboard only/screen reader user’s point of view) and what we can do to improve it.

I had too much material initially and had to cut it down. Eventually, I settled on talking about the accessibility of the following plugins:

  • NextGEN Gallery
  • MailMunch
  • Sumo
  • Gravity Forms

Rather than live demos, I decided to make videos/GIFs of my testing. This was better as it (a) avoided any snafus and (b) helped me keep to time.

My slides and video

Here’s the talk in two formats – PDF for the links, video for the demos.

Making popular WordPress plugins more accessible (Slides)

Don’t lose your steam! How to deal with unhappy customers – Stef Mattana

Stef Mattana of AutomatticStef works as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, so deals with customers daily.

The important thing to remember is angry customers are rare.

But when we have to deal with one, some tips are:

  • Don’t lose your cool.
  • Take a break and recharge.
  • Don’t take any frustration personally.
  • Use the customer’s name when replying.
  • Be positive. Avoid words like “can’t” or “no” where possible.
  • Explain and try to offer solutions. Make them part of the solution-finding process.
  • Give a refund if necessary (never a waste of money!)
  • Educate and empower your users as much as you can.
  • Be patient!
  • Never tolerate abuse or bad behaviour.
  • Prefer written channels like live chat – it gives you both more time to think.
  • Smile. It changes your mood.
  • Document everything.
  • Triage multiple tickets – address them by urgency.
  • Create stock replies.
  • Make it easy for your users to leave feedback and study what went wrong.
  • Appreciate good feedback when it comes, but never ask for it.

This was a really practical talk with lots of customer service nuggets. 🙂

Follow up with Stef Mattana

Read Stef’s bio

View Stef’s blog on fire extinguishers (yes, you read that right!)

Follow Stef on Twitter

Using Facebook Ads to get more eyes on your content – Gavin Bell

Gavin talked about the power of video and Facebook ads together to create a winning content marketing strategy.

He knew that video was getting more important but was scared of doing it until he met Gary Vee.

His first video had a very inauspicious start – filmed in a forest with background noise.

Gavin Bell and that awkward first video

He knew it was terrible, but he persisted.

Embrace the messy

After that, Gavin went all in and did 100 vlogs in 100 days, and started building some traction.

He then decided to focus on quality instead of quantity and create a weekly vlog with higher production values.

Using his skill with Facebook ads he can promote the right content to the right person at the right time.

Creating engaging content is key (his videos have an average watch time of 15 seconds; the norm is six). Then you need to find a custom Facebook audience to promote it to.

He will typically buy ads to target:

  • People who have watched 50% of one of his previous videos
  • Media outlets
  • Workers for a specific employer, industry or job title.

The obvious thing would be to target your competitors’ Facebook fans. Unfortunately, you can’t do that unless Facebook deems them large enough to be of interest.

Follow up with Gavin Bell

Visit Gavin’s YouTube channel

Download Gavin’s Facebook ads blueprint

Follow Gavin on Twitter

Designing for Accessibility – Graham Armfield

Introducing Graham’s talk, Heather Burns reminded us that it was five years to the day that Graham made his first accessibility presentation at WordCamp Edinburgh 2012.

Graham went through some key areas to ensure better accessibility.

  • Make sure text is sufficiently large as well as contrasting with the background.
  • Make sure form fields have clear outlines.
  • Use underlines as well as colours to signify links.
  • Always have a visible keyboard focus. (Use Flying Focus for an animated effect.)
  • Avoid justified text – it has a greater cognitive load and makes the words “swim” for folk with dyslexia.
  • Ensure content doesn’t spill out of its container when the text is resized.
  • Don’t use placeholders only for forms (people can forget what the fields are for when typing).

Graham Armfield talking about form placeholders

Graham gave us a quick demo of the Gutenberg editor and pointed out a couple of accessibility issues with missing form labels and poor keyboard focus. Hopefully these problems will be fixed soon!

Follow up with Graham Armfield

View Graham’s slides on Designing for Accessibility

Visit Graham’s website

Follow Graham on Twitter

Blogging as therapy: a personal journey – Rachel Martin

Rachel delivered the final keynote of the WordCamp, a quite affecting story about the power of blogging to help us personally.

