What do Custom Post Types, Accessibility, and Education Have in Common?

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Hello everybody. Welcome to officehoursfm Episode # 60. I am your host Carrie Dils. I am with one..I am trying to figure out…well her name is Rachel Carden. I am trying to figure out how to introduce you. She’s a huge Alabama fan. She has an amazing hair flip technique that we’re going to go over.
Rachel: (laughing) We’ll cover that later.

Carrie: Passionate about education and accessibility. Oh my gosh. We have so many things to talk about today. Before we officially dive in, I wanted to thank our show sponsors. ManageWP your one stop shop for managing all of your WordPress dashboards sites in a single spot. You can learn more about them over at ManageWP.com and wait for it…(sneezes)…it’s a sneeze between these two sponsor reads. It’s like I only have enough breath to do one. I need to do something about that. Anyhow, the second sponsor today is the Utility Pro Theme. Accessible theme for the Genesis Framework. You can learn more about that over at store/carriedils.com. Yes. I sponsored myself. If you have questions today for Rachel you can ask them by tagging them with #officefm on Twitter or using @officehoursfm..Tweet to that on Twitter. If you’re watching them over on Google+ just use the studio hangout And with that. Let’s not waste any more time. Rachel how the heck are you?

Rachel: I’m great. How are you?

Carrie: Doing good. Doing good. In the preshow you did this amazing hair flip and I have to ask…like is that something that you do before you present? Is it just sort of…like ok..I’ve got my lucky socks on; I’ve done my hair flip. Is there significance there?

Rachel: Very much so. It has magical powers. My hair is my lucky charm. It’s big. It’s curly. I have lots of it. It’s poofy. I realize if I give it an extra flip and I do this (flips hair) it just makes everything better.

Carrie: I am so going to make an animated gif out of that and turn it into something. If somebody is listening to this and has that skill set and you can crank that out before the episode is over. You’ll get major bonus points. Sorry. Jackie commented over on Twitter that there are some WIFI issues cutting in and out. I don’t know about that. Ok. So Rachel I first came across you because you have this really awesome plugin called CPT-onomies that basically let’s you marry two post types and treat them like what was a taxnomie. And I reached out to you for support. You were super friendly and helpful and pointed me to the place on your website…beautifully documented. So anyway that was my first encounter with you on the web. I’ve talked to you ever since. Yeah so thanks for taking the time to come on the show today. But tell everybody…give a little introduction to those who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you. Tell us who you are, what you do and maybe even how what you do be on Monday may be different than what do you do today?

Rachel: Well Hi. My name is Rachel Carden. I am what I usually refer to is a higher education web developer. I work at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I’m originally from Alabama. I’ve lived here all my life. I was born and raised in Montgomery Alabama. I came here to school and pretty much have kind of been here every since. This is my third university. I actually started out at a small University in Mississippi called Mississippi University for Women; which is about an hour west of here. And then I moved over to Sanford University which is in Birmingham, Alabama and that’s pretty much where I got started with web in higher ed. At the first University I was just a graphic designer…and so…then I tell people I got called home to Alabama. I started working here in January of 2011. I’ve been here a little over four years. And this job that I will be ending tomorrow…um I will be staying here… is the reason I started in WordPress. Actually, when I was interviewing for the job that was pretty much a job requirement…was to learn and use WordPress. At the time, I had barely touched it; I think I had interacted with like one site I fixed like some kind of blog issue that somebody was having. Other that that I hadn’t used it. At the previous school I was at we used this CMS called Ektron? I don’t know if anyone’s ever heard of it?

Carrie: Ektron?

Rachel: E K T R O N. It was a doosey of a CMS. It actually used ASP.net. I did get to go to a cool conference that they had. It was the Ektron Conference. It was at Orlando, at Universal Studios and it was really nice and all that stuff. At least I got that out of it. So I came there and I took this job and then in about six months I learned WordPress, figured out the multi site, launched a multi site network and then on top of all that redesigned this major web site. And then like seven of it’s “subsites” all in this network in about six months. So that was a crazy ordeal. All by myself. I’m a one man team so I am the designer…I’m the developer put together…I do have help with content at least…so there’s that. I do everything else and so it’s a lot of fun. I’ll say that. It’s a lot of work but it’s a lot of fun.

Carrie: Well you must be very very tired.

