Drinks & Open forum afterwards
The monthly SWIG hosted at the Interconnect/it offices is imminent, and on Thursday!
Meeting Location
This meet-up takes place at the interconnect/it offices. The SWIG meeting room is on the first floor of the Liverpool Science Park (meeting room 3, up the stairs to the first floor once you enter the building, through the propped open door and 2 rooms down).
this Meeting’S AGENDA, starting at 6:30pm
- Welcome and Introductions – tell us who you are and what you do, and something cool you learned about WordPress recently like new plugins or themes.
- In depth Q&A – answers to your questions, be it technical or design.
- Drinks at a nearby pub and open forum.
Don’t forget to get in touch if you want to present something at one of our friendly meetings. It doesn’t strictly have to be to do with WordPress so talks on design, copywriting, marketing, case studies or just fun web stuff are all fair game. We’ve had some great talks over summer, and the event just keeps getting better and bigger.
The Aftermath
Ok so a slightly over-dramatic subheading there but now that you’re reading here’s what we discussed and some useful links.
Simon’s (@wpsites) question:
What are some of the ways people go about creating multi-column layouts within the editor?
After some research we found a number of possiblities:
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CSS columns
CSS has a mechanism for making content flow into columns. Sadly the browser support for this is not really good enough to use this for complex layouts that involve more than just text and images. -
Page.ly Multiedit
This free plugin extends the page templates functionality by allowing you to define additional content areas for a page template. In the admin you can then Choose from a set of tabs above the editor which content area you are editing. The only potential downsides are that this plugin only works for pages and the author requests that you keep a credit link on your site. -
PageLines.com
This theme framework might be overkill if all you want is multi column pages however the templating engine is very powerful and extensible through it’s API. The downside is you’re tied into a framework that does almost everything for you so if you know what you’re doing you may find it too limiting. There is a price tag of $197 too although at the time writing there’s a $100 discount on offer. -
ThemeZilla Shortcodes
All ThemeZilla themes come with a set of shortcodes for creating tabbed interfaces, button links and more but importantly here – columns. The interface requires you to understand a grid system so it’s not really a solution for non-technical clients but the design savvy it can work very well. -
Content Columns
As yet unreleased interconnect/it plugin! I demoed this last night and it seemed to go down well. The plugin adds 2 buttons to the editor toolbar, one for column groups and one for column separators. Currently the plugin only generates the markup required so you have to implement the CSS yourself. Hopefully we’ll get it released at Wordcamp!
WordPress Security
This is something that’s probably affected each of us once or twice. Especially if you use shared hosting!
We went around the group to see what approaches we can take to secure WP sites against hacks and exploits. Here’s a list of handy plugins to help:
The favourite appeared to be one of the simpler options that gives you a checklist to work through to make your site secure.
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