There is a lot to learn and in this talk given at the WordPress Birmingham (UK) meetup I share what I have learned so far about this.

Slides

Video

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Slides

Video

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Slides

To learn more about writing extensible WordPress code, take a look at the blog post I wrote on the Highrise Digital blog all about WordPress hooks, actions and filters.

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Below you can view the video and the slide deck for the presentation.

Video

Slides

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Filming talks is a great idea and allows attendees to see videos from the alternative tracks available as well as allowing people who could not attend the event to view the talks. However recently it seems to be taking a long time to get things onto WordPress.tv. With that in mind, I set about trying to find a quicker solution that still produced a good quality video and did not cost the earth in terms of hardware and post-production time.

Before I continue with this post, I just want to outline that I am fully aware that all of this is done by volunteers and by no means is this post de-valuing the work they do, rather trying to pose an improved way to make life easier for everyone.

WordCamp Central video equipment

WordCamp Central currently have a suite of cameras and audio equipment for use at WordCamps in the US, Europe or Canada. This is great and involves an HD camera and wireless audio transmitters and receivers. However, this needs to be shipped around the world in order to get to the WordCamps which can be costly and take time.

In addition to this, the video files that come off the cameras can be large and moving large files between computers can be tricky and hence the ease of editing is difficult.

The other difficult thing is that the video/audio files are separate from the screencast of the presenter’s slides. This means you have two video files to merge into one.

My current video/audio setup for recording WordCamp talks

Not only WordCamp talks, but I have used this at local meet-ups too. When trying to come up with this setup I had a few goals in mind. I wanted to keep the price down as much as possible. I also wanted to kit to be portable, so that it could be transported easily in a laptop bag. Finally, it still had to be decent quality.

The idea with my setup was to capture the entire presentation in one piece of software on my laptop, using a video camera and external audio all connected to the laptop. I would also record my screen at the same time.

Below is the final kit that I settled on:

Screenflow

This is a piece of software for Mac, that allows you to record your screen, external audio from a connected Mic and also a feed from a webcam. It also provides pretty good editing facilities too.

Price: $129

The Logitech c920 HD Webcam

Initially, I thought it using the laptop camera however that you mean that the camera would be too close to the subject. Therefore I thought that there would be nothing wrong with an external webcam because Screenflow would still pick this up.

We had already purchased this camera for one of our employees and it worked really well, recording good quality video.

Price: $65

Lavalier Microphone

As the presenter is likely to be stood further away from the laptop during recording (although not a million miles away) an external Mic would ensure better quality audio. I also use a standard 2-metre headphone extension cable so the presenter can be about 2.5 metres from the laptop.

Price: $10

Basic tripod

To make sure the camera is not looking up at the subject, a simple tripod works well and the webcam above is tripod mountable which means it is secure. I also use a standard 3-metre USB extension cable so the camera can be about 3.5 metres from the laptop, which means you get a nice wider shot.

Price: $15

All this kit adds up to less than $220 dollars. In addition to this, and perhaps more importantly in terms of getting videos published quickly is the speed on editing.

I last used this setup at WordCamp Manchester 2019 and I managed to have the video edited in about 30 minutes, the same evening of the WordCamp and uploaded to Youtube within a further 90 minutes.

An additional advantage with using Youtube is the quite superb audio captioning for the videos which are automatic and does not require any work from the video editor. It is also extremely (if not 100%) accurate.

The finished video

The finished video from WordCamp Manchester is below:

Photo credit: Claire Brotherton (@abrightclearweb)

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The previous year I had purchased my first domain name (markdw.co.uk) which I still use for email to this day, but had not got around to actually using it for a website.

Getting into the web through education

At the time I was working as a teacher and a new(ish) initiative landed at my door called eLearning. I was a Geography teacher back then and, as one of the tech-savvy teachers in the school, was tasked with finding a way of getting resources online for students to download and use.

