Live demo
Want to get content into Wordpress
“Dumb” copying and pasting seems to work OK
Appearing is pretty bad, but oo, I have lots of themes. Really quick to switch them, and it just works.
Installing a new theme – JUST WORKS. So painless
Awfully large header. Can we change that?
An editor. So we can!
My mom has got images of horses too. What can we do with that?
Hey, we can create a gallery. Let’s do that.
Now we can add some images. Upload one. There’s small boxes for a bunch of information. But we can add them.
Can I make a page for my gallery to show on?
let’s look in plugins area.
[note that the plugin is already installed. Plugin discovery is still not simple.]
how about that link? No, that’s not it.
[gets a bit lost]
maybe google knows. Hey, FAQs for NextGEN gallery. There it is.
That works. I have a gallery.
I have a site
When I log into a wp site, I have straight away links to doing stuff.
What happens when I want to add wysiwyg to Drupal? Wp is just there.
What if we have to set up wysiwyg? It’s like twelve steps.
What if I want to set up tags?
What if I want to change how it looks? “Hire a themer.” OK, how do I do that?
How do I add images? How do I get image cache? What’s that?
Has anyone ever set up a calendar on Drupal?
How does my mom upgrade things on Drupal? “Use drush!” There’s this place called modules, but apparently that’s wrong.
What’s a page? It’s a content type. Maybe something with panels. Something your browser spits out. Maybe it’s a view, or a category listing.
Posts? Depending on which bit of UI you used, you might get that word.
What are themes? Are they skins?
Are categories taxonomy?
We do things because that’s the way we do it.
Developers like to build new stuff. They don’t necessarily care when there’s existing stuff.
Developers don’t care about looks. They think their job is done when it sort of works.
Developers don’t care about ux if they can use drush.
Drupal is sort of a blank slate. You can put blocks where you want them, but why would you?
Wordpress is a finished product.
All you have to do is satisfy market need. Wp is behind us, but they can move fast, and they’re looking at us.
3.0? Their blogging engine turned into a content management engine.
They’re catching up pretty quick. What happens when we’re left in drupal-is-fun land, alone?
What do we need?
Distributions? Yes! All that time saved.
“so many distributions can be really confusing”
Wordpress has three. So we could say we do e-commerce.
Wordpress has direction. It makes good products, but it’s more top-led
Does e community need to make distros or a better blank slate?
Both.
“officially supported”
What does that mean?
“not just supported by one company, but supported by core”
How does that happen in the module lifecycle? we need to come up with some kind of standard, or a way to get acceptance. How do we do this?
Drupalmodules.com – one guy has an attitude of “I can do this better on my own.” big security risks. Big problem for drupal reputation. It’s not right.
“we don’t ship a product. We need to ship products.”
Is it n ot too late to chase wp as a blog product?
“No.”
One thing we don’t have is a great team of salesmen. Wp has that. Whether we can take over their space, I doubt. But we have to figure out how to do the whole vertical.
“OpenAtrium – already done? And now we’re feeding back into the community.”
Yeah, but how do you know about OpenAtrium? Because you’re already in the community.
There is no drupal.com
“as more companies start working on distros, we’ll get a middle ground.”
How quickly can we do this?
Developers get so excited about all these technologies that prototypes sometimes don’t get finished.
A few months back Paul Evans asked me to write a short essay/blog post for the Political Innovation project – taking a series of posts about how politics could be done better – and cross-posting them on political blogs from different places on the political spectrum. I managed to escape dissertation writing long enough to draft the below, which has been posted today as the first post in the series and is featured on the Political Innovation site; Left Foot Forward and Local Democracy blog so far. Comments, if any, should all go to the main Political Innovation site…
Here’s the post:
The communication revolution that we’ve undergone in recent years has two big impacts:
- It changes what’s possible. It makes creating networks between people across organisations easier; it opens new ways for communication between citizens and state; it gives everyone who wants it a platform for global communication; and it makes it possible to discover local online dialogue.
- It changes citizen expectations of government. When I can follow news from my neighbour’s blog on my phone, why can’t I get updates on local services on the mobile-web? When I can e-mail someone across the world and be collaborating on a document in minutes, why is it so hard to have a conversation with the council down the road? And when brands and mainstream media are doing interactivity and engagement – why are government departments struggling with it so much?
