Disruptive Conversations

Now here is an awesome gift for the holidays! Any self-hosted WordPress users who use the JetPack plugin can now automatically publicize their posts out to a Google+ account... including to a Google+ page. This is all courtesy of the new Jetpack 2.7 release that happened yesterday.

For quite some time, users of Jetpack (and other similar WordPress plugins) have been able to auto-post out to Twitter and Facebook using the "Publicize" component of Jetpack, but posting to a Google+ page always required you to manually go to G+ to post the link. As a result, it was just yet-another-step that sometimes didn't happen. This was particularly true for scheduled posts that you might arrange to go out at particular times when staff were not available to post the link into Google+. (I've scheduled posts like this any number of times when I'm going to be spending a day traveling on planes.)

This changes with Jetpack 2.7 and puts Google+ on equal footing with other services. Now when you configure "Publicize" within Jetpack you see this screen (shown on my Monadnock Curling Club web site):

You then are asked how you want to connect to Google+ for this WordPress site. You can either connect to your own G+ account or to any of the Google+ Pages for which you are a manager:

You next must approve the permissions and indicate who you want to see your posts:

One final step is to approve whether you want all users of the blog to be able to publicize the post through this Google+ connection:

That's it!

Now all your future posts will be publicized through Google+! I'd note that you do have the option to control on a per-post basis what services your content is auto-posted to. When you are in a post you can see right in the "Publish" box an area for "Publicize" and by clicking on an "Edit" link you can have control over what services get the post automatically and what the message will be:

In a very nice feature I found that you can click "Add New" and go through the process again to connect additional Google+ pages or accounts. Here I've configured posts to this blog to go not only to the Monadnock Curling Club page but also to my personal Google+ account:

All in all a very cool addition to Jetpack! Well worth the upgrade to 2.7 (or the installation of Jetpack if you're not using it yet). Looking forward to now being able to more regularly get my content into Google+.

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As part of my work with the Internet Society on the Deploy360 Programme, I've wound up spending a good chunk of time learning the inner workings of WordPress due to the fact that WordPress powers our Deploy360 site. Given that the main Internet Society site uses Drupal, we wanted our site to look as close as possible to the main site. The Internet Society also has 100 local chapters scattered around the world who also maintain their own websites - and some of them use WordPress as well. The result is that I've spent a good bit of time working on a custom WordPress theme that is available through Github for chapters to use:

https://github.com/internetsociety/isoc-wp

It's been an interesting experience using Github for a WordPress theme. Given my love of the git version control system, Github was a fairly obvious choice for public collaboration, given that I'd been using Github for long before joining the Internet Society (ISOC) in 2011. Perhaps the single biggest advantage of using Github beyond the ease of collaboration has been the issue tracking. We can maintain a list of "issues", be they bugs, enhancements or otherwise, and collaboratively work through those issues. Github does a great job of tying in code commits to issues and lets you easily associate them with milestones. Today's experiment for me was to learn more about Github's "releases" feature and to make the theme available as a formal "release". I documented this in (of course!) an issue for the theme after Github removed the "Downloads" functionality very early this year. My main issue was that for ease of documentation and support I wanted people to install the theme into a folder called isoc-wp on their WordPress server. If they did so they would be able to use some of the examples in the documentation without any modification. The problem is that if you just download the code from Github using the standard download buttons, you get a ZIP file with a directory name with a version number on it, such as isoc-wp-v1.2.0 or isoc-wp-master. This does actually work perfectly fine when uploaded to a WordPress server... but the documentation examples don't work verbatim and need to be modified with the directory name. With the "Releases" functionality, what I can do is separately create a ZIP file that has isoc-wp as the directory name and then upload that ZIP file to Github as part of the release. I've documented my release packaging instructions in the Github wiki for the theme. All in all it's a rather nice way to maintain a WordPress theme and I'm pleased with how it is all working so far!

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P.S. If any of you out there want to help work on this WordPress theme, perhaps as a way of learning more about themes - or about working with Github, you're welcome to join us on Github, even if you have no connection to the Internet Society or an ISOC chapter... best place to start may be to look at the list of open issues and see if there are any you can comment on or contribute to. (You'll need a Github account but those are free.)

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If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• following me on Twitter;
• adding me to a circle on Google+;
• following me on App.net;
• subscribing to my email newsletter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed.

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