Rachel: You have no idea. (laughing) but I love it. I love what I do and I love being a part of Higher d. It’s a whole different world. It’s just one big community. I like to think…I always say I’m part of the WordPress Community and I’m part of the Higher Ed web community. I’m actually at the moment manning a Higher Ed Web Conference here at Alabama on June 29^th and 30th. It’s called Higher Ed Web Alabama. There’s an organization called High Ed Web. It’s a national organization for higher educational web professionals and so we’re hosting a small like regional conference.

Carrie: Cool.

Rachel: Yeah so that’s exciting. So back to all that. I currently work for the college engineering here. I am their web person but tomorrow is my last day and I’m moving to just to a different department on campus starting Monday. I’ll be the web person for our division of student affairs. So the difference being between today, tomorrow and Monday…is not a big difference. I mean in a sense it’s just a different audience. Going from college…an academic college to a student oriented division/department. You know we have lots of programs and stuff like that for students. And so I’m really excited that because basically on my list of my career goals, one of them was just wanting to work more with students. And so that was one of the big things that drove me to this job. So I’m really excited and I start on Monday. But we’re doing…It’s all going to on WordPress.It’s going to be a multisite network, we’re gonna have lots of cool things. I’ve written a lot of functionality that let’s us interact with a lot of stuff of campus. Letting students log in with their school accounts…all this stuff..and so I’m really excited. I am excited to get started. Kind of dive into that world. That world is very different from my college world. (thumbs up)

Carrie: Congratulations from all of the officehoursfm listeners.

Rachel: Thank you.

Carrie: What you just touched on goes hand in hand with a question that was just asked. Are there any uses WordPress at the Higher Ed level that maybe the average person doesn’t thing about. You touched on that with being able to provide a student login. How…ok…my question is too broad so I let you to through them.

Rachel: So. I’ll tell this story. CPT-onomies was born out of a need for the college. So basically I was building this expansive people directory. The college of engineering here has over 250 faculty and staff and so basically we have is essentially on line directories where you can find all people. So you can find them by obviously their name…we wanted to be able to find them by the departments they work for, and maybe even the buildings they work in. We have lots of research centers and so some of the faculty and staff are just like the research centers…you can find them by that. And so I needed this way to make relationships between the people which are a custom post type and then the departments, the buildings, the research centers. I’m redesigning the site right now to have even more custom post types that I’ve added in. So now we have laboratories and we have research areas which I’m excited for that kind of functionality, but that’s a whole other story. So now basically in the new people directory that we hope to launch soon you can find a person by their name, you can find a person by their research area, you can find a person by what research area they work in, what research centers they’re a part of…and so that whole need is what kind of CPT-onomies came from. I wanted this ability to treat these different pieces of content like a taxonomy. There are lots of plug-ins out there that do similar things. You could achieve what I’m doing pretty much with most of them. Relationship post types and stuff like that. But I think maybe at the time there wasn’t really one that acted in this particular manner. That treated it like a taxonomy…that you could use taxonomy functions. So that’s why I built it and try to keep it going.
Carrie: Have you received any sort of pushback that you are using WordPress. Post types are not meant to be related in the way you’re using them or anything like that?

Rachel: No. I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve never received any negative…not really. There’s some problems…like people come across bugs and stuff like that. I try to fix them when I can. Other than just people finding little bugs…I’ve been pretty lucky. I never really…I take that awesomeness lightly.
Carrie: The way you say bugs is amazing. That’s going to be my goal for the rest of the show. Hear you say bugs….

Rachel: Bugs? (laughing) Oh god. Is my southern coming out?

Carrie: I like it when southern comes out to play. So a follow up question around that last on. How do you manage user roles and security?

Rachel: So I am a power user when it comes to user roles. I’m a big fan of Justin Tadlock’s members plugin. I use that like nothing else. Everytime I create a site, I go in and I strip out everyone’s capabilities. And then I pretty much only add…then I only add what they need when they need it. So it’s a little more… maybe a little bit more work than giving e everyone access to everything and having to tame it down. It goes a long way in keeping people from doing things that I don’t want them to do. I create user roles and using that plugin you can great custom user roles. So like… the guy that I work with…he’s the director of PR. So his user role is literally called Director of PR. I can go in and only give him very specific…you know he can do most things… but he doesn’t really know code…stuff like that. He’d rather not have access to something then take the risk of messing it up. Out of all the people, he has the most. Like faculty and stuff if they’re going in, they usually have ones specific purpose. Or one specific thing that they only need to do. So I set them up a user role and only give them one or two of those capabilities. Other tools for that…I pretty much just use the members plugin… that really lets me customizes all the capabilities and user roles. That’s pretty handy. I’ve never really had a problem with it. So I’ve been using it know for the four years. Security wise…um….I use limit login attempts. That seems to cover most of our problems. I will say I’ve been looking recently into maybe using some more…maybe upping the security a little bit…but honestly I’ve used that plug-in and only that plugin on this huge multisite network for 4 1/2 years and I’ve never had a problem.
Carrie: Knock on wood.
Rachel: Yea. (knocks) I mean, with that said, I am constantly like managing the environment and constantly in there looking at things. You know we… there are problems…we had problems on campus with um…security issues and like 99% of the time it’s because this website was built and then ignored. And never updated. And then some person’s come across it and hacked into it because it’s three years old and the plugins haven’t been touched or updated. That’s really….keep it up to date..and keep your plugins upt to date and using reputable plugins. I myself am building probably 70% if not more of more of the code on the network. And so that goes a long way too.