Right now, government is missing out on significant cost saving and service-enhancing benefits from new forms of communication and collaboration. But the answers are not simply about introducing new technology – they are to be found in intentional culture change: in creating the will and the opportunity for interactive government.
There are three things we need to focus on:
- Culture change. Although there are pockets of interactivity breaking out across the public sector, it’s often counter-cultural and ‘underground’. Most staff feel constrained to work with tools given to them by IT departments, and to focus on official lines more than open conversations. Creating a culture of interactivity needs leadership from the top, and values that everyone can sign up to.
- Removing the barriers. There are literally hundreds of small daily frustrations and barriers that can get in the way of interactive government. It might be the inability of upload a photo to an online forum (interactive government has human faces…), or consent and moderation policies that cover everyone’s backs but don’t allow real voices to be heard. Instead of ignoring these barriers, we need to overcome them – to rethink them within an interactive culture that can make dialogue and change a top priority.
- Solving tough problems. Public service is tough: it has to deal with political, democratic and social pressures that would make most social media start-ups struggle. We need to think hard about how interactive technology and interactive ways of working play out in the tough cases that the public sector deals in every day.
The Interactive Charter is a project to explore how exactly we go about making government into interactive government. It’s got three parts:
- Creating a pledge – The ‘Interactive Charter’ will be a clear statement that any organization (or senior manager within an organization) can sign up to say something along the lines of “I want my organization to get interactivity; and I’ll commit to overcoming the barriers to interactive ways of working”. With a promise and commitment from the top removing the barriers should get a lot easierOf course to just hand down a pledge wouldn’t be very interactive, so we’re drafting it on Mixed Ink.
- Naming the problems…and overcoming them – We’ve already made a start over on the Interactive Charter wiki, but we would love you to join in suggesting practical challenges, and practical solutions, to interactive and digital working in government.
- Putting it into practice – We want to pilot the approach: getting top-level support, and removing the barriers to interactivity from the ground up. Could your organization be part of that?
So, if you’ve got a vision for more interactive government, you can share it by redrafting the current pledge. And if you’ve faced or solved problems around interactive government, help shape the body of knowledge around each of the barriers and their solutions on the wiki. Of course, you could also just drop in comments over on the Political Innovation blog…
Journalism and accounting seem not to mix at The Daily Mail, which is a significant problem for Mail journalists, as they often like to examine, in the minutest detail, public finance mistakes – and expose those mistakes to general and widespread derision. Just imagine the glee that the Mail would exhibit as it jumped all over a story where the finances were under-budgeted by 30%. Oh, wait… Someone needs to remind the Mail journalists how many days there are in a week.
click for the big picture
Unfortunately, no-brainers aren’t the exclusive domain of the Daily Mail. I pulled this one off the BBC News website. The clipping shows a photograph of possibly the most hated former British Prime Minister since Sir Robert Walpole took up the title, 289 years ago. As if it were some kind of herculean feat, the BBC asks the question: ‘How do you sum up a life story in two words?’, next to Mr Blair’s photograph. Oh, in his case, that’s really easy, ‘War Criminal’.
This man is a vagina, but in colloquial terms (click for the big picture)
Hello Anne’s faithful readers! While she is off on vacation, allegedly roughing it in a tent on cold hard ground, she has asked me to guest blog. Woo hoo!
My name is Brahm, I live in Edmonton, Canada — that is our house above, or a reasonable facsimile. I write at http://www.alfredliveshere.com/, which is named for the adorable Alfred, pictured below…
When Annie asked me to fill in, I wondered what the hell to ramble about. She is British, I am Canadian, what do we have in common besides our blogs, our mischievous dogs, our liberal left leanings, our incredible good looks, our addictions to Barbie’s pink van and crystal meth? Hmmm…
So I have nothing. Then I thought of my visits to the UK, where I loved the history, the architecture, the people, the arts, just everything. Well, everything except the food. The food kinda blew. And worse than the bland boiled battered food, was all the weird food names. What is up with that?
As I love lists in a sick obsessive way, here’s ten winners:
1- Yorkshire Pudding: This is not pudding, people! it is batter. What would Bill Cosby say?
