Part 4: Integrating Google Docs

1. We selected More Actions > Embed. Copy the iframe code.
2. We created a new post on the website, categorized it under "Surveys," then pasted the embed code into the HTML tab of the editor.
3. We used the Members Plugin's options under the Content Permissions panel of the post editor to limit access to Contributor. This way, non-members wouldn't be able to participate in the survey.
4. *Note: if using Google Apps for your domain, you must also de-select "Require mydomain.com sign-in." Otherwise, your form will not display on the plan website.

Logged in members could access the surveys

General members of the public could not participate

Anyone could see, download, and interact with survey results

Conclusion

• Engage citizens online,
• Using low-cost open source tools,
• Yielding open, standardized data

Part 3: Configuring WordPress

1. The latest version of WordPress
2. The TwentyEleven theme, which ships with WordPress as the default
3. Justin Tadlock's brilliant Members plugin to customize permissions
4. The Wiki plugin (lite version) by WPMUdev to make draft plan chapters editable by logged-in members
5. The Lightbox Plus plugin by 23 Systems, to smoothly present multimedia in the site
6. Google Forms and Charts (covered in the next post)

1. Adjust the default theme's appearance and layout (Twenty Eleven)
• We didn't need the large banner header Twenty Eleven ships with, so we removed it by going to Appearance > Header, and clicking the "Remove Header Image" button.
• We liked having the sidebar on the left, so we specified lefthand sidebar under Appearance > Theme Options.
• While Twenty Eleven is a remarkable theme overall, it has at least one quirk. For some reason, its authors decided to only show the sidebar on certain pages. So we Googled "Twenty Eleven sidebar" and found several tutorials for modifying the theme to show the sidebar everywhere. We found a few code snippets and copied / pasted them into the theme using the built in editor under Appearance > Editor.
• We also did not want the comments system showing up on ordinary pages. It would be nice to have the comment system apply to posts only. While we could deselect "allow comments" on every new page we created, we decided to force this setting by removing the snippet that puts comments in pages in the first place. We visited Appearance > Editor then located the file responsible for serving ordinary pages, called page.php. We removed this line:

  comments_template( '', true );

2. Adjust basic settings to tailor the site's behavior
• WordPress core ships with dozens of built-in configurable options out of the box. One is the site "tagline" or description. This is a text string that displays visually in most themes and often displays in the HTML title or meta description, meaning that it also appears on search engines among other places. By default it says "Just another WordPress website." We changed it to something more fitting by going to Settings > General and filling in the Tagline field.
• While still in Settings > General, we also unchecked the "Anyone can register" option. This way, only pre-designated members who we supplied accounts for could sign up to participate in the site. This is the first step in a series of steps we took to turn our site into a publicly visible site which only designated plan members could take part in.
• While still in Settings > General, we concluded by changing "New User Default Role" to contributor. This allowed us to create our member accounts with adequate privileges for engaging with the site's features.
• Under Settings > Discussion, we set the "Users must be registered and logged in to comment" option to true. This way, only authorized plan area members were able to discuss posts.
3. Allow members to edit wiki-style entries
• We wanted to invite members to make contributions to the plan's draft chapters directly. So we went to Plugins > Add New, then searched for the term "wiki" and found a plugin called "wiki" by Incsub. We installed then activated this plugin, which registered an all-new menu section to our admin area, called "Wikis".
• Next, we added the draft chapter seeds for members to edit under Wikis > Add Wiki, one per chapter, and published each once ready.
• To display the editable chapters on the site, we went to Appearance > Widgets and located the Wiki widget. We dragged it to the first sidebar and renamed it "Plan Wiki". This put a list of our editable chapters in the sidebar.
4. Control participation without hiding the site from the public
• Only members should be able to take part in our site surveys, make comments on posts, and edit plan chapters. There are a few ways to do this in WordPress core, but they involve cumbersome and unreliable techniques such as adding passwords to posts. So we achieved exactly what we wanted to do by installing and activating the Members plugin by Justin Tadlock.
• Once activated, the Members plugin added a new submenu under Settings. We visited Settings > Members and chose to enable the login widget. We also replaced the default restricted text with a custom message letting members of the public know that they need to join the Neighborhood Association to participate.
• We went to Appearance > Widgets and dragged the new Members widget to the very top of our first sidebar, this way a prominent login form would be available on every page.
• Now, thanks to Justin's powerful plugin, the editor for every page and post now had a new set of controls. We were then able to keep certain pieces of content completely open, while restricting access to members only on others.
5. Give visitors context and instructions
• To familiarize members of the public as well as designated plan members with how the site works, we created an "About this Site" page with instructions on how to get involved, who can do what, and notes about the overall planning process.
• We also added a page for storing and showcasing plan media, such as images, pdfs and videos. We made this page a child of the "About this Site" page so that it would be easy for people to get to without taking up space on the top level menu.