Carrie Does that involve some  Sequel installations in addition to the multi site installs?

Rachel: A couple. We’ve recently started creating some site/environments that needed to be really secure. They were housing really secure information (or at least more secure information) and so we started…because the current web site is not on a secure environment…the new one will be… we started kind of making new ones. Another kind of cool WordPress use that I’ve been working on… which is kind of neat…I’ve been building this access control request system. I imagine that the term is used outside Higher Ed but it’s kind of like..

Carrie: That one’s pretty awesome.

Rachel: (giggling) The basic premise is that if you need access to a door on campus, or an office or a lab, or something like that, you have to request access control and then you get approved and then you obviously get access. On a campus it’s probably a little different than most places in the sense that obviously there are lots of buildings and we don’t really have keys…like we have ID cards for at least the outside doors, so it’s like you can only get access to certain buildings. During the day my building’s open to everyone. I work in the main administration building. But after a certain hour…I don’t know what time it is…maybe 6 or 7, you have to have access with your card. This kind of system is for that. I’ve been building it for the college they have like…I don’t know six or seven buildings? They’re big expensive research buildings. So obviously they have to limit access to the rooms and stuff like that. The way the system works…it’s a WordPress Site…really cool….I’ve been using advanced custom fields to make this complex form environment on the backend. On the front end I’ve been using Gravity Forms. I built this plugin that lets you do single sign on into WordPress with our campus’ authentication system which we call mybama…really mybama is more that. But you have a mybama username and password. That’s pretty much the keys to the kingdom around here. You use that to log into everything.
Carrie: Mybama!
Rachel: Mybama. If anyone’s familiar with Higher Ed you have to have like your banner system. That’s your portal in a sense so that’s what ours is called…mybama. This plugin lets you use your mybama login to login into WordPress which is cool. That way we don’t have to give people forty bajillion logins. So you log into system with that. You fill out this form. It does a lot of crazy things. It’s really cool. I’m proud of it. It’s been a lot of fun to work on. That’s  kind of another extreme use case for Higher Ed.

 