2- Clotted Cream: This name is just wrong, and makes everything sound gross. It is sort of whipped cream that wasn’t whipped, it just sat there. Ick.
3- Fish and Chips: Nothing wrong there, love these. Of course, batter and deep fry anything and you are gonna win. Like Oreos. Or tempura. Or, I heard recently, butter.
4- Bangers: These are sausages, people. Way less exciting than their name.
5- Toad In The Hole: Food name? No. Porn flick name? Yes.
6- Kippers: oily gutted fish… for breakfast?
7- Bread Pudding: Again, NOT PUDDING!
8- Trifle: never had it, may be delicious, makes me think of the Friends episode where Rachel got pages of a cookbook stuck together and baked meat into the trifle. Ick.
9- Butterfly Cakes: Haven’t had these either, are apparently a type of cupcake, how could that be wrong?
10- Spotted Dick: Another tragically bad food name. I mean, really, do people order spotted dick off a menu? Does the waiter giggle?
So there you have it, my superficial, fact-free tourist view of British food. And yes this is coming from Canada, where we put maple syrup on everything, and our closest thing to a national food is poutine. Look it up. It’s soggy and messy and gross.
Have a great vacation Anne!
You lucky lot! Today you are getting a real treat…. this is a guest post written by Ron from the marvellous blog called; “If I had a blog“. Enjoy, and don’t forget to drop by Ron’s blog to say hello!
Well, Anne is away on holidays this week and she asked me to leave a guest post on her blog. I was very flattered and accepted. Anne gave me the keys to let myself in…I KNOW…right? It surprised the heck out of me too?!? She gave me the keys and didn’t even do a background check on me…silly girl! Honestly…it’s a little like asking the patients to run the asylum…but she asked.
So here I am. You know, I’ve been following Anne for some time now, and I’ve never seen her blog from this side. There’s a lot of stuff back here. It’s neat and organized mind you…but maybe I’ll dust while I’m here.
Along with having access to post Anne asked me if I would keep an eye on Naughty George for her as well (in a cyber-babysitting sort of way). Well apparently Naughty George doesn’t do well with separation anxiety and as I write this he is online ordering a large amount of dog toys from what appears to be a very expensive online pet supply site. I can’t believe Anne gave him access to her credit cards…oh well, she won’t be able to return any of it because by the time she gets back NG will have chewed everything…Anne can sort it out later. “George…go with the red diamond laced collar…it goes with your eyes.” Oops…sorry.
I have a proclivity for practical jokes…and this is a perfect opportunity…but first I will give you examples.
I was a partner in a small ad agency years ago and at a time when we were very busy, one of the partners decided to go on holiday. He deserved the time off no doubt, but the timing was [stressful]. In his absence we (the other 3 partners) filled his office from floor to ceiling with Styrofoam packing peanuts and put a “For Lease” on the door. The reaction was obvious. The next time he went on vacation we were in the middle of renovating our offices and upon his return he found that we had his office repainted, all of the furniture updated and it was in pristine condition for his inspection. Seeing that everything was in place, clean, fresh and new…he became suspicious. He asked, “Okay it looks great, but what did you do?” He checked drawers and doors. He checked to be sure that the handset had not been super-glued to the phone, and the chair to be sure it didn’t fall apart when he sat down. Again and nervously he asked, “WHAT DID YOU DO?”
Knowing he was a mild germaphobe, we replied, “Well, we each took turns licking our fingers and touching EVERYTHING in the office!” We hadn’t really done that, but he spent the rest of the afternoon with disinfectant scrubbing his office.
To that end…I invite you all to the party. Let’s cut loose and have fun in Anne’s absence. I’m not sure that I can approve moderated comments, but leave them anyway. Have fun and tell Anne about all of the wild things you did on her blog while she was away. We have hidden things, rearranged things and otherwise wreaked havoc in the name of freedom (lack of supervision) and we will slyly welcome her back seemingly innocent of the scorched path we have left behind. I will try to have things cleaned up before she gets back…but we’ll see.
I’m reasonably sure Anne is going to change the locks when she gets back :)
Shhhhh!
I’m just saying
Posted by Ron Reed from “If I had a Blog“
On Wednesday, the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab announced that I’m their inaugural Geek in Residence:
