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

So, there is no question DSader has been a veritable mensch when it comes to sharing with the WPMu community, and I’d like to say thanks. But before I even can he comes out with an updated version of his Sitewide Comment Tracking plugin for WPMu that reminds me just how deeply indebted I am to his work. If you haven’t tested it, I highly recommend it. It tracks the comments you have left on numerous blogs within the WPMu community. So, for example, If I leave comments on various blogs, I can track them from the Comments–>My Comments tab. It provides an awesome interface to quickly scan where you’ve commented and who has responded, an amazingly powerful feature for a controlled, yet deeply distributed architecture like WPMu.

Here’s what it looks like:

DSader's My Recent Comments plugin for WPMu

Think about it, this is an amazing way to let faculty and students know how they can track response to their comments easily, something which isn’t all that easy in the regular blogosphere. So an engineered improvement to make the community potentially more manageable.  And so many of DSader’s plugins are just like that, it’s as if he were programming for UMW, he comes from an educational setting and it’s amazing how many of our needs and desires are met and satisfied by his work

Update: While writing this I received an email from him telling me the Sitewide 3-in-1 Widget panel has been updated, with a bug or two fixed, Is DSader sick or what? What can I say, it’s people like him that make this whole thing so much funner and cooler. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

Here is UMW Blogs with the gray background:

And here it is with the white background:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

Now for the anatomy of the redesign of UMW Blogs. I have to say that a year ago this time I had spent many a long hour trying to get everything working on the front page of UMW Blogs. I blogged the process for creating the front page here, and talked extensively about the elaborate hack to get sitewide tags and a sitwewide archive working here.

This time around, my life was significantly easier, and I think that’s a testament to how far the WPMu community has come over the last year. It never ceases to amaze me how folks like Donncha, D Sader, andrea_r, Andre Malan, and Enej Bajgoric (amongst many, many others), have made the creation of a state of the art publishing platform for Mary Washington elegant, simple, and powerful as hell. These are people that have little or no affiliation with UMW, but have nonetheless enabled truly cutting edge publishing possibilities for little money and even less programming know how. I love the whole thing.

The Home Page

The homepage for the redesign really captures just how much easier things have become, and also points to some necessary re-aligning of plugins, resources, and syndication. For example, the previous version of UMW Blogs front page was almost entirely driven by the BDP RSS plugin for aggregation, in this iteration it has all but disappeared. I am keenly aware that the developer for this awesome plugin hasn’t updated it in over a year, and while it still works swimmingly in version 2.6 (a testament to the solid coding), I’m not sure how much longer it can hold out. So I’m afraid it’s high time to try and move on. That’s where two plugins I have already blogged about recently have allowed me to transition away from BDP RSS with little or no separation anxiety: Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin and D Sader’s “3-in-1″ widget.

Between these two plugins I can have the 10 most recent sitwewide posts, a sitewide tag cloud, and a sitewide archive all on the front page sidebar. These features would have been impossible for me last year, and now it is as simple as two plugins and a customizable widget. Moreover, Donncha’s Sitewide Tag goodness single-handedly powers the Recent Posts, Tags, and Archives pages of UMW Blogs that I will get to in more detail below.

As I mentioned already, PrimePress is the theme, and the header images are homegrown. The login is a little bit of PHP code Patrick Murray-John whipped up, and you can download it here and drop it into your sidebar should you need it.

Finally, the blog that powers the UMW Blogs homepage will be the site we use for the feature articles that chronicle and share the activity, cool blogs, and course projects that are happening throughout the UMW community.

Courses, Support, and Contact Pages

The Courses page is pretty straightforward, and it is going to be a directory of courses being hosted on UMW Blogs that will be up and running by Monday. I have some idea of how I am going to feed this stuff in, but for the most part it will be relatively traditional directory of courses being taught around campus using this publishing platform, but I have some more thinking to do here–any recommendations?

The Support pages are awesome, and this marks for me one of the most significant leaps forward over the last year. Namely, the Bliki has arrived people! And that is thanks to the awesome work of Brian Lamb’s UBC rat pack of developers like Andre Malan and Enej Bajgoric. They are working on integrating MediaWiki and WPMu as a kind of symbiotic distributed publishing framework, which Brian talked about in his screencast here. The fruit of this syndication rich framework has made my life a million times easier thank to Enej’s plugin Wiki Inc, which basically takes an article from a MediaWIki installation and republishes it seamlessly on a WordPress page. So, all the documentation for UMW Blogs done in MediaWiki can now be effortlessly pulled into a page on the home blog for UMW Blogs. So support pages like the FAQ, WordPress Guide, and “10 Ideas for Using UMW Blogs” are all MediaWiki articles posing as blog pages—bliki bling bling!

Wiki Inc Plugin for WordPress

And then there is the Embed MediaWiki Sections plugin that allows you to copy and paste a section of a wiki article into a blog post or page, kinda like YouTube embedding for MediaWiki content. I played with this one a bit earlier in the Summer, but haven’t got back to it yet. Not sure if all the bugs are out, but I’m convinced this will make things insanely interesting for the holy grail of the Bliki.  All of which is just another name for a distributed publishing framework that can be collaborative, simple, and polished all at the same time. Disco!

The Contact page is the Dagon Design Secure Form Mailer plugin inserted in a page, simple, secure, and customizable.

News, Sitewide Tags, and Archives

The News tab on the Front page links to the UMW News Blog, which is actually a separate blog from the home blog  http://news.umwblogs.org) which gives it a separate feed, and a simple way to pull in the RSS feed for News into the home page sidebar without it interfering with Feature articles. The trick to making it integrate seamlessly is just dressing it up in the same theme with the same widgets.  And once you hack the navigation menu to match that on the homepage of UMW Blogs, it’s done. Pretty simple.

The Sitewide Tags tab also links out to another blog, which is actually the blog that is automatically created through Donncha’s Sitewide Feeds plugin, I already mentioned earlier. This blog/plugin also changes the game in my mind, and it provides everything from sitewide posts, tags, categories, and archives in one fell swoop. It rules, and I simply dressed this site up in the same theme as the home page, and hacked the navigation menu accordingly. Moreover, if you go to the front page of the tags.umwblogs.org blog you’ll see the most recent post, which on the front page has been substituted with featured blogs. The Tags tab is just a page on the tags.umwblogs.org blog that has a Simple Tags tag cloud running, which will by default collect all the tags from around UMW Blogs, as well as provide a working feed for each tag (major possibilities here!).

The Sitewide Archives tab does much of the same thing, but this is just using a hacked version of the archive template for PrimePress that will allow people to search all of UMW Blogs, see posts archived by month (or day or year), as well as the last 100 posts that have come through the system.

And voila! That’s it! All the hacking and kludging I had to do last year has been replaced by clean and elegant solutions that make this years model a step up indeed.  We couldn’t have done it without the community, so a big thanks to all of you making WPMu about as bitchin a publishing engine as I’ve seen.

Now, the semester is poised to start, and it’s time to make this baby sing with 1500 new blogs.  Let’s get ‘em!

What’s more, DSader notes that this plugin can also be edited to…

pull from multiple blogs by editing one line of code ("clones" the widget output while applying the same widget control options to each clone):
<code>
`$featured_blogs = array($options['blog_id']); // Clone multiple panel outputs such as …
// $featured_blogs = array($options['blog_id'],3,354);`
(inspired by http://dailytestimony.net/plugins/)

In other words, there may be a way to select a specific number of blogs from a WPMu installation that can be fed into a specific tag cloud. Now this would be an awesome plugin in and of itself, for it could provide a way to aggregate tags for a series of distributed student blogs for a course, which could then be presented back on the mother blog as the course tag cloud. Something similar to what I was imagining way back when in this post.

Anyway, awesome work fromDSader and if you’re itching to see the plugin in action, I have it running on UMW Blogs already

Assuming the domain is already pointed to your host and you are using CPanel like me, just create the subdomain and point the document root to your WPMu installation. In the following example I added a subdomain blog to jimgroom.org and then pointed it to my WPMu installation using the Document Root field (which is at public_html/wpmued-org for my personal installation).

After you do this, you can map subdomains for all your favorite domain names to one WPMu installation and save yourself the headache of updating numerous blogs on numerous domains that need numoerous updates and themes and plugins and whatnot. One installation to rule them all!

Well, that was then, this is now. Donncha just released a plugin that brings domain mapping for WPMu to the masses in the form of a simple, easy-to-use plugin. Is Donncha on a roll or what? Last month it was the Sitwewide Tags Plugin (though it’s much more than the name suggests) which kicks major ass. This week it is the Domain Mapping Plugin, which is for many the Holy Grail for WPMu admins.

So, I just got around to testing it out on a WPMu install that uses [[CPanel], and it is actually pretty painless, though not entirely automated. Keep in mind this will only work for installation that have sub-domains setup, no love for sub-directories just yet.

