On Friday the 28th of February we visited Knowit Jönköping who held #wpbar jönköping. We were there and told about WordCamp Norrköping 2014 which we are the main organisers of and listened to some interesting lectures.
Lidköping municipality’s new website
Robert Lidberg from Duva told us about how they worked on the work of Lidköping municipality’s website, which initially would not be made in WordPress at all. From the beginning, the municipality had a procurement that was extremely narrowly written and tied to the CMS tool SiteVision and its certified suppliers. Many of the requirements that were stated were completely up the wall and Robert simply picked up the phone and called the municipality, and there began the procurement’s journey to becoming something that actually resembled a “real” procurement.
Procurement 2.0
The new procurement instead became a procurement where design & coding could be done by anyone, regardless of whether they worked with SiteVision or not. This resulted in a procurement where a really good design was to be developed and a modern and standard-friendly markup made. The end product would be a nice design with markup that followed WCAG and other W3c standards.
Robert’s company, Duva, won the tender by simply doing the job cheaply and thus being the most competitive choice.
Dramatic turnaround
Once the design and markup had been produced according to the requirements (which were delivered at a higher quality than the requirements specification as they not only used HTML5 but also SVG and Vertical rhythm) and was to be integrated into SiteVision, SiteVision thought that they should dump the markup produced as they could not integrate this code into the SiteVision tool in a good way. It was simply not possible to be at the forefront of SiteVision in the way they wanted according to the new procurement. The supplier did not want to accept this as it would undermine the value of the delivery, and since the job only totalled just over SEK 100,000, they were going to withdraw from the procurement, which meant that it would have to be redone and they would have to do the job again from the beginning.
They called an emergency meeting. How would they solve the problem? Robert and his company suggested solving it all by using WordPress as a tool instead of SiteVision. No sooner said than done, and SiteVision was dumped as a supplier.
The challenges for editors could have been great, but by making various small changes to the tool using both free plugins and their own, the administration interface was adapted for the approximately 100 editors so that they would feel at home. The municipality provided the training within the internal organisation, which was beneficial as this could have been a major effort.
In total, there are 14 plug-ins on the website that have been gone through line by line. 4 of these were written by the organisation itself, as other options were not available or were considered to be of too low quality.
They chose to go above and beyond what they were paid for in this tender, so they spent 300 hours free of charge building a Solr search engine integration which they then integrated into the telephone switchboard. This allows you to see what staff are doing based on what status they have entered in the switchboard. The website therefore knows if the person is on a course, on parental leave or if they are available.
The Solr integration also makes the menu structure dynamic. You simply pick out what people are actually on and what people search for most and set these as menu items. This is done automatically once a quarter. They also tried updating it once a day, but this annoyed visitors rather than helping them.
Now that the municipality has WordPress instead of SiteVision, the money is spent on new development rather than on licence costs as it was before, and it is more active as a client, which provides increased added value for Lidköping’s residents. In total, the project involved 900 man-hours. All code is licensed under GPLv2, but Lidköping is free to decide whether to make the code available to the public or share it with other municipalities.
The job took a total of 9 months to complete and sets the standard for what a modern municipal website should be in 2014.
Case management in WordPress
Olaf Lindström and Linus Svensson from Knowit Jönköping presented what you can do more for fun with WordPress that is not just web. You can use WordPress as an application platform.
Why did they make a case management system in WordPress? A system such as Atlassian Jira is large and good for most people, but the licence system can make it extremely expensive if you are many users, and completely lacks support for external customers. A big advantage was that WordPress is Open Source and you could do exactly what you wanted.
The result was a simple but very nice and professional case management system.