Speakers
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Jake Rainis 4.54
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nikibrown 4.67
Description:
What the presentation is about We’ve been developing websites in WordPress professionally for several years now and have really been fascinated by the aspect of its use as full-blown content management system. WordPress is obviously a very powerful platform. Throughout our experience, we’ve made many content-managed websites for clients. To us developers, the WP admin interface is very simple and intuitive, particularly considering the amount of trouble that we go through on the back-end to make it behave the way it should. However, we’ve found that a lot of clients that were so gung-ho about having their own self-powered CMS simply weren’t using it. It still wasn’t easy or intuitive enough. Formatting through the WYSIWYG was a pain in the butt. They’d get lost trying to create a new piece of content. They’d add a page, it would break the menu layout. Yes, the site was content managed, but it wasn’t client manageable.
Perhaps you or someone you know has been in a similar situation with a client. It sucks. You’ve done the work you estimated you’ve given the client that deliverable but the client isn’t quite satisfied. So no one wins. In the interest of combating this problem, we’ve found some great plugins and techniques to customize your WordPress site to fit the specific needs of your client and make it feel like THEIR CMS, and an out-of-the-box WordPress install.
Who this presentation is for This presentation isn’t meant to be overly technical and in-depth ‘programmatically’, but rather an overview of what you can do easily to improve client usability or usability for you and your own site. However, even if you’re just a little familiar with WordPress development, this presentation will give you more than enough information to achieve this functionality on your own. We’ll be taking questions afterwards if you have something specific to ask and we’re always available online to help as well, so hit us up!
Slides from the talk can be downloaded here: http://www.slideshare.net/nworbikin/customizing-the-wordpress-admin-interface-for-clients
Links: Website
Comments on this Talk
Thanks for the feedback Sarah!
bostongal1,
25 Jul 10:38 AM
Great content, upbeat presentation.. Good use of humor.
These guys were great. It's all stuff that we mostly don't bother to do and should. It will improve the experience for our clients, the content managers. I understand Sarah's comment about encouraging folks to check out the code, etc. But one of the best things about Niki and Jake was the "validation" for those of us who (like them) are kinda just doing copy and paste, trial and error. We do learn that way and I think it's a good way. But mostly just nice to know the "experts" kinda do it that way too.
@bostongal1 @jimmerd Thanks for the feeback! :)
I was not able to attend this presentation. I spoke to Niki in the Expert Zone later in the day and she was amazingly helpful. She gave me a quick demo using some of the slides from the talk and explained the key points. In these few minutes, we also asked about a feature I was looking for that would compliment the admin interface. She found a plugin on the fly that did just what I needed and then wrote a blog post about to share with all. When I got back to my email, I had a note with all the details on my inbox. It is people like this that make the WordPress community so cool to be a part of. I won't miss a presentation by Niki in the future – regardless of the topic.
byaparentdesign,
26 Jul 03:48 PM
Very energetic speakers whose humor kept things moving. I will be integrating some of their suggestions soon!
@webthisway @byaparentdesign Thanks for the feedback!
Last Five Ratings
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byaparentdesign
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bostongal1
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Ashley Carroll
Lovely presentation and although y'all aren't backend developers, I think you have a great grasp of some of the code.
I hope in the future you encourage folks to check out the code, read it, figure it out/try to break it themselves so you can do less and less with plugins and more and more with your own code because you really understand what's it's doing.
You hit on the point at the end, which was great, but in the middle you kept dismissing that you could or might want to read the code.
Thanks!