At the time we had a ‘web-guy’ in school however he was tasked with building the school (corporate) website and therefore was not available. Having spoken to him it turned out I needed to learn something called HTML and CSS. This was a Friday afternoon and after he had given me a 30-minute demo on his machine of how to get started I headed home for the weekend armed with a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver.

I returned on Monday with a completed website full of resources having spent most of the weekend working on the site. I was absolutely hooked with building for the web and I guess my life (well my career at least) would take new directions for this point.

This all escalated so that I was building sites for other subjects and before I knew it I had about 6 or 7 websites all in HTML and online – I had even understood the basics of DNS and domains and how to host the sites (no one in schools IT or IT support departments seemed to know) at this point.

This started to pose a problem, as teachers started to like the idea of being able to put their resources online for students to access – it saved them time I guess. I was inundated with requests for changes and additions to the sites and questions which usually started with “Mark, can we do …… [on the website]?”. I loved it as it meant I could go learn something new about building websites to fulfil their needs.

Finding WordPress

However, after a while it became unmanageable and therefore I went on the lookout for something that meant the teachers could manage the content of their own sites.

After some Googling it became clear that what I needed was a CMS – a Content Management System. I can’t, to this day remember how I found WordPress, but I did. It was December 2005, and WordPress was at version 1.5.

The next challenge was actually getting a WordPress site installed. I had hosting, which met the WordPress requirements, but what on earth was MySQL and PHP – I had certainly not heard of these before.

Back then hosts were not as good at giving you 1 click install tools and therefore I had to figure this stuff out for myself. I remember spending an evening trying to figure out how to create a database and find the connection details for the wp-config.php file – seems so easy now looking back! So I headed back to the school web guy for some help. He knew exactly what all that stuff meant and I quickly climbed over another barrier and had a WordPress site installed and running a few hours later.

I then began the tasks of migrating the static Dreamweaver built, HTML sites to WordPress. This helped me learn so much more with WordPress. Like many I am sure, I started learning how to modify the default themes to improve the look and feel and to make them fit better with the brand we had at the time.

Starting freelancing

Having worked on lots of sites at school, and indeed graduating(?) to building the schools own website with WordPress (see above for both iterations I designed and built), I started getting better and better at building sites.

I started freelancing building sites for local businesses. These were just small sizes for hundreds of pounds and no more but I started to understand, figure out and learn what could be done with WordPress.

At the same time, I moved roles in education to subject leader of ICT (weird for a Geography teacher with no qualifications in ICT or Computing but that is another story). I was now starting to teach web design, along with the rest of the curriculum and I loved it.

Outside of education, my freelancing got better and better, with my increased skills and knowledge of WordPress, all self-taught helping to win bigger projects and better clients.

So much so that in 2013 I reached a point where both my teaching and freelancing with WordPress was holding each other back. I needed to break free of one and it was clear which was my real passion. It was a big career change and a leap of faith but I am so glad I finished teaching to freelance with WordPress full-time.

I freelanced solo for a further 2 years, often working with other digital agencies including Pixel Junction and Compass Design as well as other freelancers including Keith Devon. It was a great couple of years and again, as I was able to focus on one thing I got better and better at WordPress development.

Giving back to WordPress

Part of me using WordPress over the years has meant that I have wanted to give back to the open source community that has supported and helped me over the years.

View all my WordPress related talks here.

I do this where I can but some of the ways include speaking at WordCamps and local meetups, as well as helping to organise WordPress Lancaster 2013.

Highrise Digital and the future

In February of 2016, Keith Devon and I, having worked on several projects as freelancers decided to form Highrise Digital Ltd – a WordPress development agency.

We are now a 4 person team and growing.

Thank you, WordPress

WordPress has no undoubtedly changed my life for the better. It has allowed me to work from home, spend more time with the family and have much better work-life balance. Thank you to everyone who contributes to its success.

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With the rise of page builders and ‘block-based’ layouts, and the imminent arrival of Gutenberg – WordPress’ new block-based editor – we needed a solution for transitioning towards this new way of editing content while sticking with the mature and stable technology stack that we know and love.