Hailing from Australia, she now lives in Scotland. In 2010 she was living in Christchurch, New Zealand with her husband and two young children. On 4 September 2010, the city was struck by an earthquake. Fortunately, she and her family were fine and there were no fatalities overall.

There was a feeling that the people living there had had a lucky escape. They had.

Six months later an aftershock hit. It wasn’t as powerful as the original earthquake but 185 people died, mostly in two buildings. Rachel was picking up her young son from kindergarten and was unhurt. But as time went on she realised she was not okay mentally.

Rachel got caught up in a fight or flight response where she was constantly anticipating the next aftershock. Her experience was common: rates of mental ill-health went up 69% after the earthquake.

Rachel Andrew showing a map of aftershocks from the Christhurch earthquake
Rachel Andrew showing a map of aftershocks from the Christhurch earthquake

She decided to start a blog as a way of coping. In her first month, April 2011, she wrote 19 posts and slowly started to feel better and sleep more soundly.

Rachel shared data showing that expressive writing helps with general health, boosting immunity and coping with job loss.

Her writing tips were:

  • Don’t censor yourself
  • Forget about spelling and grammar – just write
  • You can’t write the wrong thing
  • Make your blog or posts private if they’re really personal

Follow up with Rachel Martin

Read Rachel’s blog

Read Rachel’s account of WordCamp Edinburgh 2017

Follow Rachel on Twitter

WordCamp Edinburgh 2017 atmosphere

Codebase worked well as a venue. We had two rooms for the talks. I was in room 1 – the only time I’ve seen a sofa and bean bags in a talk room. The second track was in the same room as the refreshments and had an eclectic collection of chairs. It felt a lot more cosy than usual!

The weather was a downer for most of the weekend – constant rain. The WordCamp Manchester umbrellas that were brought disappeared quickly!

The Wapuunicorn was a fab design and the stickers and t-shirts proved to be a big hit.

We were also treated to the sight of Codebase’s resident unicorn Popcorn and emcee and speaker organiser Heather Burns adorned with a unicorn horn! What’s not to like?

Popcorn, Codebase's resident unicorn
Heather Burns

Special thanks to 34SP.com for bringing swag bags and being lovely.

The food was impressive all round. I loved the speaker’s dinner at La Piazza, one of my favourite Italian restaurants in the capital. Social Bite made a fantastic range of items for lunch, catering to all tastes (the pulled pork wraps were a highlight). Sygn Bar – the usual venue for the local meetup – kept us satisfied at the after party. I never knew mac and cheese balls were a thing, but they definitely are a good thing.

One of the best parts of a WordCamp is seeing people you haven’t seen in a while.

I enjoyed catching up with a good few people, especially Graham Armfield, Henriette Stewart, who I hadn’t seen since WordCamp London 2015 (too long!) and my friends from the CMA Community – Vicky, Ahmed, Colin and Gavin. It was also good to chat to new people like Keith from 34SP, CJ Andrew and Richard and Chris of HeroThemes.

Big thanks to the WordCamp Edinburgh organising team, sponsors and volunteers for the weekend. You’re going to have a tough time outdoing this year, guys…

Category: WordPress Tags: , , , , , , , ,

About Claire Brotherton

Freelance web designer and front end developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. I love WordPress, code, learning and blogging.

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Comments

  1. Rachel Martin says

    This is a great recap of the weekend, Claire. It was nice to relive the experience again through your words. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and am looking forward to the next one!

    Reply

    • Claire Brotherton says

      Thanks for sharing your story, Rachel. Look forward to catching up at another WordCamp. 🙂

      Reply

  2. Alistair says

    it was good to be at WordCamp 2017 and there was also a talk given for translating WordPress content through polyglot plugins or maybe I am getting my years mixed up.

    Dave Green and CoolFields were awesome! Dave inspired me to re-publish his talk in tutorial format. Accessibility from CoolFields and A Bright Clear Web (Claire) has always inspired me to do better with accessibility.

    I just wish I could be more involved with the WordPress community, it truly is one of the best out there.

    Reply

    • Claire Brotherton says

      Thanks, Alistair.

      I don’t think I caught the translation talk, so I’m not sure when that was.

      Hope to catch you at a WordCamp sometime soon,

      Claire

      Reply

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