Steve Harris Stalinism Blog (Oh what a header)

Today I actually gave my first advanced training session on WordPress to a group of five faculty. And I have to say it was a ball. Professors Steve Harris (History), Michael Killian (Biology), Betsy Lewis (Spanish), Andrew Dolby (Biology), and Zach Whalen (English/New Media Studies) were nice enough to remain polite through a kind of abstract session on UMW Blogs as syndicated publishing platform. Because all of these faculty were to some degree familiar with UMW Blogs, and could navigate the application rather well, we went through a few quick questions about uploading and the new interface and then proceeded to focus on how the syndicated logic of a course blog works. Exactly how does WPMu re-publish students work form their own space into a course blog? What kind of setup allows the student to compose and publish their work on their own blog/academic portfolio space yet feed it out easily?.

These are the questions we wrestled with, and I figured I’d blog the details of this setup for other mavericks WordPress users like Professors Sue Fernsebner and Jeff McClurken who will likely be adopting a similar method. So what follows is a tutorial for creating a syndication rich course blog using sitewide tags and FeedWordPress.

Here it is (is that The Roots I hear on the headphones or is it Yo La Tengo?):

For a while now we have been using BDP RSS at UMW Blogs for aggregated course blogs, but with that plugin out of development for a while now, it is time to explore some other aggregating options. The heirs to the spam aggregating plugin WP-Autoblog (long defunct) are WP-O-Matic and FeedWordPress. Given the elegance and simplicity of FeedWordPress it is the republishing aggregator of choice at UMW Blogs these days. What does it do?  Well, quite simply it republishes a post (or several posts) from one blog into another, and provides a series of option to customize the republishing of a feed.

So, take this plugin (which I will go into more detail on below) and marry it with Donncha’s new Sitewide Tags Page plugin, which generates feeds for sitweide tags from a WPMu install. In other words, every time a person uses a shared tag on a post in their own blog, it automatically becomes part of a larger feed for that tag. So, if students for History 101 tag all their posts for this class hist101 in their own blogs, a sitewide feed on that tag will be generated, and it will look like this:

http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/hist101/fee…

So, that url above contain the posts from every student blog tagged with hist101, groovy, right?

OK, so the tag needs to be unique and students need to remember to use, but if those things happen, then this is one single feed for an entire distributed class that could consist of as many as 30 blogs. And this is where the details of FeedWordPress come in handy.  So, we have the feed for all the student blog posts relevant to History 101, all we need to do now is activate the plugin FeedWordPress and do the following:

1. Go to the Syndication tab in your WordPress stall that is created once you activate the plugin and add your sitewide tag feed, and click syndicate.


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2. If the feeds work swell, no errors, then click the syndication button.


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3. After that, go to the Syndication–>Options Subtab and customize the options for your feed (make sure it updates automatically and you consider if you want the permalink to take people back to the student blog, etc.


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4. Categories for syndicated posts do work (attention WPMu über admins: I learned this thanks to the ever wise D’Arcy Norman, you just have to do the Magpie RSS Upgrade included with the plugin). You can have the feed you are syndicated come into its own category or even include the categories the students use in their posts. I still can’t get this plugin to include tags fro the original post, however.


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5. Comments and ping can be enabled or disabled (you may want to disable them if you want people to comment on the student’s own blog (this is where changing the permalink option to original post might be useful). You all can choose the author settings here.

6. After it is customized to your liking, you can then return to the main syndication tab, and check the radio box aligned with this link and click the “Upgrade checked links”  button. And the posts will start a feeding



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If you would like to get a sense of what a course blog like this might look like, take a look at the master course blog wrangler Gardner Campbell’s phenomenal Milton Seminar course taught this summer. I love his design, and he has the permalink going back to the student’s blog, while aggregating all the distibuted comments for all the students blogs in the sidebar. Gardner used FeedWordPress to great effect, and while this blog isn’t feeding off of one sitewide tag feed, there were few enough students so that Gardner could add the students’ feeds manually to the FeedWordPress plugin.

Gardner Campbell’s Attack of the Summer Miltonauts course blog

Now, imagine the sitewide tag feed for Gardner’s blog as just one less step to do, and one giant step towards complete automation. We are getting there people!!! Die BlackBoard die

Cole’s post about providing a selection of feeds to pick from on any given blog that might filter content by category or even provide feeds of your work from other services like del.icio.us, YouTube, Flickr, etc. was particularly intriguing to me. I have seen this done with categories on WordPress, but never using the RSS icon in the address bar. The challenge is to figure out how numerous feeds (not just to your Wordpress categories or comments) be added easily? In real life it requires a hack to the template of the blog header, yet how many people are going to be able willing to hack their theme to do this? So, as Cole suggests, making it easy is the real trick. Well, given that I am using WordPress Multi-User, easy is my middle name, baby! There is a plugin Add RSS that does just this, which gives you fields for three feeds URIs to add to your header from any service you specifify, and if you need more you can hack the plugin (which I have), but I think it could easily be modified to automatically create more feed fields if you need them. You can see it in action on a regular WP 2.3.1 site at the OG bava or on WPMu at fakebava.