Carrie: Good Grief. Ok. So you’re clearly extremely smart. How did you…you had about a six month period to pick up at least the essentials to get up and running with WordPress in this environment…are you self taught? What classes are you taking? How did you learn all of that?
Rachel: I am self-taught. As far as WordPress is concerned, I mostly did a lot tutorials online and lots of playing around .We had one book in the office that probably read maybe about half of it. I want to say it was the advanced plugin development book? If you said the guy’s name I would remember it. Professional WordPress: Design and Development Brad Williams, David Damstra and Hal Stern (Tweeted after the show). It’s really very popular. They are on like version two or three now.
Carrie: Ugh….I don’t know. I don’t know why that’s not ringing a bell.
Rachel: I could look it up. I probably read a good bit of that to kind of help with some beginning plugin development. Stuff like that. What I churned out in that six months was no where near perfect WordPress setup. You know whatever…but it worked and we got the job done. And then you spend the next bit of time trying to perfect it and make it better. So that’s what been kind of exciting about our redesign right now is that I’ve been able to take all these lessons that I’ve learned over the past four years and I can do it right this time around. There’s some stuff on our current site that is just broken. It’s broken from an admin front end sense that my colleague can’t do…and every time I have to go into the database and just fix it. It’s not worth the time it would take for me to figure out. I’ve got to go in and fix it and you’ve just got to hold on. Hold on until the new site. That thing is broken and it’s not going to be fixed. As far as anything else like programming…I minored in computer science. When I was growing up and kind of getting into high school, I realized I wanted to design. And then closer to college I started playing around with web sites and realized I liked the programming aspect of it. The closest I could get at times to a program was I majored in graphic design and I minored in computer science. So then I taught myself the rest. The internet is awesome. I’m always telling people Google is your best friend. I taught a class last summer to these high schools students. It was a web design class. I pretty much reiterated over and over again that if you don’t know the answer then just Google it. Be as key wordy as possible. Just ask Google and you will find…you will most likely find a tutorial that will help you out. It was awesome. Because at the end of this five session thing. At the start somebody would raise their hand and ask a question and some other kid would be like…just go to Google. I was like yes. I am mostly self taught. I just play around. Trial and error. You know? Like make mistakes and play around and do stuff. It’s funny I do personal training. My trainer was telling me how bored he is. He said when I’m not here, I’m just so bored. I told him he should pick up some kind of hobby or some kind of…what another friend of mine likes to call side hustles…you should find a side hustle to…yes that’s a whole other story…and he gave a Ted talk about it in April…so when the trainer starts talking he tells me in college he took a web design class and he liked it. So I’m telling him you should pick that up. That would be a great thing you could do on the side. You can play around. You can make stuff. You can eventually turn this into a side gig and make money off of it. I was trying to give him tips for how to get started. I was like find a project or a problem or just something you want to exist than just try to make it. The internet is there to help you and you know? There’s no problem in messing up and not doing it right the first time. You can use that trial and error process. That’s the fun part because you’re playing around with all these ideas and these tools. When you see them finally happen you get all geeky and air it out a little bit. That was also the fun part of teaching those high school kids. Once they got their webpage made and it got up and it worked. They played around and could see it changing. They would just get so excited. That was a lot of fun. I would love to do that again.

Carrie: You’ve just set the perfect segway. So thank you for really doing my job for me. So you recently spoke on LoopConf really about that…so…getting your code out there and not being afraid to show it off. Can you share a little bit with officehoursfm listeners?
Rachel: Yeah. That was a great experience. I highly recommend LoopConf. They are going to have it again next year. This was first year. And so I presented… I submitted this idea back in fall of last year. The title of my talk was You are Not Your Code-How to Share Your Work Without Fear. It was a lot about this…basically the base of it was discussing imposter syndrome. I don’t know how many of our listeners kind of know what imposter syndrome is or deal with it. But it is this fear and anxiety that a lot of people…not just developers deal with that they feel like they don’t belong. People feel like they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s that notion of no matter what you do your stuff isn’t good enough.

Carrie: Yeah. Selling yourself way short.

Rachel: Yes. Yes that’s a great way. You’re selling yourself horribly short and almost kind of putting everyone else…you know raising everyone else around you high. Because you think so little of yourself. So I kind of start at the top talking about the fact that sharing code is awesome. And that a lot of us really wouldn’t be here….and really wouldn’t be doing our jobs if it wasn’t for people sharing their code on the Internet. Those were pretty much our only resources for a long time. There were maybe a few classes and stuff like that. You figured things out because you went on line or people blogged about it. You found websites with the code…stuff like that and so that’s how I learned. But for some people, or for a good bit of people sharing your code is easy. Maybe you’re a little doubtful, you read over a few times and then you publish and then you’re good to go. But for a lot of people sharing your code… basically for a lot of people they have real anxiety fears that hold them back from not just sharing their code but putting themselves out there and trying new things or maybe applying for that job or stuff like that and so I talked a lot about that and kind of how to overcome it….some helpful tips. You can find the talk on line at LoopConf.io/talks. They just put that up earlier if you want to go watch it. Some of the big bullet points were don’t take yourself so seriously. You know? Embrace mistakes as a way of learning. All code becomes bad code. Don’t let that hold you back. Be open to criticism as a way of learning but also on the other end everyone should be constructive in their criticism. You know a lot of people are afraid they’re going to put something out there and then someone is going to make fun of it. A lot of us are quick to kind of judge code and we don’t really know what’s going on. We don’t know how old that code is….we don’t know what the situation was…we don’t know what that person was doing…we don’t know. So who are we to just jump on their code and just bash it. You know if you’re not going to say something constructive then what’s the point of saying anything at all? You aren’t helping the situation so there’s a lot of stuff like that and surround yourself with awesome. Surround yourself with people that are going to encourage you…with mentors… with people that will help you grow as a developer. I am trying to think of…there was like two other bullet points. You can go and watch the talk. Let me know what you think.

Carrie: I just Tweeted out the link to that. I love your url. I am not going to say it on the air, but go read that.