Part 2. Getting Started

Option A. using your MIT Athena account

1. Call up Athena from any machine connected to the internet. There are many ways to do this. Here's one that assumes you're on a Mac. Open up Terminal.app and type:

   ssh linerva.mit.edu

2. The first time you do this from a non-Athena machine, you'll likely be prompted to add an exception. Enter 'yes', then hit enter.
3. Enter your kerberos password.
4. Type:

   add scripts

5. Type:

   scripts-start

6. Type '2' to select WordPress.
7. Choose your personal locker or a course locker. For the purpose of experimenting and getting to know WordPress, type '1' to select your personal locker. When you're comfortable with how things work you can set up a community engagement site for your course using this same process (although you must have adequate course locker privileges granted from accounts).
8. Specify a subdirectory name.
9. A shell GUI appears. Follow the steps outlined. After entering your desired admin password (which should NOT be the same as your kerberos password), WordPress will set up in under a minute. You're ready to go thanks to all the hard work SIPB and the scripts.mit.edu team put in.

• There are numerous help resources available to you through SIPB and the scripts.mit.edu service. Consult the help docs first if you get stuck. But if you run up against a wall, you should feel free to contact the scripts team. Their email can be found on their website. Better still, you can drop by their headquarters for a dose of one on one help. Just be mindful of their time since they're hard working students like you.
• Your Athena account expires shortly after you graduate. So you should not expect to setup a permanent website in your Athena locker at the generated mit.edu url. However, there are many ways to export whatever you do build there, including export tools built into WordPress.
• On the other hand, a WordPress you install in a course locker can potentially outlive your time at MIT. The contents of a course locker will remain live until someone purges it, but it is not the policy of accounts to systematically purge course lockers. Given the complex nature and vulnerability inherent in interactive web software like WordPress, you should know that what you build might cause headaches for SIPB down the road. While they proactively stay on top of security updates, there is always the chance that an unattended course locker will become the target of spam or even an exploit. To prevent this, you should configure the interactive options carefully (covered herein) but also ask yourself whether the site you build needs to live after the course wraps up. If what you're doing only applies to a single semester, you might consider deactivating it on your own, or at very least buttoning things up by deactivating account registrations and comments.

Option B. using an external web host

Part 1: Overview

1. Learn to engage citizens online,
2. Using low-cost open source tools,
3. Yielding open, standardized data

Logged in (authorized) users were able to take part in the surveys, edit the plan wiki, and make comments.

Unauthenticated users were not allowed to participate.

However, anyone could view the result charts and even download the raw datasets, whether or not they were logged in.

[Neighborhood] sites are valued by officers and elected members as the most useful online channel to listen to and talk to residents, above others such as Facebook and Twitter.