Long story short is that it works and it’s easy. Now I have to wrestle with Cole’s other concerns like repositories, which I can’t say I am nearly as excited about.

Related posts on bavatuesdays

• October 5, 2007 — Creating a dynamic frontpage for WPMu (6)
• April 14, 2007 — WP-o-Matic (17)
• February 14, 2007 — The digital five ring binder and much more (4)
• February 12, 2007 — WPMU Hacks for BDP RSS, Optimal, & YouTube (8)
• December 4, 2007 — A List of Plugins for WPMu (5)

Marie and I have been talking about this project for a few months informally, but it wasn’t until early this semester that we sat down for an hour or so and went through the specifics of how she conceptualized the project and what specifically she wanted it to do. Marie specializes in 18th and 19th century British literature and one of her concerns as a professor (please correct me if I am wrong Marie) is the dislocation between the students analysis of the poems of the eighteenth century when simply read silently on the printed page versus an actual reading that exemplifies and models the means through which any given poet of that time is exploring issues of meaning through pronunciation, meter, rhythm, rhyme, etc. The idea was to create a resource that featured a variety of poems from the eighteenth century read in a manner that would give a more compelling sense of some of these poetic elements that may get overlooked when silently read rather than actively listened to.

But these audio poems are not being thought of as static resources in a repository that Marie and i would have to upload. Rather they would come from a variety of different sources already available online in the public domain (through sites like Librivox) that could be brought seamlessly into this site. Additionally, students would have to listen, examine, and rate these various readings. This interactive element of rating the readings would allow poems that are considered superior by users to be featured prominently on the homepage in the sidebar.

The other issues were usability, a space for discussion, an easy way to browse the different poems, and a mechanism whereby students could submit there own readings of poems to the site easily. This was beginning to sound a lot more like a social site than a blog and I started to feel Wordpress slipping away from me, and I was scared Luckily I read numerous edubloggers often, and this post on Bionic Teaching featuring some excellent WordPress tutorials also linked out to this project which helped me imagine how we might approach the Eighteenth-Century Audio site. Never underestimate the power of a distributed network and special thanks go to Tom Woodward for sharing his very cool work. Tom talks about the elements used to create the Byrd Book project in this video tutorial, and I’ll briefly detail a similar process I used in WPMu below.

Creating Eighteenth-Century Audio was in many ways a conceptual rather than a programming issue (particularly because I am not a programmer!). The biggest obstacle with WordPress when creating a site rather than a blog is page navigation. WordPress has no sophisticated mechanism for dealing with navigating between posts and pages, or even pages and pages, making this site in many ways a custom job that, once hacked, makes the actual posting of audio simple.

So what was the hack, it is more like a plguin cheat that I think I will be using again very soon. Here’s how we did it.

There will be no blog!: Imagining Wordpress without a blog
This site has no centralized blog that collects posts, rather there are a series of author pages that aggregate the posts that have audio of that particular author using the category RSS feeds in WordPress. For example, the Robert Burns page is effectively empty, there is no text in it at all. Yet if you go to it you’ll see there is a list of links to various posts that contain audio, a rating bar, and space for comments. How did we do this voodoo, you ask? Simple, we made sure that every post that had a Robert Burns audio file was placed in the category titled “burns” (no quotes). We then used the aggr plugin (a fork of the aggregate plugin) to pull the RSS feed containing all the posts in the category “burns” into this page. This was accomplished with one simple line of code:

And that’s it. For every new author page Marie created, she just took that little piece of code, placed it in the code editor for the new page and changed the category to match the appropriate author. For example, a page with links to Jonathan Swift’s audio poems would have this in the code editor…

A page with links to Aphra Behn’s audio poems would have this in the code editor…

Et cetera.

The genius of this is once you create an author page you don;t ever have to update it again, it is all done through posts and categories making an a new entry to an existing author page a one step process.

After that, everything else is a layup:

Post-Ratings
The ratings are based on Lester Chan’s plugin Post-Ratings (along with the sidebar widget), which is easily integrated into the post template with a quick theme hack accomplished quite easily on WPMu using the capabilities of Userthemes 1.1. The benefit of Userthemes is that once copy to her own directory this is a theme that she can change accordingly and will be the only person with access to it, so that any hacks don’t impact the system theme for all users.

Anarchy Media Player
The actual audio player is the Anarchy Media Player for WPMu which takes any url of any mp3 file openly available online and embeds it a post so that users can access the audio right from the site 9while at the same time including a link to the audio source). This is the real coup in my opinion, for we don;t have to waste time downloading, organizing, and re-uploading audio, we are essentially using this blog to organize audio already online in manner useful for a particular course dealing with a specific set of authors.