Rachel: I just say that. I don’t why that’s the url. I think in my original proposal that maybe I had like a funny subtitle that I didn’t actually intend to use. Like Googling about what people really think about your code kind of thing. I think that might be where it stemmed from? Like I never planned for that to be the public title. (both laugh) Thanks Ryan for the url. Thank Ryan Sullivan for that.
Carrie: Or Rob. I don’t know who’s maintaining that site.

Rachel: I assumed its Ryan. I don’t know. I noticed that earlier when they made their little talks page.

Carrie: Awesome. Awesome stuff. I appreciate the little inspiration hour going on. I do want to say howdy to anyone who’s popping in a little bit late. I want to let everybody know that I am talking with Rachel Carden of the University of Alabama where did that go?

Rachel: Yeah you froze up on me.
Carrie: I was trying to do that little roll tie thing, but I’m not sure exactly how it’s supposed to sound.

Rachel: Just roll tide.
Carrie: OK roll tide. If you have questions you can sent them to #officefm. You can get those in. Sorry for the spotty internet. I even turned my bandwidth down and alas! I’m plagued with technical difficulties. It’s got to be something every week where it’s not quite officehoursfm. But I’m just trying to reflect the reality that is of all of our lives in the office. Nothing goes right all of the time. What’s that?

Rachel: #truths
Carrie: I wanted to shift gears a little bit and share with listeners a conversation…maybe a continuation of the conversation that you and I had recently about accessibility. Can you kind of frame that in the context of being a US University in terms of both your legal obligations and how that plays out in reality?
Rachel: So accessibility is obviously important and very much needed. But in the world of Higher Ed it kind of goes the extra mile because at least most of us in the sense that we are a state-funded organization and so therefore we are required by law to be accessible. I believe we are required to follow the WCAG…I am never sure how to say that acronym. WCAG 2.0 I believe. So it’s obviously even more important to us. It’s interesting on campus because it’s not just Web…there’s lots of accessibility needs that fall outside our jurisdiction. You know being able to get into buildings, stuff like that. But there’s also a general…just general technology accessibility…because it’s not just like for example everyone needing videos… but it’s not just videos on the web… you know it’s videos…like a front end website but it’s also they record lectures. The lectures have to be captioned or else they can’t be shared and so that’s a big I guess power resource…. big need….I don’t know…what term I was trying to think of there. So accessibility, like I said is very important. It’s becoming more and more important here which is awesome. They’re actually working on a technology accessibility plan right now. It’s going through the ropes. I think it might be announced soon to know what all steps they are going to take to help people on campus. That’s all technology, not just web. But it includes us. So that’s really exciting. So basically they went around and talked to everybody. You know what resources to you need. How long do you think it will take? Stuff like that. They put together something and so hopefully that’s going to start rolling out here soon.

Carrie: So the education piece of that has got to be huge. Even asking what resources they’ll need. I am thinking of that from a web perspective, not general technology. But you know if they’re asking what resources you need to make stuff accessible, you may not even know.

Rachel: Yeah. I think a part it will be education. Another big part of it will be just resources. There’s a lot of the one-man teams and a lot of understaffed departments. There are some departments on campus…they don’t even have a web person… much less someone who could handle all the accessibility needs for the website and so that in itself is a huge hurdle to jump over. They’re also working on that too. So resources, education, buy in…buy in is like pretty much the big first step. Some people inherently understand the importance of accessibility but for rest of them you’ve got to like kind of make the case. One of our sessions at Higher Ed Alabama at the end of next month is actually going to be from the person on campus here who is kind of in charge, who is basically taking the helm on accessibility. The title of her session is Carrots and Sticks: Making the Case for Web Accessibility. Which is pretty awesome. She basically is going talk about that you know. Basically talk about how to get buy in and a little bit about what’s the negative side of not being accessible. So once you get buy in you’ve got to have education. You’ve go to have resources. Then you’ve got to implement. Then you’ve got to have testing. That’s a whole other big part of it. You’ve got to make sure it’s valid and it’s working. So I know that they’re looking into some tools that we can use as a campus to kind of help with that. Then once you do all that, you pretty much start over. You keep doing it. (laughing)

Carrie: Round two.

