 Hello, everyone. So as they said, Joe, my wife and business partner who is a co-founder in our startup is here with me and Charlie, of course, just sitting on the floor there. Some of you may not be able to see him. So today I'm here to talk about my disability matters, which is an online community that we have built on top of WordPress using a couple of different solutions that I'll go into our experience with them and what we've decided to come back to. The disability sector, for those who are wondering and why we are targeting that, does make up about 20% of the world's population. Not all with visible disabilities, of course. Some we encompass mental health issues, mental illness, and all other sorts of invisible disabilities as well. So our focus is not just on technical accessibility in terms of being able to use the website, but very much unlike Facebook and Twitter actually enforcing community standards. So not to bully, troll, abuse, and to keep a civil... And not to say that we don't allow dissent and robust discussions and things, but just no personal attacks and to enforce those standards has very much got people to come and join the community. And also loneliness is a very big problem in the disability sector. So that's another reason that we have built the community to help people to get to meet others and to make friends all over the world. Unlike Facebook, which really seeks to expand your network through your current group of friends and out to their friends, we hope to introduce people to completely new friends and new contacts that aren't in their present circle of friends at the moment. So the main issue that led to us actually developing my disability matters is accessibility. And I mean accessibility in the broader sense. Obviously, there's what's known as the WCAG online standards for developing websites. And there's been a new version of them out in only the last month or so, version 2.1. But we are also looking at the usability and the user's experience on the website. Because even though Facebook does employ two or three accessibility people, which in an organisation their size is just really, in my opinion, a token effort, it is the layout of their site with so much content laid out in a confusing manner, ads and different things everywhere on the page. One of the other worst things for accessibility is constantly changing your layout. You may not notice when you look at Facebook if you go there all the time, but I know testing is very important to businesses, but they are constantly changing their layout every few days. And knowing where things are located on a website page is very important for accessibility and just efficient usage of the site so you know where to find things, how to actually navigate around the site. And a very important component of design too is to use techniques that are common across all websites so that people are familiar with your navigation system and layout. So if you're going to do something that is different from other sites, you better have a very good reason for doing so, explain it very carefully and you're going to have much more support on your hands. And as was in the introduction, when you're designing your community and contact forms and blog posting comments on your site in general, I know that you don't want to have too much spam on your site, but using those graphical captures is an absolutely terrible way to go. They're not only bad for people with limited vision, but I know Joe who has to help me fill them out sometimes has to take several goes. They are just not a good user experience for anyone. Google has recently and probably the last nine months or so tried to make them a lot better. Many of you would be familiar with what's called Google recapture, which is now their older method of producing those captures. They now have, and there is a free WordPress plugin to implement it, what's called the invisible recapture. So it operates in the background and it's only if your activity on the site is suspicious and Google thinks you are a robot that it then brings in the capture and actually challenges you. I mean, it still has problems because many false positives, but it is a lot better. And there is, which unfortunately I can't mention at work camp, but there is a brilliant non-GPL solution that we actually use on our sites. It doesn't use captures and for us, it has actually blocked 100% of spam with just no mistakes at all. Occasionally the plugin, if it's accidentally turned off and the spam flows in again and put it back on and nothing coming through. And obviously I won't go heavily into it, but Gutenberg is, when you're looking at your community, do be very mindful and look into accessibility if you're using that to design anything, because it is having quite a few accessibility issues at the moment. I know they will overcome, but they're not going to be overcome by launch in November, so you will need to look into those. And that was actually one of the reasons for us choosing WordPress as our underlying stack for our community was accessibility being open source project and WordPress does have an accessibility team. Then it is being developed very well and BuddyPress and PPSO, the other solution that we have used and still using at the moment, are very responsive to accessibility issues. So that is very good. Oh, and just getting back one thing Joe had mentioned to me earlier, just to explain how I, in particular, use the Internet and what I mean by a screen reader when I say that and accessibility, I actually started using the Internet way back in about 1996 when there was still Windows 95 was the operating system, so we've come a long way since then. Using the Internet back then, there was very basic speech technology that read out what was on the screen. The Internet back then due to speed of the Internet was very simple, mainly text