That’s it!

However, we still have one larger challenge: allowing any user to sign-up and add an audio file. The adding of audio for pre-existing pages will be easy for UMW students because they can sign-up for a username and add themselves as authors to the sidebar using the Sidebar User Registration plugin for WPMu. Yet, the challenge of how to let users outside of this UMW Blogs community also become authors and upload audio remains tricky with WPMu. I am always up for good suggestions or tips, but for now we have a very basic, but highly functional social site that will allow the professor, class members, and anyone in the UMW community to post an audio file featuring a reading of eighteenth-century poetry to this site. Groovy, no?

Related posts on bavatuesdays

• December 4, 2007 — A List of Plugins for WPMu (5)
• November 4, 2007 — WPMu: Sitewide Tags, Search, and Archive (3)
• October 5, 2007 — Creating a dynamic frontpage for WPMu (6)
• August 12, 2007 — Everyday’s a WPMu day @ bava (4)
• July 19, 2007 — More than one way to skin a class with WPMu (2)

Keep in mind that this is an insane list that most universities and other WPMu administrators might find horrifying. It’s not my fault, I just haven’t been fully reined in yet In other words, you may not want to try all these plugins at home, and I have noted the one’s to watch out for.

Finally, if you are using plugins not listed here I would love to know about them in the comments, UMW Blogs is always on the lookout for additional functionality and their is no better way than through your recommendations, so please don’t be shy and share the love, hippies!

Mu-Plugins

Here is a list of the site wide mu-plugins we are using currently with a brief description about each and an asterik ( * ) next to the one’s I find essential and a dagger ( † ) next to the mu-pugins I got from the WPMuDev Premium service.

User Themes 1.1*
Adds the ability for system administrators to move themes to users file folders, allowing them to edit their themes.This feature is managed via Site Admin. Practical uses for me as site admin: my blogs-including the home-all have different user themes so no user can choose these themes. I am able to hack these themes without harm to the original “system theme”. Userthemes do not appear in the normal list of themes, they only show up in the user’s Presentation tab. If a particular user wants to customize (read hack) a theme more extensively, you can upload it to their blogs.dir/blog_id/themes folder and only they will be able to see/edit/activate it. Warning: enabling the theme editor is a huge risk/responsibility. This plugin does not magically enable it.

WPMu Sitewide Feed*
This plugin generates three RSS 2.0 feeds comprising of posts, comments, and pages across all blogs on your WPMU powered site.

Anarchy Media Player*
Anarchy Media Player 2.0 for WordPressMu will play any simple href link to mp3, flv, Quicktime mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp as well as Windows wmv, avi and asf files, in the appropriate player on your web page. Links can be added via Rich Text Editor (’A’ for anarchy) button and also includes buttons for embedding Flash swf and Director dcr movies as well as YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, DailyMotion, Revver, Metacafe, MySpace, Atomfilms, Break.com, Apple iTunes iMix, and GoEar players. Version 2.0 includes admin options page for per blog settings as well as config.php for sitewide defaults. Note: This plugin is not working with all the video services listed above, specifically we have had issues with Revver, Metacafe, and iFilm.

Sidebar Author Registration*
Adds a sidebar widget for users to auto-register as authors. Drop in mu-plugins. Then add the widget to sidebar.

Mass Mailer
This plugin allows you to send a mass email to your users.

More Privacy Options*
Adds a three more levels of privacy to the Options–>Privacy page. Drop into mu-plugins. 1. Blog visible to any logged in community member. 2. Blog visible only to registered users of blog. 3. Blog visible only to administrators.

List All Widgets*
Adds sidebar widgets to let you display new/ updated/ active blogs from WordPressMU. Download from the topmost link.

Widget Box Widgets
This widget allows users to use up to 9 Widgetbox widgets in their sidebars… just drop it into mu-plugins and watch as your blogs start to become populated with Tetris, PacMan, radio stations and glittertext

Change Blog URL*
This plugin allows blog user to change their blog URL from existing one (subject to availability). The admin page can be access at Option->Publishing. Note: user’s should be made aware that this will change their RSS feed accordingly.

WPMU User Comment Tracking and Display*
This plugin will keep track of which blogposts a user comments on and store them as usermeta. It adds a page which users this tracked information to show the last 3 comments written on the blogposts a user has commented on. It also has a function which can be used on the dashboard etc which just lists the blog post title, blog name and number of comments on the users latest commented blog posts.

List All Blogs
Lists all blogs on a WPMU site. Simply place list-all.php in your mu-plugins directory and then you can call the list from any page. Read the instructions located within the zip file for configuration options. Additionally, this plugin no longer displays any blog marked as spam, mature, archived, or deleted.