• Neighbourhood websites are valued as the most useful online channel, above others such as Facebook and Twitter, by officers and elected members.
• Those claiming that they are aware of one or more neighbourhood sites in their area increased from 63 per cent in 2010 to 84 per cent for members, and from 55 per cent to 92 per cent among officers responding.
• The proportion of members who perceived local sites to be negative dropped 5 per cent, from 17 per cent a year ago.
• Nonetheless, in 2011 the proportion of members who feel that relationships with sites can be described as ‘co-operative’ is about 50 per cent, compared to two thirds in 2010. Among officers the trend is in the other direction: from 53 per cent in 2010 to 67 per cent this year.
• Some 90 per cent of members feel that they should read and contribute to neighbourhood websites as active participants, compared with 65 per cent in 2010.
• Members and officers recognise a broad range of pro-social and co-productive roles, such as ‘quickly identifying issues of concern for residents’, acting ‘as a link to council online services’ and ‘sharing council news and information on council services and events’.
• Officers and members reported more concern about getting involved in protracted or discordant conversations than in 2010.
• Internal barriers within councils are still constraining their ability to take advantage of neighbourhood websites. These include restrictions on the use of the internet, the lack of council clarity on responsibility for interacting with the sites, and the lack of council guidance.

What's this about?

What's the problem?

Options for managing small government websites

No Content Management System (CMS)

• Hand code all content
• Useful for very small, simple sites
• Impractical at ten or more pages or pages with very rich content

"One-off" CMS

• AKA "roll your own"
• Custom CRUD (and possibly a GUI)
• Made in-house or by contractor
• Useful in very unique situation
• Unwise for most, since there are are abundant existing choices

Language Framework CMS

• Similar to one-off
• Begins with a broadly distributed skeleton system (Rails, Django, CakePHP, CodeIgnitor, etc.)
• Impractical for small governement organizations

Proprietary / Vendor CMS

• Already built, ready to deploy
• Examples include Ektron, Civic Plus, etc.
• Most common solution for now
• Purchased outright or Software as a Service
• Usually solves most all problems out of the box
• Typically extremely costly
• Sometimes slow innovation pace
• High risk of vendor lock-in

Open Source CMS

• Already built, ready to tailor to needs
• Examples include Drupal (most common OS CMS), WordPress, Joomla, Plone, etc.
• Core is usually free, reasonably priced extensions and services
• Avoids vendor lock-in
• Access to very large communities of contributors
• A very wise choice for small and mid-sized government organizations
• Open Source shares government philosophy: of the people, by the people, for the people

But more isn't always better...

So, why WordPress?

• Simpler setup & maintenance = less money spent upfront and ongoing
• Big community = more potential managers in the labor pool
• Less moving parts = less things that can go wrong
• Intuitive workflow = increased productivity
• Platform agnostic = runs anywhere (even IIS!)
• Tons of hooks = integration with other services
• But above all, it’s built for communities!!!
  • powerful threaded commenting engine in core
  • multiuser, multisite out of the box
  • user levels, from superadmin to subscriber
  • dozens of forks & plugins for forums
(bbPress, buddyPress, p2, etc.)

When to consider WordPress for government sites

• Local government websites serving populations up to 50,000
• Special neighborhood and community websites
• Planning sites

Resources for your WordPress government project

• Download core, plugins, themes
: http://wordpress.org
• Extend: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API
• Database of WordPress Hooks (by Adam Brown): 
http://adambrown.info/p/wp_hooks
• Help from advanced users: 
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com

Thank You

It was with a deep sense of awe (and some disbelief) that we recently heard Matt Mullenweg state on the Big Web Show that WordPress drives one in 8 websites. Thinking this impossible, we looked around and found a study that tracks content management systems in use around the web. W3 Tech Surveys tracks what websites use which content management systems. As of January, 2011, just eight years after being released, WordPress now drives 1 in 8 websites, enjoying a 56% market share among all publicly available content management systems. Simply incredible. According to W3 Tech Surveys, this market share continues to grow.

Here's to the wide and wonderful WordPress community. We look forward to the next 8 years of flourishing with you.]]> http://luminopolis.com/technology/wordpress-powers-13-of-all-websites/feed 0