Rachel: Round two. Because it will always be an ongoing need and it’s very important. You have turn over…and people…and so in its ongoing cycle of just making sure everyone understands the importance. Making sure everyone has what they need. Going back to the buy in…it’s also not just a buy in for web developers, designers and web people but you also have to get buy in from their bosses. Because not everyone may have a web boss. I luckily have a boss who’s a web person and understands all this. Not everyone has that so you have to…accessibility as important as is…does still take up some of your time. It is another piece of the web puzzle. Some bosses have to understand that I’m working on this because of this. It’s important. Maybe it’s taking up 20% of my time but it’s an important 20% of my time…so there’s that too. There’s an administration buy in as well as a general web professional.

Carrie: So who ultimately…you’ve been legally handed down to be accessible in various ways…who comes by…are there accessibility police from the government? Like the IRS for accessibility? Or would it only come to light if someone complained that something was not accessible?

Rachel: I don’t know the answer to that. I do know that there have been several big cases or examples where some larger universities have been sued. Sadly it seems that people don’t really seem to do anything until they’ve been sued, which is unfortunate. I’m pretty sure that…I don’t want to say the names because I fear I might get them wrong. I will try to look up some of this stuff and I will share on the # hashtag later. I’m pretty sure there are some articles online. Where some people…where one or two universities….there was a case study…but it was like here’s what happened. But I think in a couple of examples I’m thinking of…. it wasn’t necessarily some kind of organization…it wasn’t like an organization that sued them…it was like an ACLB or something like that on behalf of an individual who had problems. I believe generally that’s sometimes like when someone calls out of university for something then you’re given so much time to fix it. You’ve basically said you need to fix this and you’re given so much time and if you don’t fix it then trouble come’s your way. That’s what I believe generally happens.

Carrie: That’s a big buy in for me. How to not get sued.

Rachel: Honestly that was…yeah…one of the big buy in points. For the people that don’t understand the value of just having accessible website for all their users then you can just kind of wave the legal flag and say well according to the law, you have to do this and if we don’t do it we are going to be sued. That brings in the rest of the pack on board generally.

Carrie: Do you think the government can do a better job of not just saying here’s the requirements but here are some resources to help you to meet those requirements. Other than obviously monetary resources to do the leg work do you feel there is enough information out there? I feel like we are legally required to do this huge task and…

Rachel: Good luck buddy.

Carrie: It’s like the biggest scam. Then turn around and leave. I am kind of playing devil’s advocate here. I don’t know. Hey I think you two have $8 million dollars on my doorstep tomorrow but I don’t tell you how to get $8 million dollars.

Rachel: Thanks. I know that there are fair amount of resources on line but off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you how many of them are government resources. I feel like there are a decent amount of free resources. There’s that Wave tool and stuff like that can help you. Could there be more resources? There could probably always be more resources. I feel like over the next year or so there’s going to be more and more. It’s definitely kind of like picking up steam. People are seeing the importance of it. I Tweeted about it earlier, there’s another great LoopConf presentation that I loved, I loved a lot of them. Corey Ellis gave this great talk about responsive web design. Basically he made the point over and over again that accessibility is responsive web design. He pointed out that responsive web design is so much more than just a screen size. He made that point several times talking about the different benefits. One of his big points was about accessibility and how you’re being accessible to your user is making your web site responsive. I highly recommend watching that talk as well…I listened to it earlier today while I was tinkering around. It’s a great one and he made some other great points. He’s pretty funny too. I forget what the point of me saying all that was but…

Carrie: (laughing) So what I heard was just go listen to all the LoopConf sessions and then some minor chat…something like that. It sounds like it was awesome.
Rachel: It was really great. I heard a lot of really great talks. I recommend Chris’ security talk. That was a big one. There was a great one about debugging that made me nerd out. There were tons of them. The sessions were only 25 minutes. They were knocking them out. There were basically two every hours and it went all day. Like all day two days! So there were lots of amazing talks and the fact that they were all lived streamed and now you can still go in there and watch them that was just….I would highly recommend…I like to play stuff while I work. I like to play stuff in the background so you can still get work done. I highly recommend that. Check them out. It was pretty cool.

Carrie: Awesome. Well let’s ratchet this back down to talking about accessibility sort of at the Higher Ed level. Let’s bring it down to the individual user. Like you and me people who are doing developing or web designing because that’s who most of our listeners are. Do you have any specific tools that you would recommend for managing accessibility with WordPress? What would speak to for folks like me?