List All Posts
This Plugin allows you to place a list of the latest posts wherever you wish. Read the instructions located within the zip file.

Firestats for WPMu
FireStats is a comprehensive statistics package with support for various systems (WordPress, WordPress MU, trac, Drupal, Jumla and more). FireStats installation into WPMU is really simple, and it creates a single set of tables for the entire WPMU site, which are shared by all the blogs. Each user get their own statistics view in the dashboard, and the site administrator gets a complete administrative view, that enable him/her to administer FireStats. Note: users have the option to activate this plugin on a blog-by-blog basis.

Plugin Manager*
Manage global plugin policies or just turn on and off plugins for individual blogs.

WPMu Avatar Pack Release*
Users will be able to navigate to their Profile page and upload their own photo. The photo will appear next to their comments across your WPMU site, and, if they use my Author Profile Enhanced widget, in their sidebar next to their “About Me” text. For a demo see http://suleiman.hadithuna.com. Note: the new Gravatar plugin may also be a possibility here, but we haven’t tested this yet.

Blog Activity †
Collects data on how many blogs were updated in the past “hour”, “day”, and “month”. Also displays how many posts and comments were made over the last “hour”, “day”, and “month”.

User Activity †
Collects user activity data and makes it available via a tab under the Site Admin. This plugin also allows you to display the number of users currently online anywhere on your main blog (or any other blog).

Admin Message * †
This is a simple plugin that makes it easier to place a message in the admin panels that all users will see. Extremely useful for communicating with users about updates, new features, etc.

Friends †
Adds the ability for users to add other blogs as friends and display friends in the sidebar via a widget. Includes friends approval/rejection and email notifications. Please note that this plugin requires the “Avatar” plugin. Note: I have been very underwhelmed by this feature and it requires a core hack which is never good for a plugin that doesn’t really add much.

Primary Blog Switcher †
Places a drop down on the profile page to allow a user to select their primary blog. Very useful if you have numerous blogs on a WPMu system and want you default login to be one other than the first blog you created.

Invite †
This plugin allows users to send invitations to friends and colleagues. Users can include a personal message along with the invitation.

User-Activated Plugins

Here is a list of the plugins that users can activate and use according to their own needs. None of these are essential save perhaps Spam karma 2, our spam blocker of choice.

Advanced WYSIWYG Editor
Adds more styling options to the WYSIWYG post editor in your blog. This feature allows you a host of editing options for your visual text editor in the write post of write page areas of your blog.

Aggr
Allows you to place the contents of an RSS feed into your posts.

BBpress Latest Discussions
Puts the latest discussions on the UMW Blogs Forums (a bbpress forum) on your blogs sidebar.

BDP RSS Aggregator
New and Improved RSS Aggregator - collate RSS feeds and summarise to a page - updates regularly without the need for cron. This is an extremely powerful and a bit complex plugin. Read more about this plugin on the developers site here.

BDP RSS Aggregator Widgets
Generate sidebar widgets for the RSS Aggregator. This plugin will only work when activated in associate with the BDP RSS plugin, described above.

Code Markup
A filter that displays code blocks nicely while still allowing formatting. This is primarily for folks who will be displaying a lot of code in their blog post in order to explain certain procedures, ideas, etc.

Dagon Design Form Mailer
The WordPress plugin version of my secure php form mailer script.

Daiko’s Video Widget
Adds a sidebar widget to display random videos of your own choice. You can mix Google and YouTube videos.

Firestats
Statistics plugin for WordPress.

Flickr Photo Gallery
This plugin will retrieve your Flickr photos and allow you to easily add your photos to your posts. Note: this plugin does currently have a bug which make the upload section of write post or page disappear!

flickrRSS
Allows you to integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site. Read more about this plugin on the developers site here.

Last.fm widget
Adds a sidebar widget to show your last.fm widget.

Netflix
Displays info from your Netflix account. This includes text and images via RSS feed. Read more about this plugin on the developers site here.

Netflix Widget
Adds an Automattic, Inc. Sidebar Widget wrapper for Albert Banks’ Netflix plugin. Read more about this plugin on the developers site here.

podPress
The podPress pluggin gives you everything you need in one easy plugin to use WordPress for Podcasting. Read more about this plugin on the developers site here. Note: I know folks have got this plugin working with WPMu, but I am still having problems, anyone have any tips for this?

Sidebar Author Registration
Adds a sidebar widget for users to auto-register as authors. Drop in mu-plugins. Then add the widget to sidebar.

Simple Forum
Page-based forum that is created right within a user’s blog. An amazing tool if you are into forums that is just about as powerful as any other forum application I have seen. Moreover, the support community is quite amazing!

SimplePie for Wordpress
Wordpress plugin for SimplePie: a super-fast, easy-to-use RSS and Atom parser. Read more about this plugin on the developers site here. Note: As of now, this plugin will only be functional is a user can edit their theme.