based, so it was actually very easy to use. The software could easily read out websites, no issues at all. As the Internet progressed through Web 2.0, it got much worse for quite a while. The use of Flash in particular, and we're very grateful to Apple and Google for helping get rid of Flash and hopefully soon it will be something that developers never even contemplate using. It is used, unfortunately, a lot more we discovered on our last trip in Europe. Lots of the websites are made with Flash over there, and it is completely inaccessible to screen readers. The software simply cannot read what is on the screen. It's a lot like many PDF documents, if you're using them, then PDF by itself is not actually a text document, it's a graphical representation. So PDF documents do cause a lot of accessibility issues. I personally don't like them on websites. With all the page designers we've got now, lay out your information on a web page, that's what your website is meant for. And the PDFs just cause many issues across devices and for accessibility as well. But yeah, so my software has to know standard HTML make up of the page, it analyzes it, converts it into the format that it can then read out. So it's when you start using nonstandard elements, or perhaps maybe use buttons when you should be using a link on a page or vice versa, then the screen reader can get confused as to what's happening on the page and that in turn causes accessibility issues. And unfortunately, I haven't used Gutenberg too much these days, but the more JavaScript you use on your website, the more problems it normally is. Because it just causes so much processing in the person's browser and software sometimes can't cope with that and know about all the changes on the site. So there are software tools out there that can help you test your website, but I won't go any further into accessibility now, but suffice to say that that was one of the reasons we have used the WordPress solution because it is so adaptable and you can make those accessibility adjustments. So back to our journey and experience with our community, we started with BuddyPress. We have been using WordPress itself since about 2010. So we were familiar with that and when we wanted to create a community, we first of all started with just blog posting and comments on blog posts. But our network, our sector didn't really like that process for building a community. We also looked into and did try a forum. Software BBPress was used. And whilst it works well as a forum again, that is seen by our members and users as very restrictive and more designed to post a question and get answers rather than a social media network like Facebook where you can essentially post just general daily activities and upload photos and all of those sorts of things which really aren't designed well for a forum. Now there are integration plugins for both BuddyPress and PPSO to use forums within your community. We did try that and from our personal experience, I'd highly recommend against it. Our members just found it confusing because you'd have a group for a topic, perhaps for the NDIS and then there'd also be a forum. So people didn't know where to post their comments, where to post their questions. You get people posting in both areas and then the answers were spread out and people didn't see them both. So I think you just really need to choose whether you're going to go down the groups or the forum route. You can turn groups off in both BuddyPress and PPSO. So you could use personal profiles from the social media side and then forums. But we think groups are what people are used to with Facebook. And it's always more difficult to get people to swap and start using something they're not familiar with. So that's why we ended up turning off the forums just using groups and people are much more familiar with that and that has gone much better. Now, as I said, we started with BuddyPress and lasted until we were up to about a thousand members. At that point, we started having many technical issues with hosting and plug-in conflicts, bugs, certain plug-ins and for messaging and chat, simply timing out or not working when trying to use that many members. And in the scheme of things, perhaps if you're just having a community for your business, then I think the solution is going to work well for small numbers. But as we were growing, then we did get problems there because the core component with BuddyPress then needed a lot of extra plug-ins added to it to get the functionality we wanted to customize things, to get the chat and email and inbox messaging that we needed to give to our members. So it was then that we decided we were either going to have to spend a lot of money on customizations and development work, or we became aware of Heapso, a new community project, and they actually had, it has about 30 now, extra integration add-on plug-ins that do things within the community. And the best part is that as they bring out updates to the whole system, then they are testing to make sure it works with all those add-on plug-ins and integration. So you're much more assured that your whole community is not going to break down and you can do your upgrades with much more certainty. With BuddyPress, the plug-ins come from many different developers, and that was the particular problem that they weren't always testing with each other and when there was an update to one it might break another one. So I think with BuddyPress, our experience has been to stick to perhaps a couple of the major BuddyPress clubs that are out there that have plug-ins, some free, some paid, being BuddyDev and BuddyBoss, both have a lot of good work. And then there are some, of course, Boone, who's the lead developer with BuddyPress, has some excellent free plug-ins in the repository as well. So our advice is just to stick to as few different developers as