Rachel: I will say that…(clicking) something’s making noises…

Carrie: It sounded like Slack.
Rachel: I think it was Slack. I would say there aren’t a whole lot of options for accessibility in WordPress. There are a couple of options to help with WordPress but I wish there were more. I feel like it’s getting there. It’s becoming more important so people are making more accessible themes and stuff like that. But for general plugins…it’s really hard to have a general plugin that’s going to handle all of your accessibility needs because of the extreme variety of themes out there. There is no telling what these themes are doing or using or how they’re writing the code. I feel like it’s pretty much impossible to cover it all. There is a WP accessibility plugin. I’m kind of thinking that this summer that I might to try to work on my own. I am going to try to work on something that will…we kind of talked about it a little bit in our chat a few weeks ago. Just talking about something that at the very least will help you validate. If anyone knows of a tool that already exists…another plugin that I’m not thinking of…please, please share. I was kind of brainstorming ideas for a plugin that could be built that basically just integrated the Wave tool…your admin…(noise)….shutup Slack….quiting Slack…gave you the red light. This page is not being validated or whatever. I might work on something this summer if anybody wants to help me out.
Carrie: That would be awesome! So it’s basically like the Yoast SEO plugin…green light…yellow light…red light…only for accessibility.

Rachel: Yeah exactly. So like the plugin’s like…Whoa Nelli. Hold your horses. This page is not accessible. Here’s what you do to fix it. Or at least this is why it’s failing.

Carrie: You know what would be cool? I’ll let you figure out how to do all this and I’ll just sit out the ideas, but if you could tell it to only look at the entry content. Say you are working on a theme that is not accessible. So every page is going to throw the same 30 errors…or whatever. As a content writer, I can’t do anything about those. That’s my web developer’s problem. So a way to recheck just what I’m doing…because I’m doing all I can as a content producer to make it accessible content. That would be cool.

Rachel: Or if the plugin could like show you what you can edit in the content and then make this handy dandy list that you can mail to your developer. Here dude or woman. Check this out. I’m having some problems. I’m making notes by the way.

Carrie: Amanda Rush just tweeted that there’s an accessibility monitor that uses the Tenant API to help validate. I think that’s another Joe Olson plugin if I remember correctly. Check that one out. I think it’s more for site wide versus individual posted page content but I’m honestly not sure.

Rachel: I’ll have to check that one out.
Carrie: All right. We’ve got about ten minutes left here together. So if you have questions for Rachel covering all kinds of bases about Higher Ed custom post types.

Rachel: What was that? I’m reading over the # hashtag right now.

Carrie: Yeah. #officefm if you want to slip in a question under the wire there. We did have a question earlier from Leonica back on the topic of custom post types. If someone was kind of brand new to the concept of working with post types what would you recommend as a learning resource?

Rachel: Hmmm…good question. It’s been a long time since I’ve kind of figured it out. I know that there’s tons of tutorials. I’m pretty sure Justin Tadlock has a pretty good one. Custom post types can be a little crazy to wrap your head around at first. But then once the light bulb comes on it’s like you realize all the cool stuff you can do with it and how crazy you can get. Like I’m pretty crazy. (laughing)
Carrie: I think you’re right. I think Tadlock does have an older article but if there’s anything else I can think of I will try to post it.

Rachel: I will go and try to find one. There are tons. It’s just weeding out the good ones from the not so great ones. I will find one and I will share it on the hashtag.

Carrie: All right. We have a burning question from Jackie. I’ve got a lot of Genesis fans that listen to this show. Do you use Genesis?

Rachel: I do not. Well I do a little bit of freelance work and I do have one client that uses it. From what I do with them…I’ve made a plugin. I don’t really interact with a theme all that much. I have very little Genesis experience. For our website, I pretty much made our own framework, but it’s built off of foundation which is not a WordPress thing. I used that as the underlying skeleton and then I made my own WordPress framework.

Carrie: That’s inspiring that you just made your own.

Rachel: I made my own. It is a lot easier. I do a lot of…I’m a power hacker I guess you could say. It’s a lot easier in my world to just make my own.

Carrie: Fair enough. We do have a request that you bust out a little roll tie.

Rachel: I will do like the whole shebang. Build up the momentum. Does a roll tide…Roll! Was that good?

Carrie: There was no hair flip.

Rachel: The hair flip is not part of the chant. They should add that in though. There’s plenty of girls.

Carrie: I love that. You were really winding up. Thanks for all of that.
Rachel: All this hair and the southern heat. It might as well be good for something.