We, therefore, set out to find another solution and this led to the development of the HD ACF Blocks plugin that we use on most sites today.

This talk introduces the plugin, how we built it, how it works, and how it provides value to our clients and our business.

This talk is aimed at developers who are looking to move towards building sites with blocks. Perhaps those that have looked at Gutenberg and had little success and looking for something different.

You can view the slide deck for this talk below.

Video

The post Transitioning to a block based WordPress editor in a pre-Gutenberg World at WordCamp Manchester appeared first on Mark Wilkinson.

Background and setup

So let us step back a little bit and look a bit more at the setup of the installation. We have a long-term client who has lots of websites that are very similar. They have the same set of themes and plugins and we built them a website to deliver this using WordPress multisite.

I won’t go into the technicalities of the multisite build here for 2 reasons. The first being that I am not allowed to (NDA) and the second is that is is not massively important for this post.

What is important is that when our client wants to create a new site, for one of their clients, they simply add a new site in the WordPress multisite installation. At this point, this site is given a subdomain address. Let’s assume that the whole WordPress installation is at domain.com, a new site would get a URL of newsite.domain.com.

Obviously, clients don’t really want this as their site URL, they want to use their own domain. For that, we use domain mapping.

Mapping domains to a WordPress multisite installation

This assumes that the domain you are mapping is not currently in use.

When we first set up the site, WordPress didn’t (or so we thought at the time) support domain mapping out of the box, therefore we used the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin.

For the sake of this article though, I am going to talk through this without using the domain mapping plugin as WordPress support domain mapping without a plugin.

Step 1 – Change the domain DNS

In order for the site to use the domain, the domain must be pointed to the server where your WordPress multisite installation resides. There are a number of ways to do this:

1. Change the nameservers of your domain, to the nameservers of your server. Most hosting companies will provide you of these when you create your account.
2. Set the A record for domain.com and www.domain.com to point to the IP address of the server where the multisite installation resides
3. Use a flattened CNAME record in order to avoid using IP addresses (see below)

Once the DNS starts to propagate the site will now resolve to the server where you have your WordPress multisite installed. At this point, of course, WordPress is not aware of this domain and neither is your server.

Step 2 – Create a new add-on domain

Different hosts do this differently, but if like me your host is using cPanel you need to navigate to add-on domains and add a new add-on domain for the domain you want to use. What is important here is that the add-on domains document root is set to point at the folder where your WordPress multisite is installed – likely htdocs or  public_html.

What happens then is that the server forwards the requests for that domain onto WordPress and WordPress should deliver you the correct site.

Step 3 – Add your site to WordPress multisite

To add a site click on My Sites > Sites > Add new and complete the details.

Once you have added your site, click on the My Sites > Sites menu item to see a listing of all your sites within your network.

On this listing when you hover over one of the rows, you will see an Edit link. Click this to edit the details of a site. You are then presented with a screen where you can set the address of this site. All you need to do is enter the address of the site in here, using https if you want the site to run over SSL (see below).

Domain mapping using a CNAME without the need for using an IP address

Mapping the domain with methods 1 (changing the domain nameservers) and 2 (pointing the A record to the server IP address) both have their problems.

If you choose to use the nameserver option it means that the server where the WordPress multisite resides is now in charge of all the DNS records for that domain. This means the domain owner no longer has control of those DNS records for adding things like MX and TXT records for example, often needed when setting up email solutions. They would have to ask you to add them each time which could become a pain.

If you choose the method of using the A record, this ties the domain mapping down to a specific IP address. What if the server you are using has issues and you need to move servers? That would have a different IP address and then the domain mapping would break. Also if you wanted to upgrade your server as your multisite instance grows, again the IP may change and that would break things.

Therefore I went about trying to find a solution to this problem and came across one that works really well, and is free!