possible. And now we have been going with Peepso up until about three months ago it was performing well, but now we've got up to about 4,800 members. It again, despite using very powerful hosting, it has started having severe performance issues. And that's actually been the one major complaint from our members that the site was too slow or timing out. And simply because we then had some performance testing done and discovered that the way some of the add-ons for Peepso were written, they were not going to be efficient as our community grew. They would require a lot of free coding to work in a better way. And that has led us back to the decision to swap back to BuddyPress, starting in a couple of weeks time when we've got the chance to do the swap over of our site, redesign the pages, etc. Because BuddyPress has come a long way since we stopped using it. One of the major missing factors for BuddyPress when we swapped to Peepso was the moderation capability. BuddyDev only in the last few weeks has brought out a very powerful moderation plug-in to let the community report content, queue it up, have auto content hiding with multiple reports, and all of these features that will make the community much easier to manage. And BuddyPress code itself has been optimised a lot in the last 12 months. So the core component of BuddyPress is working a lot better. We are going to need to still do some custom work and, yeah, that will take some time and money. And being a small starter for ourselves, it just depends on budget and finance. Yeah, so just to expand a little bit on the performance problems in case you're not aware, WordPress itself as a very basic process has to put together, compile each page, each output as it's displayed on the screen. Now with a static site, the way that that's compensated for is either your host or through a plug-in, a caching plug-in, helps store in memory or on disk lots of those components of the page or a whole page to display it much quicker, to not place as much strain on the server and generally then even shared hosting can cope very well. With a community it is essentially a membership site. People have to be able to log in to WordPress to use the community features so that the site knows who's doing what, who's posting what content. And when you're dealing with logged in users and members, most standard WordPress caching methods won't work, which means you need more and more powerful web hosting to cope with the extra processing that's being done to put each page together to display the community activity, to list people's friends, to dig out the comments and likes and everything else from the database. So really you do need to work well with your hosting company. A couple of things we are looking at, talking to one of the very big WordPress development companies called TenUp, who produces the elastic press plug-in that works with Elasticsearch, their looking into now and will be developing that to work with BuddyPress, which will take a fair bit of work, but that will dramatically enhance the performance. You also need to look into things like object caching, whether that's done through Memcached or Redis, I'm not quite sure how you say that one. Just as an example on Kinstra, our hosting, before we turned on the object caching, you know, a page might take 20 seconds to load, turn that on and it was down to three or four seconds, so just way faster just through adding that add-on. Many shared hosts of course can't or won't or aren't set up to let you add that object caching, so that's why you do have to progress to a VPS, some form of dedicated or managed WordPress hosting. And yeah, that's why we're personally at the moment with Google Cloud hosting through Kinstra, and we're looking at moving back to Amazon hosting through Pagely or another company using their technology, just because it's much easier to scale on those cloud platforms. Yes, this slide just covers moving back to BuddyPress, but it looks like I've gone through most of that already. The couple of features there that I hadn't mentioned before and one of the reasons for using WordPress is that we do have a members blog on the community, so we're still using the blogging components of WordPress. Us as site owners and site members can submit blog posts. We have their posts go into a moderation system and we publish them, but that has been working well and you can get some excellent plugins to let you have members submitted posts from front end on your site. One other factor that actually led to us coming back to BuddyPress is wanting to create an app for our community. The way the internet usage is these days, we have had a lot of requests for members for an app, and WordPress is a very good platform and it can actually integrate with some app development tools. One in the community is actually called App Pressure that we are going to be using with BuddyPress. The good part is that that company App Pressure has actually built the integration with BuddyPress so you don't have to do all that work yourself, whereas there is presently no integration with Poopso, which means lots of the community features don't work properly in the app. So these tools essentially run through another theme and some plug-ins on your site that the app calls through API or it's various back-end methods and then the content is all managed through your central WordPress site. So yeah, otherwise to create custom apps is going to cost a lot of money, whereas this way of course all your data stays in sync and people get to use the community. So that's definitely one advantage there of moving back to BuddyPress until Poopso does have it on its road map to create an integration with App Pressure or another system, but that hasn't happened yet. So that is, as I said, another factor. Now the other thing that's technically not part of our Australian law or American