Here is how I got it to work with CPanel:

After you install the plugin you will find the Domain Mapping subtab under the Manage tab. Once you go there you will see the following:

Domain Mapping Subtab

The logic here is simple, each WPMu blog will have access to this subtab once the plugin is installed. If someone has a blog on your system and they have a domain they want to map, they would need to do two things:

1) From where ever they purchased their domain, they would need to point their domain to the nameservers of the WPMu install. For example, if your WPMu install was hosted on Bluehost, they would need to point them to NS1.BLUEHOST.COM AND NS2.BLUEHOST.COM.

2) After that, they will need to go tot the Manage–>Domain Mapping tab and specify the IP address of the WPMu site and have them put in their domain. (You can decide how you want to share the IP address with them.)

That’s it on their end, pretty simple. But on the admin end there is one more step if you are using CPanel.

You need to create an addon domain for the mapped domain and point it to the directory with the WPMu installation. For me it looked like this:

Add Domain Trick in Cpanel

You can see that the domain is added normally, but the document root is changed to point to the actual directory with the WPMu installation. After that, it works like a charm. Now, this was simple and awesome, and for folks who aren’t using CPanel it will probably work automatically once someone points their domain to the correct IP address. But with CPanel there is one extra step, and while a relatively easy one, it does rule out strict automation of the mapped domains. But, th upside is that at the end of the day even I can map domains with out hacking Apache settings or putting our WPMu install in imminent danger. Disco!

So, can UMW Blogs map domains now? Well, I gues we can now, can’t we

I did a quick search and found this forum thread which suggests I’m not alone with this issue. I deleted all my plugins and mu-plugins,  cleared the cache and threw out the cookies. I even spent some time in the wp-config file, and double checked my .htaccess settings, all to no avail.  I’m sure a fix is forthcoming, or at least a hack, but until then I would perhap hold off on upgrading to WPMu 2.6 if you are using subdirectorties. I make this post because after the pollyanna screencast about upgrading to WPMu 2.6 I posted previously, I want to make clear that the upgrade was only tested with dynamic subdomains, not subdirectories.

Screencasts » Support Videos

• Overview of New Admin Interface in UMW Blogs
• Overview of the Write Tab
• Overview of Manage Tab
• Overview of the Design Tab
• Overview of Comments Tab
• Overview of Settings Tab
• Overview of the Plugins Tab
• Overview of Users Tab
• Creating a UMW Blog
• Changing your password on UWM Blogs

Now the difference between Andy’s screencasts and mine are easily discernible: Andy is the consummate professional and I’m the consummate hack. Andy are brief, no-nonsense, and precise poems, whereas mine are meandering, long, fraught with missteps, and bad jokes (the Overview of the Comments tab is an excellent example of this). That openly acknowledged, I really enjoyed this process because it forced me to approach an application I have inhabited for almost two years from the perspective of a novice. What I discovered along the way are some issues that I need to focus on to make UMW Blogs that much easier.

For example, I expected the screencast that provides an overview of the Design Tab to be straightforward and simple, yet I found that working with a wide array of themes, widgets, plugins, and dsader’s Userthemes is not always as simple as I preach. Take the fact that if someone changes the theme, they may lose the Meta login sidebar element that could totally throw off someone who is not familiar with the application.

Additionally, while DSader’s Userthemes Revisited plugin is a huge asset for UMW Blogs and I love that he has developed it out, it also presents a potential difficulty for users. Specifically because the Userthemes shows up in the Design tab up for everyone and anyone who has their own blog. And while only people who are enabled by an admin can hack their theme, anyone can still activate Userthemes and effectively lose the functionality of the built-in theme viewer. This could potentially confuse someone who activates a theme through userthemes, and then deletes that theme and returns to the theme viewer they won’t see anything at all. The system themes have effectively been disabled.  it would be nice if when a user deleted a (or all) themes activated through the Userthemes subtab that they could once again access the system theme through the themes subtab.

Additonally, the relationships between sidebar widgets and plugins in Wordpress is not as clear as it could be. When new users activate a plugin they often have to know to go into the Settings tab to configure the plugin and, quite often also need to drag a plugin-specific widget into the sidebar for the functionality to appear on the site.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that WordPress demands that users explore the possibilities by providing them a place to experiment and play with the application. And I wouldn’t sacrifice that for a clean experience by any means. That said, these screencasts helped me see some of the obstacles I had been overlooking for people who are coming to this application fresh, and I have to start working on ways to keep the possibilities all the features it provides while making the interface rabbit holes hard to fall down.

Feeds listed by aggr.

…I would be going to WordCamp 2008 like the great Alan Levine, but being only a bava—which in fact is not only the surname of my favorite film director but also Italian for drool—I’m not. So, after reading Alan’s recent call for examples of WordPress in education I tried to add my 50 cent, but Alan’s blog was intentionally blocking my long, link-filled comment of utter genius because he is petrified of the Reverend’s wrathful range, as one should be.