Using a CNAME instead

Instead of pointing the domain name using A records you can point it using a CNAME record.

Let us assume that your WordPress multisite install resides at domain.com, what you would need to do in this instance is create a DNS A record entry which points to your sites IP address like so:

A    sites.highrise.network    10.11.12.13

Now you can point the domain you want to map (let us assume it is mymappeddomain.com) using a CNAME to that domain name like so:

CNAME      www.mymappeddomain.com   sites.highrise.network

In the above CNAME record note the www in front. This is because you cannot create a CNAME record for the naked domain – that is mymappeddomain.com. Therefore if the client wants both mymappeddomain.com and www.mymappeddomain.com to resolve to their WordPress site, this won’t work.

Therefore we need a way to allow a CNAME (which of course is an alias and points to another domain name) to the top level or naked domain name – is this case mymappeddomain.com

A Flattened CNAME record to the rescue

So I went on the hunt and asked around for whether anyone has solved this problem. This is when I came across the term flattened CNAME on the Cloudflare website.

They allow exactly this – the naked domain can be pointed to another domain, like an alias rather than an IP address. Therefore in Cloudflare we would set this up like this.

Now because your domain points to (in this case) sites.highrise.network, we can always change the IP address of that A record to point to another one and the mapped domain will always reside to the correct place.

A note about SSLs with Let’s Encrypt

If you want to add an SSL certificate (and I urge you too) via the free Let’s Encrypt service, this will only work if your domain resolves to the server IP address which requests the certificate.

This won’t happen unless, in the image above, the two orange clouds are clicked and turned grey. I am not entirely sure what this is doing, but making them grey allows the SSL to be installed. Once installed you can turn them orange again.

You will also notice that Cloudflare offers SSL and caching etc. However I only want it for the DNS, and the great news is, is that the free plan they offer gives us all we need. To just use DNS, make sure you click on the Pause option on the Cloudflare dashboard home screen. This ensures that you only use DNS.

In our multisite scenario, this means that the client who owns the domain can signup for a free Cloudflare account, make these changes and everything should work. It also means they keep control of their DNS so they can add other records as and when they need to.

An added bonus is that the client can even add you as a user to their Cloudflare account so that you can make changes on their behalf!

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Why film the talks

Primarily because I want to be able to place them on our website over at Highrise Digital, or even on this blog so that people can view them there. Any local attendees that could not make the meetup on that date can then look back at them in order to hopefully get something out of them.

Why on at smaller meetups

Well not necessarily but the larger ‘conferences’, notably WordCamps that I have spoken to, more often than not film the talks anyway. However, if I know that is not taking place then I would happily film at larger events too in this way.

The kit I used

First of all the thing that makes this possible (well not possible but a lot easier) is some screen recording software. Most will do what I need, but as I used Screen Flow I am going to mention that here. It enables me to capture a video feed of my presenting screen (my slides), an audio feed from my computer, or in this case a mic connected to my computer and finally a video feed from a webcam. This means I can then stitch these together in an edit to produce the final video.

The Webcam

I opted for the very good quality and fairly inexpensive Logitech C920 HD Pro Webcam. It records a great quality picture in full HD and easily mounts to a tripod.

The Mic

I used will use a simple Lavalier microphone plugged into the headphone port on my MacBook. In my first attempt it didn’t record from this microphone but I think that is because unplugged and plugged in the camera just before I started recording and I think it selected a different microphone from the above camera instead.

Tripod

I use an Amazon Basics tripod which does the trick although it would be good if it was a little higher. However, I can also put it on a table or desk.

The first outcome

The first attempt at this setup us below. As you can hear it did not pick up the correct Mic, but hopefully I can correct that next time and make it better. Maybe some lighting would also help.

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This talk will teach you some of the principles to follow when making your plugins, which will make it easier for you to develop and upgrade your plugin, as well as allowing other developers to make changes in a safer way and keep things secure. Ideal for beginners and intermediate developers in plugin development.

View the slides

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