Spam Karma 2
Ultimate Spam Killer for WordPress. Activate the plugin and go to Options>> Spam Karma 2 to configure. Read more about this plugin on the developers site here.

Subscribe To Comments
Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

The Author Description Widget
Adds a sidebar widget to display The Author Description that is in the User–>Profile tab. Read more about this plugin on the developers site here. This plugin/widget is bundled with the WPMU Avatar Pack Release.

Top Level Categories
Removes the prefix from the URL for a category. For instance, if your old category link was /category/catname it will now be /catname

WordPress.com Stats
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

Wordpress Database Backup
On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Works brilliantly with WPMu allowing users to back up just their work from the shared database. Love that!

Wordpress Heat Map
Template tags for a heat map of category links and archive links. Read more about this plugin on the developers site here. This may eventually prove unneccessary with WPMu 1.3’s tagging features.

Wordpress Mobile Edition
Show a mobile view of the post/page if the visitor is on a known mobile device. Read more about this plugin on the developers site here. (There is an accompanying theme file that goes with this.)

wordTube
This plugin creates your personal YouTube plugin for wordpress. It finally works with the file structure in WPMu and I think this is a total coup. It is kinda like having a bitchin’ media center in your very own WordPress blog.

WP-Autoblog
Given RSS Feeds, automatically makes posts to your blog. The development of this plugin has unfortunately been discontinued, but you can still get a version at http://wpmudev.org

WP-Contact
Adds a contact form to your sidebar.

WP-Cron
This plugin automates chron jobs from within WP. usefule for certain plugins.

WP-o-Matic
Enables administrators to create posts automatically from RSS/Atom feeds.

WP-PostRatings
Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page. This plugin needs a theme hack to work.

WP-PostRatings Widget
Adds a PostRatings Widget to display most rated and/or highest rated posts and/or pages on your sidebar. (Note: You will need to activate WP-PostRatings first.)

wpLicense
Allows selection of a Creative Commons license for blog content.

WPMu Themes

As an additionl note, There is really only one option and it is free!:
Farms Bumper Theme Pack

Related posts on bavatuesdays

• October 5, 2007 — Creating a dynamic frontpage for WPMu (6)
• August 12, 2007 — Everyday’s a WPMu day @ bava (4)
• July 19, 2007 — More than one way to skin a class with WPMu (2)
• May 4, 2007 — WordPress: power and simplicity (9)
• April 17, 2007 — Exploring a few WPMU plugins (4)

There are a host of features, a couple I particularly like are the following:

• It integrates seamlessly with a WordPress theme as a separate page, so if you have class site and want a powerful forum in your blog here is an excellent option
• It has advanced permissions to control who can post and/or see the forum
• It can integrate with the blog it is installed on you more in-depth conversations about bog post can carry over to a forum –very cool!
• It automatically integrates users from the blog, allowing all registered users to post without an additional sign-up
• It has a simple spam blocking feature built in
• It has RSS and e-mail subscriptions for individual topic as well as the entire forum -wow!
• It allows for avatars, and can grab gravatars as well
• An admin interface in the WP backend that is simple and intuitive
• The forum itself is highly customizable with a series of skins to boot
• Best of all, the developer Andy Staines is still tirelessly supporting users and working on integrating their feedback into the future builds–he is pretty remarkable

And did I mention that this is a plugin!!! A fact that truly amazes me given all the functionality and seamless integration at work here.

That said, there is one simple hack you need to do to get it to work with WPMu, and here it is:

You need to edit the following lines on sf-includes.php file in the plugin so that WPMu can recognize the users:

Change:
define(’SFUSERS’, $wpdb->prefix.’users’);
define(’SFUSERMETA’, $wpdb->prefix.’usermeta’);

To this:
define(’SFUSERS’, ‘wp_users’);
define(’SFUSERMETA’, ‘wp_usermeta’);

This is not be offered as a sitewide feature for all sites on UMW Blogs, but rather as an option for users on a site-by-site basis as a plugin they can activate.

There is one issue of WPMu that makes this plugin a bit difficult that I haven’t entirely gotten my head around yet, and maybe someone out there has figured it out. In the Simple Foums Options (under the Manage tab in the WP backend) their is the ability to “Show Login/Logout/Register if allowed:” I couldn’t check this option, and I realized it is because you can’t allow users who have not signed-up for a blog or username in a WPMu environment to to register for specific blogs independently. They must first have a username at the minimum. Not too big an issue, but since I am running multiple domains I need to find a way to allow any user to sign-up for an account yet keep it distinct from UMW Blogs, hmmm…I have to think on this more though–any ideas or experience with this out there?