But never fear faithful reader, for the Reverend has got his own publishing platform, and can make the good word know the world round. That’s right folks, “I’m comin’ up, comin’ up, so you better you better get this party started.” So, with no more saccharine fan fare, here is my addition to Alan’s call for examples that was maliciously blocked to keep the right reverend from making it clear that education is where WordPress is poppin’ like no other field. And if the folks at WordPress don’t start paying us mind, we’re going to make a mass exodus to LiveJournal very, very soon! Transcript of my aborted missive to the dog follows:

All right, I have couple of things for you dog.

First, the current ground swell of universities adopting WPMu for all kinds of cool things. Here is a list compiled by Mario A. Núñez Molina, and stolen by the bava:

http://bavatuesdays.com/universities-usi…

And then there is the Pickering Institute http://bavatuesdays.com/pickering-instit…

The dude at Plymouth State in New Hampshire who is using WP as an OPAC for the university library:
http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11133

The MacCaulay Honors College launching WPMu as e-portfolios:
http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/

David Wiley’s use of WordPress.com, and the kick off of the whole spam educational blogging technique you love so much http://bavatuesdays.com/proud-spammer-of…

Literary Journals with WordPress by Pulitzer Prize winning Claudia Emerson (who rules!). Below are two examples of a possible seven:
http://ecollective.umwblogs.org/
http://noncejournal.elsweb.org/
(Some background on this project here: http://bavatuesdays.com/nonce-journal/)

Steve Gallik’s Lablogs and Data-Blogging (a wonderful example of WP as Lab Notebooks)
http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/…
Some background on this project here:
http://bavatuesdays.com/umw-lablogs-aggr…

Marie McAllister’s Eighteenth Century Audio site, which basically has students recording themselves reading poetry, then uploading them to Librivox and linking to them in this WP Blog:
http://ecaudio.umwblogs.org
(Some background on this project here: http://bavatuesdays.com/eighteenth-centu…)

Jeff McClurken’s work with Digital History: http://digitalhistory.umwblogs.org

I particularly like this one for it really is a site with no search functionality, yet still effectively acts as an easy engine for finding over 100 historical markers:
http://fredmarkers.umwblogs.org

The now graduated UMW student Roblog, whose blog is an ideal example of a student portfolio:
http://roblog.umwblogs.org

And Brad Efford, whose blog is an example of just how amazing students are with this stuff (he was also part of Gardner’s Film/text/Culture experiment mentioned below):

http://blogs.elsweb.org/nsftmfx

Just about everything Gardner Campbell has done with blogging (you’ll agree with me there I’m sure):
http://miltonsummer08.umwblogs.org/
http://intronewmediastudies08.umwblogs.o…
http://rocksoulprog.umwblogs.org/

Gardner’ grand experiment which I think is one of the best yet. Basically students used each others blog posts throughout the semester as research and fodder for their final papers, which were written as posts, and used trackbacks as attribution and quotes. Brilliant

http://blogs.elsweb.org/class-feeds/prof…

Gardner talks about this experiment here:
http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/…

Then there is Barbara Ganley’s unbelievable work, but she used MovableType

Ok, I have more, but you only have a little bit of time

strpos() [function.strpos]: Empty delimiter in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-includes/wpmu-functions.php on line 1586

Given that upload images and documents is not an insignificant feature for UMW Blogs, I was a bit concerned. So, I searched high and low on the forums and elsewhere for a solution, but all to no avail. Finally, I asked the ever great Zach Davis of Cast Iron Coding—whose stint with me in grad school has gained him nothing but an endless stream of code questions for over three years now—if this was a problem with the .htaccess file given this fix for the issues with uploading images on WP 2.5 which had a similar error message. But given it was a PHP error it seemed unlikely, or so Zach informed me So, he did me an ace and looked at the code and asked me the following two questions:

Zach: Have you set an option for upload_filetypes?
Me: Yes, jpg jpeg png gif mp3 mov avi wmv midi mid pdf rtf doc xls ppt docx xlsx odt ods swf m4v
Zach: Is there a trailing space or a leading space?

Disco! There was a trailing space in the Upload File Types field in the Site Admin–>Options tab. I got rid of the trailing space and the upload error went away. Now that is code diagnostic prowess, two questions and my problem was fixed, it would have taken me all night and I would have sacrificed those wee hours of blogging bliss too. But, I was spared the knife again thanks to my betters. One day I will learn how to read PHP code, but until then I’ll just have to hail Zach!