One day we'll do a proper logo

After a month packed with Easter Eggs, DIBI, and giant statues walking around the city, we have an evening of web based discussion. No pagan fertility symbols will be on display, but instead good company and experts on everything including WordPress, DBs and web marketing.

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 1, up the stairs to the first floor once you enter the building, through the propped open door and then first on your right).

Agenda for this Meeting, starting at 6:30pm

1. Welcome and Introductions – tell us who you are and what you do, and something cool you learned recently like new WordPress plugins or themes, CSS Techniques, DBs etc.
2. Talk to be confirmed.
3. Q&A – it’s the usual chance to swap problems and solutions.
4. 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 or the web, 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.

If you’d like to add anything to the agenda – just mention it in the comments. Please use the form below to register (it’s free to attend!) If you can’t make it to a meeting and have booked a ticket please do let us know as numbers are strictly limited and it’s disappointing to have five no-shows on a sold out night.

The Overview page, now shinier than ever

Following on from our initial announcement, I’m happy to announce we have a new version! We’ve listened to feedback and made many improvements. We’re also making expanding the closed beta! One of the points mentioned in feedback was the potential for extending the plugin, examples including Google Analytics traffic widgets on the overview page etc.

The second iteration now comes with more developer documentation explaining how to:

• Add your own events
• Use multiple event logs
• Custom logging outputs
• Custom html for logtable events
• Hook debugging tools

One day we'll do a proper logo

Here we are, in the post-Easter chocolate hangover. W

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 1, up the stairs to the first floor once you enter the building, through the propped open door and then first on your right).

Agenda for this Meeting, starting at 6:30pm

1. 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.
2. Handling Data in WordPress - Damian Gostomski talks about the various ways of storing and handling data in WordPress.
3. Q&A – it’s the usual chance to swap problems and solutions.
4. 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.

If you’d like to add anything to the agenda – just mention it in the comments. Please use the form below to register (it’s free to attend!) If you can’t make it to a meeting and have booked a ticket please do let us know as numbers are strictly limited and it’s disappointing to have five no-shows on a sold out night.

The log viewer offers charts to help you understand the pattern of use on your site. Pretty sweet eh?

The Auditor (name to be finalised) is a plugin that comes in two parts – an event logger that tracks key options and content changes within your WP install, and a viewer that lets you view what’s been happening on your site.

The closed beta for the plugin is strictly limited, and we’re rolling out the tool on our own sites before trying on client installs. Once we know that there are no issues or problems caused by the system we will review the beta feedback and make certain decisions on how and when we will release the final version.

The Auditor is designed for power users and administrators. It produces a wealth of data which is useful for debugging problems on sites caused either by users, XSS attacks and so on. User rights upgrades, password changes and so on are all logged in a searchable index on the database.

Beta testing is now closed.  Those who received the plugin will hear from us in due course with a link to a questionnaire.  We really appreciate those of you offering to test – by doing this we can make better software.

One day we'll do a proper logo

The February SWIG is the post-hangover, post-Christmas gig. The previous SWIG was the amazingly successful bigSWIG, our first ever attempt at running a larger, more important and paid for event. And the one before that was SWIGmas, the Xmas special involving a simply vast amount of blue food colouring.

A Wee Change

One key thing that come out from bigSWIG is that this is no longer a WordPress only event. Although everyone at the event uses WordPress (who doesn’t these days?) the talk was always about a wider range of subjects and, consequently, you can apply the name however you like. SWIG is a community event, so let’s use it to represent what we all do. That means HTML, HTML5, Javascript, server wrangling… So if you think it’s the Liverpool Web Interest Group, that’s what it is. If you think it’s the Superduper Working Interwebs Group, go for it!

SWIG is what you make it, and you make it what you want it to be by turning up and, if possible, helping out. Get in there!

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 1, up the stairs to the first floor once you enter the building, through the propped open door and then first on your right).

Agenda for this Meeting, starting at 6:30pm

1. 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.
2. Online Branding – Rob from interconnect/it has had to explain this process to various clients of late and it’s turned into a presentation we can give to all SWIGgers.
3. A Presentation – Chris Hough of WordPress Bees has a likely second career in public speaking. We don’t yet know what the subject of this month’s talk will be, but he’s giving one. Yay!
4. Q&A – it’s the usual chance to swap problems and solutions.
5. 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.