Related posts on bavatuesdays

• October 5, 2007 — Creating a dynamic frontpage for WPMu (6)
• September 10, 2007 — WPMu plugin patrol (7)
• November 18, 2007 — Multiple Domains on WPMu: Mission Accomplished! (0)
• November 10, 2007 — Customize the WPMu Dashboard (3)
• November 5, 2007 — OneClick Installer Plugin Screencast Tutorial (0)

I had blogged earlier this semester about the potential possibilities available to UMW if we were to pursue mapping multiple domains to one WordPress Multi-User installation–one install, one upgrade, one point of failure–the last one is a quote from Jerry :). It is something people had been working out on the WPMu forums and, as usual, Dr. Mike came up with the hack that was ultimately turned into a tutorial here and then, to make things even easier, a plugin here.

So, having all of these unbelievable resources I gave it a whirl. I discovered a few things that may be useful:

1. First and foremost, you need a really cool hosting service that is willing to work with you (or you need your own server). Why? Well, CPanel cannot necessary take care of everything you need to do here. You need to park the add-on domain and point it to your existing WPMu installation (easy enough). However, you then have to create another Virtual Host for the new domain that has its own dynamic dns (I’m quickly getting out of my depth so let me use exmple from two people who know what they are talking about.

   Luke, from the premium.wpmudev.org forums offered me a nice conceptual overview of how this needs to be accomplished (thanks Luke!).

   In Apache’s configuration file, you should either have 2 virtual hosts (one for each domain) that point to the same file path (where mu is installed), or you should have added more domains to the ServerAlias directive in the vhost for the primary domain so that it looked like:

   ServerAlias domain1.tld *.domain1.tld www.domain2.tld domain2.tld *.domain2.tld

   Also note that you would still need to create the wildcard DNS, which “may” take a day or two to propagate and become available. It shouldn’t take that long, but it might depending on several factors.

   As long as the dns points to the server, then apache points it to the right file path, MU will take care of the rest.

   And for those of you who understand Apache (which I don’t enirely) here is the code we used for our WPMu installation with multiple domains:

   ServerAlias www.umwblogs.org *.umwblogs.org
   ServerAdmin  webmaster at umwblogs.org />
   DocumentRoot /home/umwblogs/public_html
   ServerName umwblogs.org
   ServerAlias wpmued.org www.wpmued.org
   ServerAlias *.wpmued.org
   User umwblogs
   Group umwblogs
   BytesLog /usr/local/apache/domlogs/umwblogs.org-bytes_log
   CustomLog /usr/local/apache/domlogs/umwblogs.org combined
   ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /home/umwblogs/public_html/cgi-bin/

   This worked and was by far the most difficult part of the process because it is not exactly something you can do on your own if you are on a hosted web server, and it really requires an administrator who is willing to work with you, lucky we have the coolest guy in town with Zach Davis of Cast Iron Coding–thanks again Zach!

2. The Multi-Site Manager plugin works extremely well, but there is at least one thing you have to do in the database to make it work successfully–see #3. Once you have created a blog with your new domain name (for example the domain wpmued.org would have the correlating blog on the existing WPMu install: wpmued.umwblogs.org) and added the plugin to your mu-plugins folder you will see a “Sites” subtab within the Site Admin tab. When you click on the “Sites” subtab you will see the following fields where you need to enter the appropriate information:
   1. “Site Name” (what to call your site)
   2. the “Domain” field will have the URL of the domain you have parked and pointed to the existing WPMu installation
   3. The “path” field where you need to enter a single forward slash “/” (no quotes)

   After this, map your new domain.

   

   There is also another feature for this plugin that allows you to clone your existing installation–very useful! Keep in mind, however, that the site-admins table does not clone and we are going to have to go in to the database and create this for ourselves. Next stop is the WPMu database, but not the new domain ID number (mine above is 683) before you proceed to the database (it will save you some time and effort).

3. Creating the site-admins in the WPMu database is the final step and this is where Richard’s tutorial came in quite useful. You have to have access to a PHPmyadmin to do what he outlines in steps 26 through 30, but if you follow these steps to create the site_admins table you will then be able to see the Site Admin tab and effectively administer your mapped domain. After that, you can change the settings for all the particular options such as illegal domains, allowed file types, etc. from the Site Admin–>Options tab.

Related posts on bavatuesdays

• November 5, 2007 — OneClick Installer Plugin Screencast Tutorial (0)
• November 1, 2007 — The Era of a One-Click WordPress (3)
• November 18, 2007 — Simple Forums Plugin for WPMu (0)
• October 5, 2007 — Creating a dynamic frontpage for WPMu (6)
• February 12, 2007 — WPMU Hacks for BDP RSS, Optimal, & YouTube (8)
]]> http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2007/11/18/multiple-domains-on-wpmu-mission-accomplished/feed/ http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2007/11/04/wpmu-sitewide-tags-search-and-archive/ http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2007/11/04/wpmu-sitewide-tags-search-and-archive/#comments Mon, 05 Nov 2007 02:45:15 +0000 http://bavatuesdays.com/wpmu-sitewide-tags-search-and-archive/ Sitewide tags was one of the elements of UMW Blogs I spent a bit of time working on this past Summer. In fact, one particular workaround allows you to have a sitewide tag cloud as well as sitewide searching of blog posts, and a dynamic archive of posts–all without any hacks to the core files of your WordPress Multi-User installation.



