WordPress London Meetup #6

WordPress London Meetup is still a baby, with the first Meetup that took place 9 June 2011. Besides the success in attendance it also had a change in name. Starting out as London WordPress Meetup it is now officially WordPress London Meetup group. Clearly a much needed Meetup group for London locals, I am happy to have attended 3 of them so far. The 6th meetup took place Thursday, 20 October 2011—Publishing with WordPress, hosted by the Telegraph.

How the Telegraph use WordPress

First up was Paul Gibbs, core developer of BuddyPress and web developer at Daily Telegraph. That’s right, Telegraph Blogs is powered by WordPress and MyTelegraph is possibly the largest BuddyPress website in the UK. Paul shared some of the plugins they use for the respective websites.

Telegraph Blog plugins:

• Yoast Breadcrumbs (more information at yoast.com)
• WordPress SEO (also by Yoast, more information here)
• Widget Logic (lets you control on which pages widgets appear)
• Unfiltered HTML (gives blog Administrators and Editors the ability to post whatever HTML they want)
• TMG Open Graph (based on the Open Graph plugin for adding additional metadata to webpages to identify them as “social objects”— modified further by the development team at the Telegraph)
• Blackbird Pie (add embedded HTML representations of actual tweets in your blog posts)

MyTelegraph BuddyPress plugins:

• BuddyPress (a social network in a box—more information at BuddyPress.org)
• BuddyPress Groupblog (extends the group functionality by enabling each group to have a single blog associated with it)
• SSO (single sign-on) Integration
• WP Report Posts (puts a link to each posts and pages to report that particluar post or page)
• Yoast Breadcrumbs (more information at yoast.com)
• Sitewide Tags (creates a new blog on your server for all the posts on your site, much like http://wordpress.com/tags/)
• Blackbird Pie (add embedded HTML representations of actual tweets in your blog posts)

WordPress and Web Accessibility: Why it’s Important

Graham Armfield was on for the second talk of the evening. His presentation covered some issues that disabled and elderly users experience with websites. He shared valuable techniques to improve accessibility and why it makes business sense.

Graham’s presentation, WordPress and Web Accessibility, can be viewed at SlideShare.

Upcoming WordPress London Meetups

Thursday, 17 November 2011: WordPress SEO and Custom Post Types

Wednesday, 7 December 2011: Christmas social!