If you’d like to add anything to the agenda – just mention it in the comments. Please use the form below to register (it’s free to attend!) If you can’t make it to a meeting and have booked a ticket please do let us know as numbers are strictly limited and it’s disappointing to have five no-shows on a sold out night.

In the end there were very nearly 40 people at our first bigSWIG and a lot who are likely to be new regulars at the monthly meetup. This is great for the group and the community. Not only that, but we made a few decisions – such as expanding the official remit of the group to cover items beyond WordPress. Unofficially that was what was happening anyway – we’d had plenty of talks on design and business as well as WP. So although WP will continue to be a big part of the event in future (after all, it’s a big BIG part of the web) you’ll probably see a bit more variety in the range of talks in future.

Presentations

The following presentations have been made available online:

• Chris Hough – Creating a WP Theme Options Panel

Q & A

There were 2 questions from the Q&A so I’ll record the answers here.

1. How can I modify the main blog page to show a custom post type? – Jake Smith

   In the latest version of WordPress this is made a bit easier by being able to pick out and modify the main query. The code to add to your functions.php is below:

2. Is there a way to improve gallery management in the post edit screen of WordPress? – Chris Hough

   I spoke briefly about some plugins that exist to bring the WordPress gallery management into the forefront in a metabox. One possible route to take if you use post formats is to drop in Alex King’s post formats UI addon.

Pictures from the night:

It would have been a shame to waste the ideas we had and the planning we’d done so I got in touch with local artist and teacher Sam Meech who I met at one our SWIG events. Sam had put together the existing Plaza website using an off the shelf theme but it had it had it’s fair share of problems when it came to maintaining film times and organising content.

Background

photograph by Mark McNulty

The Plaza cinema has had a few different owners through the years. When I was little it was an Odeon cinema and being just around the corner from my home it was always where I went to see films throughout my childhood, the first one I remember being The Rescuers, then not long after that I remember being utterly petrified by the ‘giant’ scorpion in Honey I shrunk the Kids!

photograph by Mark McNulty

After a closure and reopening as the Apollo cinema, the old art deco building eventually came under threat of demolition. This did not go over well with the community in Waterloo and the surrounding areas! Happily the cinema was reopened as a charity and is run by its fantastic volunteers so it really does belong to the community. I was only too pleased when Dave gave the nod to spend the time that was booked for FACT to create a new website for the Plaza, a place that was very much a part of my formative years.

Getting Started

We met up with Sam, James and Martin who were the volunteers responsible for managing the website to find out what their thoughts were and to share our ideas. the response was very positive and as it turned out I had (almost) complete freedom to get creating.

There were some branding guidelines and a logo in place developed by students at the John Moores University Art and Design Academy under the guidance of Sam, some photos by Mark McNulty and Michael Sheerin and a plethora of printed material to start from.

AutomatIC for the People

Before I could get too engrossed in designing the website there was one pretty crucial technical aspect that I wanted to address – streamlining the process of gathering data about the films.

I created a plugin to integrate themoviedb.org’s API with WordPress and you can see it in action on this dodgy screen cast Dave put together.

The nice thing is with the approach I took to writing the plugin its functionality can be added to any post type using the built in wordpress method:

add_post_type_support( 'post_type', 'movie' );

That line on its own adds all the custom taxonomies for actors, genres, directors etc… and the meta box for searching the db and populating the post data and gallery.

You can grab the movie db plugin from github.

Recurrence, recurrence, recurrence…

That word starts to look funny written multiple times… This is the technical issue that caused me the most sleep deprivation due to the regularly shifting schedules of the movies. The events management plugin we’ve been developing already had a means of creating repeating events but for movie listings the game changes in a subtly significant way. I had to make it possible for an event to happen multiple times within a single day, but also at different times within the day over the course of the repeating event. For example a film might be on at a fixed time every week day with extra showings on the weekends and one day of the week where it was not on at all.

