 Good afternoon. Happy Word Camp 2018 everyone. My name is Ryan King. You can find me online at all the things at Ryan Can Help You, the Tweet to the Insta's Facebook. You name it. And if you go to RyanCanHelpYou.com, you can find these slides and additional resource links. I am the digital experience designer at the Smithsonian's Free or Sackler Museums of Asian Art. I work both in code and design for both online and in gallery digital projects. And as a quick aside, I met my current supervisor right here at a local WordPress meetup group. So I always like to do a quick side shout out just to attend, support, and learn from your local WordPress meetup groups. Like most organizations, we needed a place for staff to create and share documents, submit work requests, and track projects. We needed something that would be easy to use and quick to go in, find what you were looking for, and move on with your work. So why put in effort into creating an intranet? We have roughly 116 staff members spread among various departments with different information needs and tech abilities. The museum had gone through a rebranding process and developed a new strategic plan. Better and more efficient data sharing was identified as one of the solutions we needed and something that was truly collaborative in nature. It was also ideal timing to examine our internal workflows and consider tools to streamline those processes. We actually already had an intranet, but it wasn't ideal. Built in SharePoint, our old intranet was used mostly for forms and primarily by our finance department. There were some useful resources, but a lot of it was orphaned and overlooked, and few people knew about it. David Zwiegel said it best during his presentation at WordCamp Baltimore in 2016. SharePoint is a place where documents go to die. We investigated existing office self-solutions such as Jira and Basecamp, but while Jira worked well within our digital media department, it has heavily software development focused, and the interface just proved a little too daunting for the majority of our staff who needed just quick access to files and to update work orders. One of our interns, Haley, surveyed staff to establish what they wanted and valued in the ultimate solution, and from her work, we knew we wanted something simple, attractive, and intuitive, which led to our newest incarnation, built-in WordPress, which is more user-friendly than SharePoint, and by rolling out our own solution, we were able to customize a platform built solely on WordPress that is specific to our needs. We are huge advocates of open-source and especially WordPress to power our projects at the Freer Sackler, and we also hold the belief that as a public institution, we should share our code as openly available, and make it as openly available as our collections, and so we started with the prototype and reached out to key stakeholders across the institution to test it at Milestones along the way, which allowed for rapid feedback loop and buy-in, and we held a naming competition staff-wide, also for buy-in, innocence of ownership, and just to have some fun with it, creating a shared identity and also resulted, which resulted in the name Zoku, and was part of our launch party and product rollout to generate energy, curiosity, familiarity, and exposure, weaving the Zoku brand as part of our institutional culture. As mentioned, forms and work orders were an integral part of what we needed. We had forms for design, publications, web, AV, video, social media, et cetera, and we established policies around those workflows in order to cut down on back-and-forth emails and just walking into people hallway requests, and so now we only work on tasks that are officially submitted through the proper channel of Zoku, and we won't begin work until we have all the content. It also helped on the user end to standardize the information our colleagues submitted and served as a checklist to remind them of the types of details and associated media we need to complete certain types of projects, and so with WordPress and conditional form builds, we were able to simplify the work orders to only display the prompts necessary to specific projects. Certain administration builds, such as a sine, are hidden to the end user, and it also creates one central place to group content and attachments along with the work order instead of tracking down things in emails or passed to files on our internal server. Staff were also thrilled with the level of transparency this provided. They could log in any time and track the status of the request or submit edits. It also helps with setting expectations and scope creep. They can see our full workload and it's helpful when discussing timelines so that they can see the other projects we have on our plate beyond their own and can prioritize accordingly. Finally, notifications are another important part of the system. An email notification is the default whenever someone submits a new work order, but if the user selects high priority, we also get pinged in our group Slack channel. So to combat some of the previous issues, we asked departments to appoint a web content liaison to update departmental pages. These content champions or leads were trained on how to edit their sections and we keep them on an email list to send quarterly reminders to update their content. So this contributes again to a sense of ownership and a lot of them had fun creating specialized unique pages showing a real sense of pride for the department and work and we also hosted brown bag demo sessions to roll out Zoku to all staff. And we tried our best as well to pay attention to all the small details and just customizations from even the login page. So because we're a governmental institution, the login had to be locked down and tied into our Microsoft Active Directory through a LDAP plug-in. So that way it's the same login our staff use for emails, et cetera. However, typically on a default WordPress install, you'll have the last lost password link and that allows you to reset it. However, since it's tied to LDAP, we had put in some custom code and created a plug-in so that it directs them now to a