Keep in mind, however, that this is a hack and will be deprecated sometime soon with the recent introduction of tags (as opposed to categories which this hack is using) with WPMu 1.3. That said, given it enables a tag cloud, a centralized search for posts, and a dynamic archive might make it valuable while the WordPress Multi-User community gradually ramps up to the full potential of the new tagging feature.

Site-Wide Tags & Search
Creating site-wide tags is a really intelligent work-around which–as an additional bonus–also allows for a centralized search of blog posts and a dynamic archive.

The basic concept of this hack is made possible through a very unintuitive move. That move is to create a separate, single installation of WordPress in a subdirectory (named “tags”–if you like) where your WordPress Multi-User installation lives. Once you’ve done this upload the same theme you are using on the main page for your WPMu installation and you have basically faked another part of your main site. After that use the “fixed” WP-Autoblog plugin (which also includes category for posts–the secret sauce!!!) and Sitewide Tags Permalink Replace plugin (which redirects the permalinks in the single WP installation to the WPMu posts) in the single WP installation to feed all the posts from your WPMu install into this single blog. You do this by placing the feed for all the posts on the WPMu install (this all made possible by ITDamager’s awesome WPMu Sitewide Feed plugin) into the settings for the WP-Autoblog plugin under the options tab.


A look at the WP-Autoblog settings–really straightforward!


Plugins on the single installation “tags” blog. Click for larger version

I am keeping this overview rather simple because the complex details for creating this sitewide tags hack were originally worked out in this thread on the Multi-User forums (peruse that for more granular information). Even better, the hack is documented in a step-by-step fashion on the WPMu Codex by mrjcleaver here.

These instructions are thorough, the only thing I would recommend different is to use the “full post” option in the WP-Autoblog settings rather than “excerpt” so that you can use the single installation as a way to search all posts (that’s right, sitewide tags enables a sitewide search–pretty sneaky sis).

As for the tagcloud, just pick your favorite tagcloud plugin (UMW Blogs is using WordPress Heatmap Plugin that displays your categories on a page (I titled this page view so it wouldn’t be repetitive in the URL -so instead of http://umwblogs.org/tags/tags you have http://umwblogs.org/tags/view–I stole this idea from edublogs which is using this same workaround). Finally, with a few minor hacks to a theme template (read their instructions for more details) on the single installation blog you have a tag cloud (well, technically a category cloud) on your WPMu site.

Sitewide Archive

It follows from such a hack you can then create a more dynamic archive of all the posts in the single installation that not only let’s you search, but also let’s you organize them for browsing by month or even show the last X number of posts. You can see an example of such an archive on UMW Blogs here, which is simply using a gently hacked archive template that comes stock with the MistyLook theme.



I guess this “tutorial” has been more a series of links to other cohesive How-Tos and innumerable plugins, but I felt it was necessary because I was somewhat thwarted this Summer by the lack of any organized approach to explaining and integrating such a key feature for tagging, searching, and organizing the content in a WPMu database.

Please ask me questions about anything that is unclear, for I’d hate to see you waste the same amount of time I did

Related posts on bavatuesdays

• October 5, 2007 — Creating a dynamic frontpage for WPMu (3)
• October 15, 2007 — Universities using WPMu (9)
• November 1, 2007 — The Era of a One-Click WordPress (2)
• October 30, 2007 — The D’Arcy Norman Effect (8)
• October 15, 2007 — The UMW Blogs Twilight Zone (2)
]]> http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2007/11/04/wpmu-sitewide-tags-search-and-archive/feed/ http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2007/10/25/wpmu%e2%80%99s-change-of-address-form/ http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2007/10/25/wpmu%e2%80%99s-change-of-address-form/#comments Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:19:09 +0000 Jerry http://bavatuesdays.com/wpmus-change-of-address-form/
Just found this simple and quite useful plugin called Change Blog URL by Kt that allows you to change the URL of your WPMu blog with one click. I tested it out on UMW Blogs and it works flawlessly with version 1.25a.

This plugin allows blog user to change their blog URL from existing one (subject to availability). The admin page can be access at Option->Publishing. This plugin simply modify 4 fields, three fields in user blog option table and one in the wp_blog table. When user enter a new blog address, the plugin will check for rule that apply when one sign up for a new blog.