The events interface showing subdaily times

While the implementation I came up with may not be the best, especially in terms of the data structure the guys were able to get on with the UI without too many problems.

Research

The Plaza has a few unique points that set it apart from the likes of the Odeon and other chain multiplexes. There are midnight screenings for new and classic movies, family screen events, charity or film festival events, film club events, autism and disability friendly screenings as well as community outreach projects.

Autism

Most of the above would be covered by providing a means of categorising the movies however one notable element of the design was that the site would be catering to people on the Autism spectrum. Cue the hive mind! I asked for some advice from my followers about any experience or knowledge they had of design considerations that I should be aware of for the project. I received a slew of very useful tips and links from Paul Timney, Anthony Casey, Andy Chesters and a few others whose tweets I forgot to archive (sorry!).

In summary some of the main considerations to make are:

• Yellow type on black is easier to read (same goes for visually impaired users)
• Avoid having too much on the page – multiple columns or too many boxes of info could lead to confusion
• Spacing of type is crucial, in particular the use of generous leading
• Simple or clear fonts at a slightly larger size than on a normal website
• Consider using PECS symbols (Picture Exchange Communication System) which a lot of people on the autistic spectrum use, often their reading is not too great and PECS is a universal system

Andy got his information from his partner who works at Landgate School in Wigan who specialise in educating young people on the autism spectrum. He went on to ask about the use of movement in web design eg. animated type or images or flashing for example. The response was a little unexpected:

Moving type or animations could actually engage them as long as they’re not too random, complicated or chaotic

Good to know!

So the question is – did I follow all of this advice? Well, no, not all of it. Although people on the autism spectrum make up part of the audience I was still designing for everyone else too (and partly for myself as a punter of the cinema).

I did heed the advice given to me in a few key areas though:

• Plenty of white space
• Use of icons for the main menu items
• Simple and familiar font
• Only 2 columns in the main content areas
• Avoided information overload by leaving out excerpts and sticking to a minimum of content on each page while still having a site that was easy to get around and discover content in
• The site can be linearised and further simplified by reducing the width of the window or browsing on a mobile
• The animations are used when appropriate and are quite subtle (in my opinion of course)

If you want to find out more there is a lot of information to be found on autism.org.uk

ART DECO

image via bikeexif.com

The cinema building is a classic example of art deco architecture as you can see from the photos. Given this heritage I began looking into the art deco style, in particular the vehicle designs of Harley Earl piqued my attention. My favourite find was this 1930 Henderson motorbike (not by Harley Earl) that looks like something out of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

It echoed part of the branding already in place for the plaza in the shape of the horizontal stripes common to art deco design. The polished solid colours influenced the decision to make the header into a band of bright colour rather than to have the movie backdrop behind it as in some early mockups.

A scrapped idea for the home page

Other common features of the art deco style are the geometric arrangements, pleating and fanned lines, I experimented with bringing this detailing in at a few points but none of it felt right. I don’t feel that it’s a huge loss however.

I opted to stick to the simple 3 lines motif in only a handful of places and also mirrored the architecture of the building itself in a more subtle way to carry the design through. The grid I adopted was a 5 column fluid grid. By working from a width of 1000px it was easy to calculate relative percentages for my columns and sub elements. By making the design fluid it meant that it would still work when shrunk down up until the break point where the site becomes linear on an iPad held portrait-way.

Why a 5 column grid? If you look at the photo of the front of the cinema at the beginning of this post there are 5 columns punctuating the facade. I felt this was a perfect way to marry the physical object and its digital representation.

Rounding off

Hopefully you’ve gained some insight in to the approach I took and the considerations behind the end result you see below. Of course I should mention the contributions and suggestions from my colleagues Dave, Tom & James that helped to improve the experience and also the feedback I received from industry peers. Thanks to input and feedback from Jon Grant, Nick Toye, Cole Henley and numerous others (I love twitter!).

After a very iterative design process and many many meetings with Sam to squash bugs and to tidy up and simplify the display of the film times, my first real foray into responsive web design has been well received by the cinema, it’s volunteers and customers. It’s always a good sign when a client has been happily updating their site with very little in the way of support from us after the initial training session.

As for me I’ll never be truly satisfied with anything I do, although the movie times section is damn tasty if I do say so myself!

