You've got a little Intranet on your shirt

by Daniel Bishop

Slide 1

Slide 1 text

You’ve got a little Intranet on your shirt Daniel Bishop | @bishless or How I built an Intranet site with WordPress

Slide 2

Slide 2 text

Who am I? I’m Daniel Bishop. I have no certifications. I have no degree. I’m an IT guy that built a fully armed and operational battle station Intranet for BFCO with WordPress.

Slide 3

Slide 3 text

Who’s BFCO A great group of people. BeachFleischman PC is one of the largest locally-owned public accounting firms in Arizona. I joined their IT dept. in 2010 as a Network Administrator.

Slide 4

Slide 4 text

What’s an Intranet google:// ‘define intranet’ noun [COMPUTING] “a local or restricted communications network, esp. a private network created using World Wide Web software.”

Slide 5

Slide 5 text

Requirements

Slide 6

Slide 6 text

Historically: ● 1.0 was static HTML (no CSS?!) ● 2.0 was someone’s first attempt at using WordPress. It ended up being a huge mess. Requirements Boss’ boss’ wishlist: ● fresh look/feel ● some personality / less formality ● actually find things! ● blog posts for news and podcasts

Slide 7

Slide 7 text

BFCO Intranet 1.0

Slide 8

Slide 8 text

BFCO Intranet 2.0

Slide 9

Slide 9 text

Solutions

Slide 10

Slide 10 text

2.0: So much disarray ● Couldn’t just slap a new theme on top. ● Page/Post identity crisis ● Required a complete content build-out in order to make sense of it all. Content Reorganization Necessary Evil ● I’m not a tax/audit pro. ● OMG. This sucked. ● Value = people can actually find things!

Slide 11

Slide 11 text

Active Directory / SSO Active Directory Integration by Christoph Steindorff “Allows WordPress to authenticate, authorize, create and update users against Active Directory.”

Slide 12

Slide 12 text

Security Members by Justin Tadlock “A user, role, and content management plugin that makes WordPress a more powerful CMS.”

Slide 13

Slide 13 text

Firm-wide Calendar All-in-One Event Calendar by Time.ly “A calendar system with month, week, day, agenda views; upcoming events widget, color- coded categories, recurrence, and import/export of .ics feeds.”

Slide 14

Slide 14 text

Forms & Workflows Gravity Forms by rocketgenius Game changer for existing info workflows and processes.

Slide 15

Slide 15 text

No content

Slide 16

Slide 16 text

“You’re here for the phone list, right?”

Slide 17

Slide 17 text

Employee Directory* Gravity Forms Directory by Katz Web Services, Inc. Searchable, sortable, up-to-date contact info Bonus! Add New Employee form output generates server scripts we use to create the new employee, their home folder, and mailbox.

Slide 18

Slide 18 text

Documents? default Media ● Great for photos & single-use items ● Can cause a confusion when used for a oft- updating file or group of files. WP Document Revisions by Benjamin J. Balter Used for centralized, revisioned, access- controlled, audit-trailed repository for policies, procedures, guides, and yet- to-be-converted forms.

Slide 19

Slide 19 text

Transparency Post Revision Display by D’Arcy Norman, Scott Carpenter, and forked by me (Had to, was 3 years old and broken) Displays post-publication revisions along with differences/changes from current revision on single post views … on the front end.

Slide 20

Slide 20 text

Fresh look/feel I thought about going the scratch-built route. Opted for something that’d be a good starting point. Ageless by Damojo

Slide 21

Slide 21 text

Personality Less Formal? ● Random/Unexpected header text. ● Content easter eggs

Slide 22

Slide 22 text

Lessons Learned

Slide 23

Slide 23 text

The ‘if only’s Employee Directory Should have just used WP Users + custom meta. Roles Users can only have one role. D’oh! Tools Varying Vagrant Vagrants as your dev environment = winning [FREE!] Grunt.js tasks : build process in your repo [FREE!] Trello : Kanban boards for project/task mgmt [FREE!]