Carrie: That’s what I’m crying about. I just keep mine in a perpetual pony tail because I’m too lazy to do much else. Oh well. Another benefit of working from home. Although I do a video podcast so it probably wouldn’t hurt me to do my hair every now and then. Ok. So as we’re wrapping up, do you have any tools? Something publicly available that you haven’t built for yourself that only you can…no I’m just kidding…but something out there that listeners out there might enjoy in terms of either a productivity tool, a developer tool…just something that you’ve fallen in love with recently?

 

Rachel: Um…let’s see…for a developer tool. I’m big into PHP storm. I use that for…and I leaned something at LoopConf about debugging in it which kind of blew my mind and was pretty cool. I am excited to use that. Productivity wise…I’m like hard core on the to do lists. I’m like on this life long search and mission to find like the perfect to do list integration. I’ve yet to find it. I do use Asana but even that’s not perfect. Literally I change every month. Last week I just started going back to the reminders app on my Mac and just using hat because that was the easiest and quickest thing to pull up and use. I will try everything. So if you all can recommend some task management because I’m all about…my brain works in this horrible way in the sense that my short term memory sucks. The second I think of something, I have to write it down. That’s why I’m sitting here making all these notes.

Carrie: Have you tired Todoist?

 

Rachel: I think I maybe tried that out for like a short instance. I will try to go and look at it again. Todoist. I like in Asana that you can send an e-mail and that makes a task. But then it doesn’t remind you. I need serious reminding. It doesn’t remind me enough. It only sends out an e-mail. I get enough e-mails. I don’t need another e-mail.
Carrie: Give Todoist another whirl. Also it integrates with Zapier so you can do some interesting little cross communications. Asana would be on it.
Rachel: I love those integrations and automation stuff. I nerd out about that all the time. I had this recent conversation with this client. We literally spent 30 minutes talking about how we were going to set up this web cam and this automation with her dog and how you could fill out an on line form and like feed the dog and then the video cam…it was crazy.
Carrie: Wow.

Rachel: That stuff is so cool.

 

Carrie: It’s like you’d have to out of your way to find something bazaar to do with those integrations.

Rachel: If you had all kinds of money and time you could do all kinds of crazy stuff. I don’t really have a lot of time or money so…I also am renting a house. So like I don’t want to like do a bunch of stuff in the house. But if I was like a homeowner again…the things that I would have going on in my house. So that stuff is pretty cool. So if you have examples of automation stuff that zapier…if this then that stuff…that’s pretty cool. I also love Slack even though it was annoying the bejesus out of us earlier…slack is pretty cool. I have like ten Slack teams. You can do all kinds of cool integrations into Slack which I love. I would highly recommend slack.
Carrie: You’re cracking me up. Ok. You just gave me an idea. To listeners I give you the challenge. If you’re using either zapier or if this then that. Write in a blog post on one or two of your favorite integrations or uses that you have for that. Go share it on a hashtag and we will get some ideas of how everybody uses those. Make life a little easier or fun like in the case of feeding your dog. Before we close out I do want to say a huge thank you to our sponsors. ManageWP over at Managewp.com. You can try out a free trial. There is a little yellow sign up button in the header. Try them out. You can add any WordPress sites that you want to it and then manage those sites when you see them in dashboard. So running all your updates, database optimization, backups, automated…all that…good stuff. Then also the Utility Pro Theme for the Genesis framework. You can get that through tomorrow with its introductory pricing. Rachel, you are trying to make the entire University accessible all by your lonsome self. You’ve really got things going on and I really appreciate you giving an hour of your time for us today. Please tell folks where they can find you on the web.
Rachel: You can find me on Twitter. I’m on Twitter all the time. @bamadesigner. I’m pretty much bamadesigner everywhere I go. So if you’re not on a social network or a website and you’re looking for me…if I’m on there it’s bamadesigner. I’m on Github. I’m on Instagram even though I don’t really post all that often. So I really wouldn’t go there. Feel free to follow me and interact with me. I love chit chattin and I love sharing all the resources and stuff. People crack me up. So please engage with me. I have a web site bamadesigner.com but right now it’s really just kind of a landing page. My goal is to get a blog up and going but there’s only so many hours in a day. Hopefully within the next few months, we’ll get something up there and going.

 

Carrie: Maybe you can add a plugin that can adds one hour to your day.
Rachel: Oh man…Ideas.

 

Carrie: (Chuckling) Put that on the to do list. All right guys. Thanks to everybody for tuning in. You can catch the replay of this episode over @officehours.fm. You can sign up for reminders or a reminder tweet of the show @officehours.fm/subscribe..which I just found out this week that it went over to a 404. That was hugely embarrassing. We’ll see you next week. Bye!