]]> http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2007/10/25/wpmu%e2%80%99s-change-of-address-form/feed/ http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2007/09/22/wpmu-plugins-comment-tracking-and-stats/ http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2007/09/22/wpmu-plugins-comment-tracking-and-stats/#comments Sat, 22 Sep 2007 14:24:06 +0000 http://bavatuesdays.com/wpmu-plugins-comment-tracking-and-stats/ I have been experimenting with yet a few more possibilities on our WordPress Multi-User installation at UMW Blogs. One of which I am particularly excited about, so I’ll start there.

WPMu Comment Tracking and Display

This plugin (available on WPMUDEV.org) is pretty awesome from what I can make of it thus far. What it does is tracks and display all the comments you make on other blogs within the multi-user environment. The are displayed in the “Comments” tab, under the subtab “My Comments.” This is basically a co-comment-esque feature with the limitation of being only applicable to the comments you make within the UMW Blogs environment. And while this is limited, it also is quite powerful in that it allows both students and faculty to track their blog conversations and see when other folks have responded to them right in their administrative backend.



Below is a perfect example, I commented on one of Gardner’s student blogs, and I am able to see the trackback someone else left, as well as an future responses to my comment up and until a point. The only issue is that it only tracks comments after you have installed the plugin, so the sooner the better. This plugin really highlights the benefit of using a multi-user install in an educational space like we are, for so much of the richness is in the discussion, and we now have a way for folks to track and access the comments they have made quite easily.

FireStats 1.4 for WPMu

This plugin is a pretty powerful stats manager that allows each an every user to manage their own statistics. It creates separate tables for each blog (or I believe it does at least) and allows a granular look at traffic, incoming links, referring sites, etc. The only thing about this plugin is that it is in deep beta and I am a little scared of it right now.

It has a sidebar widget that breaks the theme with php call errors (seemingly related to the bbPress forum integration). Also, the footer stats also break the theme. There are also some more sophisticated database options available through this plugin that have me worried, if anyone can assuage my fears on this one please do. I am testing it within UMW Blogs, but keeping a very close eye on it, because I am not sure if it will come back to haunt us at some point. More on this as it develops.

WordPress.com Stats

As a potential alternative to FireStats, I also installed WordPress.com stats, which I run on the bava and like a lot. Only issue here is that it requires you have a WordPress.com API Key, which mean you have to sign-up for WordPress.com, not the end of the world, but not as fluid as some may like. I will also be watching this plugin closely to see how its figures compare with those of FireStats.

Possibly my favorite thing about the WordPress.org Stats plugin, is the developers sense of humor. I installed it not more than ten minutes ago and went in immediately to test it out, and this is the message I got in return:



“Take ‘er easy, Dude”! I love it when the folks at WordPress quote The Big Lebowski, it just furthers my unabashed fanboy status. Nothing like be scolded so poetically!

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]]> http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2007/09/22/wpmu-plugins-comment-tracking-and-stats/feed/ http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2007/09/10/wpmu-plugin-patrol/ http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2007/09/10/wpmu-plugin-patrol/#comments Tue, 11 Sep 2007 03:20:08 +0000 http://bavatuesdays.com/wpmu-plugin-patrol/ While doing a quick sweep for WordPress Multi-User plugins on WPMuDev.org I came across two plugins that make me all the more certain that WordPress is without question the premiere open-source online publishing platform freely available to everyone.

“More Privacy Options” Plugin
The first, and maybe the most impressive plugin yet (at least for me), is what seems like a relatively simple affair that adds three more privacy options to control the blog visibility for sites within the Multi-User environment. As those of us in education understand all too well, the limited ability for controlling access and permissions (as much as we often hate it) was far too meager with only two privacy options: let Google and company crawl your site or don’t let them crawl your site. Such an “array” of options when talking about privacy in regards to WPMu was not very convincing for many folks. That has all changed now!



With the “More Privacy Options” plugin individual blog proprietors can choose from the above two listed already as well as the following: choose whether or not to let anyone from outside the WPMu community see their site; prevent anyone from viewing their site who is not a registered user on their site; or even limiting access to only themselves and administrators. Yes, yes, yes!!! Finally some headway on permissions. This, ladies and gentlemen, is huge for a community of educational bloggers like those congregated at UMW Blogs. We can now host every blog in the UMW community within the UMW Blogs environment. A major step forward in terms of upgrade management, database consolidation, and all around WordPress goodness.

Sidebar Add Users

Another amazingly useful and time saving plugin for anyone using WPMu with class blogs that have numerous authors is the Sidebar Add users plugin/widget. This plugin puts a sign-up form in the sidebar that allows users already registered within the WPMu community to register themselves as users for a blog that has this widget activated. This will save us here at UMW a ton of time as we are using blogs throughout this system in numerous ways, one of which is to have a class of students authoring on one blog. So rather than inputting them as authors one by one in the administrative backend, they can sign-up for themselves, and as long as they are already users within the wider WPMU community.



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