Liz Danzico of Happy Cog Studios spoke today about her consulting with Automattic on the design of the WordPress admin interface.

As with so many of the presentation today, I’m really hoping the slides will be published soon, as there are some great ideas coming out.

Liz spent a lot of time watching WordPress users at blog. At work, in cafes, and in their homes with coffee and cigarettes, Liz saw real users of all types doing everything they do with WordPress. The slides show some of the results, but I couldn’t see all the details.

She also spoke of the recent trend in using nouns in user interfaces (again, the slides showed some interesting examples), while WordPress organizes things around verbs (“write” and “manage”). Existing WordPressers responded poorly to a wireframe of a noun-ified admin panel, but I thought it looked kind of interesting (though I can’t say that it would actually be better).

There was more, lots of great ideas, so I’m hoping to see the slides again soon to shake my memory.

Liz Danzico, design, application design, wordpress, WordCamp, WordCamp 2007

Scriblio is based on WordPress, an open source content management system, and the community that uses, supports, and builds it is what makes it great. WordCamp started last year, when the community was about 750,000, and it’s even more important now that it’s grown to nearly two million.

The first day of the schedule focuses on how to better use the software, and included a great session by Lorelle VanFossen. Tomorrow is more technical, with discussions about performance, usability, and development.

What’s it all mean to Scriblio? Part of the Scriblio design philosophy is to make it easy to take advantage of advances in technology and practice that are serving all internet users, not just library users. The community has ramped up the WordPress development and release schedule, by building on top of that we get to spend our time figuring how to use the technology to serve our patrons without having to build a library-specific version of it.

[tags]WordCamp, WordCamp 2007, WordPress[/tags]

I’m at WordCamp again. This time I dragged Matt and Zach with me. Dan Kuykendall, author of PodPress, is first on the schedule, and I’m just now learning how he’s built in support for a variety of media types (more than MP3) and for premium content.

Those who showed up early got to pick over last year’s t-shirts. This year’s shirts are way different, having given up the somewhat cleaner and simpler design of that has characterized WordPress so far. Yeah, I’m complaining about t-shirt design, I can admit there are bigger challenges in the world.

WordCamp, WordPress, conference, WordCamp 2007