system, although it has actually been passed now in California, coming into effect in 15 months time, is the European GDPR General Data Protection Regulation System. It is something though that you need to consider as a community, particularly because Facebook's been going through so much bad publicity with users data, that the European system requires and technically it requires it of any business whether you're European based or not, if you're operating with European customers or members. You have to give access to the data, you have to let them edit it, delete it, download it, and Poopso has developed a full integration for that, so members can actually request all of that access and functions themselves, which is very good. Buddy Press, on the other hand at the moment, is just using WordPress's built-in data privacy tools, which do let you access all the data and export it and delete it, but it has to be initiated by the site admin. So you have to set up a contact form on your site, let a user make a submission, and then you have to go in and manually trigger that process. So that is a downside of Buddy Press at the moment, and there are some major privacy changes coming to WordPress, but unfortunately it now looks like they'll be 5.1 or 5.2. They were possibly happening in 5.0 at the same time, but Gutenberg has taken too much of the development time and I'd have liked to have seen it done the other way around myself. I personally think privacy is way more important than the page designer when there's alternatives out there, but that is coming and there is enough to manage at the moment with better management tools coming. And when dealing with members' data, don't forget that you do have many external systems. For example, we use ConvertKit, you might use Infusionsoft or Aweber, and then your help desk software, perhaps your transactional email system, Cingrid is the one that we use. All of those various third-party tools hold members' data, and you need to also have a way to let customers access, delete, edit, control, all of that. There is, at the end of the slide, and the slides will all be available afterwards, there is now a plugin called Privacy, WP, that actually integrates with many of those third-party services and adds them into the default WordPress GDPR system so that when a person does a download or a delete request, it actually takes care of it in all of those systems for you. So, yes, we have that on the community so that everything is integrated. Just to come back to hosting and to go through our personal experience, in the early days of our online presence, we certainly used a shared web host like many people start with, and that's a very easy solution. But once we started doing community, we've used the code or Kinster as a very well-managed WordPress host. The difference that a quality managed WordPress host makes is that when you're taken care of it yourself, you can get very stressed and have to worry about all those technical issues. Once you have a quality managed host, you really don't have to worry about hosting too much, apart from whether upgrades are required depending on the growth of your community and that sort of thing. So, yes, it does cost more, but you get a lot more power, a lot more features, a lot more safeguards. For example, Jetpack, who's one of the sponsors here, you need to look at backup systems. They have VaultPress, which can do real-time backups of your WordPress installation. Our host Kinster has an add-on for hourly backups, which we do on the community site. Your more static site just daily is fine. And of course, Amazon, you can push your backups onto their storage system and things. And when you're dealing with the community, because one of the features that people want to make use of so much is uploading pictures and files for their friends and sharing all these things that would quickly overload your WordPress hosting account and your database, for that matter, then you do need to look into a solution. We use a plugin called OffloadMedia. Used to be called OffloadS3 that takes all our media libraries, that means all the uploads off onto Amazon S3. They've now added on other storage providers as well if you want more choices, just so that you don't have to overload your hosting and obviously hosting disk space normally is much more expensive. And then you can offload it and use a CDN provider such as Cloudflare or the Amazon's or Google to serve it so that it's again not stressing your server. Yeah, just to mention a couple of plugins that we have found found extremely useful and then some general comments on plugins. There is one called WP Fusion and a brand new one in the last couple of weeks as well called Uncanny Automator that you really should look into with a community or any WordPress site where you do marketing. They can, they essentially act as a bridge between WordPress and your CRM system. So you can tag people for doing certain things on your site. You can enter tags into your CRM and then automatically add them to buddy press groups or do all sorts of things depending on what they do on your site. And yet they wonderful to explore with marketing. The one general comment in terms of plugins that we found with the community as I said before is to make sure you get them from quality providers as usual, make sure they're maintained and updated. And as a personal preference, I prefer paid plugins premium options to free ones. Similarly, because then I know the developer is going to be motivated to maintain and improve those plugins. So you're going to get a better experience to if there's any bugs that come up. But yes, you do have to carefully look at any interaction between your plugins. And now any questions I think we're up to. Oh, yeah, just there is at the end of the slides a list of some of the plugins that we found that were useful with the community.