Tuesday 24th January @ 6.30

SWIG started off as a purely WordPress based community group meeting at the interconnect/it offices.  It’s clearly become something more than just that and is of interest to anybody who works and lives on the web. With speakers on topics as diverse as copywriting and business management as well as the continued WP interest we’ve now decided to run a larger occasional paid ticket event called bigSWIG.

Leaf is a great venue in central Liverpool, with excellent food, alcohol and soft drinks available, making for a convivial and relaxing atmosphere.

Speakers:

• Dan Donald
  Reactive web design – designing for context
• Jake Smith
  WordPress in the wild - megadrive.me
• Lydia Bates
  Writing for the web
• Chris Hough
  Creating a theme options panel

Q&A session

Get the answers to any burning questions you have about web design and WordPress.

Tickets

• £5
• £4 for students

This is the first time we’ve tried to run SWIG as a larger event so please please please spread the word!

One day we'll do a proper logo

SWIGmas is the end of year get together for all SWIGgers – we’ll relax a little, have a drink, and watch some entertaining and thoughtful videos on a range of web and design related subjects. Nothing too heavy, and we’re not planning on anyone giving a talk as we know how hard it is to prepare in the run-up to Xmas.

This month the event is being held on the fifteenth, rather than the normal last Thursday because… well, we all know that an event in the middle of the holidays will be quiet to say the least.

In January we have Dan Donald from Speak the Web presenting on an as yet undisclosed topic so don’t miss it! Tickets for the January BIGSwig will be announced shortly.

Meeting Location

This meet-up takes place at the interconnect/it offices. The SWIG meeting room takes place on the first floor of the Liverpool Science Park (meeting room 1, up the stairs to the first floor once you enter the building, through the propped open door and then first on your right).

Agenda for this Meeting, starting at 6:30pm

1. 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
2. “F*ck You, Pay Me” – The Happy Cog way of dealing with getting paid. Chosen because we can all have these problems.
3. “Can we eat to starve cancer?” – TED talk by William Li, chosen because you never know, a blow-out Xmas dinner could save your life!
4. “Design and Discovery” – TED talk by David Carson
5. Q&A
6. Drinks at a nearby pub and open forum

Don’t forget to get in touch if you want to present something at one of 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.

If you’d like to add anything to the agenda – just mention it in the comments. Please use the form below to register (it’s free to attend!) If you can’t make it to a meeting and have booked a ticket please do let us know as numbers are strictly limited and it’s disappointing to have five no-shows on a sold out night.

The SWIG logo - shall we do one properly yet?

In the run up to SWIGmas we’ve got a great event on this month. We have 2 talks from regulars Matt Pealing and Anthony Casey covering the modern web design techniques and how WordPress can be applied to very specific content management jobs so it promises to be much more interesting than listening to me prattle on!

Next month’s event will be on the 15th to avoid eating into our precious holidays. We’re planning a movie night with a few talks from vimeo and TED with discussion time afterwards, or if it’s by popular demand we can always watch my Helvetica DVD… (you know you want to).

In January we have Dan Donald from Speak the Web presenting on an as yet undisclosed topic so don’t miss it!

Meeting Location

This meet-up takes place at the interconnect/it offices. As those from September’s SWIG remember we can seat more people with a bigger room on the first floor in (meeting room 1, up the stairs once you enter the building, through the door and on your right).

Agenda for this Meeting, starting at 6:30pm

1. 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
2. Quick discussion about ideas and get things arranged for the next month’s event
3. “Responsive Design” – presentation by Anthony Casey
4. “Building a directory website with WordPress” – presentation by Matt Pealing
5. Q&A
6. Drinks at a nearby pub and open forum

Don’t forget to get in touch if you want to present something at one of 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.

If you’d like to add anything to the agenda – just mention it in the comments. Please use the form below to register (it’s free to attend!) If you can’t make it to a meeting and have booked a ticket please do let us know as numbers are strictly limited and we’re always completely sold out of seated places. You can also book in advance for December’s meeting (15th).

Presentations

Won’t Somebody think of the internet connected fridge?

Talk by Anthony Casey