help page with the IT number they need to call to reset their password. And as well when you're working with governmental or even certain corporate entities, you always want to be aware of your client's legal specifications so we need privacy policies on all of our pages, et cetera. And as well, we wanted to work with our various departments and users to see what types of information they need to quickly get to. So we have all of our quick links on a drop-down menu and one big part of that as well is all of our new staff onboarding documents and processes are listed there as well. So it serves as kind of a checklist as well of things to get, you know, their ID badge, their computer set up, as well as kind of giving a sense of our organizational culture and putting a face to all the staff. So how do we piece all this together? So far, really it's been... Yeah, so far what we've done is focus on the people part of the equation which I can't overstate how incredibly important that is when setting out to create tools or products for your clients. Now I'll be touching a bit more on the specific WordPress plugins and pieces of the puzzle we pulled together to roll out our custom intranet. These two in particular I use on almost all of my projects. Custom post type UI and advanced custom fields and while as a developer you can definitely hand write all those codes I find it easy and recommend it for a couple of different reasons. Number one it adds a graphical user interface so it's quick and easy as you're kind of iterating and changing things up on the fly. It also allows you to export that code out into your own custom plugin if you wanted to go that route or if you're working on client work for longer term maintenance depending on the client and what kind of access you want. It's kind of nice for them to in the future work with someone to update any of the custom builds they need or post types they need. On top of that I do want to mention there's also a great website generatewp.com that does essentially the same thing and if nothing else it's also kind of a visual checklist of all the items that you need to put together for a custom post type or a custom field and you can use that if you don't want to have additional plugins in your install. Security I mentioned the LDAP login, Active Directory sync but member is another great one for restricting users and giving them unique roles. So our general departmental, as I mentioned each department has a constant liaison so when they log in they'll just see the areas that they need to edit and they don't have either they won't get into the other sections and also it just makes for a cleaner user interface for them. Enable media replace. I also use on the majority of my sites. It's kind of nice so that way if there's a second version of a PDF they can just go in that media file and it just says replace media. They upload the new version and it saves all the links and everything else and that way you don't have many, many versions in your media library. It just kind of copies over the existing one. Now there are WordPress in general is amazing both in terms of the community that we have as well as the high quality plugins and kind of pieces that we can use to build these things out and there's in particular forms just a plethora of really quality forms out there. Ninja forms called DERA forms, Contact Forum 7, WP forms, many, many, many of them. In this particular instance however we decided to go with gravity forms solely because of the vast number of add-ons and integrations that we required but I will mention this is a paid plugin and but even so going into this and a couple of the other paid plugins the cost was another reason we went with WordPress as opposed to off the shelf solution that I mentioned before. It's drastically drastically more cost effective. We do use Asana as a project management tool within our department and so this is nice that any of the forms or work orders that are done on our internet can be fed into Asana. We also as I mentioned try to meet individuals where they are using the tools that they use so we've worked with other contractors that work heavily with Google Forms or other items and so we can also pipe in any of these work order requests into a Google Form or Slack notification. The other great thing with gravity forms is they have a very good ecosystem built around it and so a few screens back when you saw the work orders those were powered by gravity view and there's also gravity flow which can help with notifications and workflow steps along the way and then finally in all projects you should delight your users with kind of unexpected niceties and special touches. One in particular I mentioned is the MIME types. It's great because it automatically will have like a PDF icon or a Word icon next to any linked item and it will also auto-generate the file size for that. Finally in terms of maintenance and upkeep there were three key areas that we really hone in on one being the technical maintenance the other being content and then third being the people side of things. So we definitely keep all of our plugins updated instantly and if we don't we'll hear from our IT central and everything else so that's kind of nice to have that extra check in but always you want to keep plugins up to date you want to test additional integrations to ensure they don't break. In terms of content I mentioned already that we send out an auto quarterly email to our content liaisons to keep the content fresh and updated so it will become a SharePoint graveyard of documents. On the people side of things we continue to have feedback ownership, gentle reminders and nudges and also all staff email just to reiterate and keep in everyone's mind the proper workflows and how to submit job requests. So what's next? Gutenberg, we are looking at what blocks mean in terms of our templates, plugins and widgets and continuing to investigate tighter integrations and workflows. And that's pretty much it. I will be at the happiness bar later if you have any questions so please stop by or reach out to me. I always love hearing input and comments. So thanks, happy work camp.