WPMu Development for Education

Confused by what Google Wave might be useful for?  Here is a nicely demonstrated scenario going through a business process modeling project.    I like the example of new members re-playing the Wave to catch up on the team’s progress — very efficient.  It seems to me that a workplace effort to encourage this type of Google Wave use would need some type of kick-off/introduction workshop.  Get a big group together, have some scripted collaborative tasks, and have them use wave to accomplish those tasks.  You’d teach the tool and also work on the general topic of effective collaboration/team work.

Using Gravity to collaborate on processes

Google Wave has been around for a few months now and though the hype is fading away we are seeing more and more practical use-cases in the enterprise. One excellent example is SAP’s Business Process Modelling tool gone collaborative; Gravity. We have been fortunate to work with a prototype version of Gravity with access to the minds behind the concept. Gravity is a Business Process Modeling tool which can be accessed as a gadget in the Google Wave client. This integration in Google Wave allows for collaboration over time and / or near real time, on business processes. This model is exportable to Netweaver BPM via BPMN 2.0 XML, thus making it a fully integrable modelling tool for use in an SAP landscape. Still puzzled? check this video with an explanatory example:

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Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey.   So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting.  As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system.  So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there.  And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.

The plugin is pretty simple and written clearly enough to make adjustments easy.  And most importantly it utilizes a table structure that is normalized, and well structured, which will work well for the eventual reporting needs.  I did do some hacking around in the code to change some of the default behavior — mostly just commenting out features we didn’t want.  These would lend themselves well to some additional options in the plug-in settings — maybe I’ll get around to adding those in at some point.  When it comes to the reports I’ll also go into the background, using PHPMyAdmin to grab the tables directly — again it wouldn’t take much to add more flexibility into the WordPress admin panel options for the plug-in, but I’m still running in the quick/simple mode here.  And with the help of the Plaintxt theme it is up and running.

The plugin could be quite useful for all sorts of user feedback on a site, not just surveys.  The nicely structured data collected in plugin-specific tables would make reporting really flexible.

WordPress › Surveys « WordPress Plugins

The Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to you blog. You can let the vistors take surveys and see the result from the admin side.

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By default, BuddyPress does not include comments from non-members (or non-logged-in users more generally) in the sitewide activity stream. For some communities, this default behavior is probably just fine. But in a community like the CUNY Academic Commons, which aims to attract readership and conversation from all sorts of folks, whether or not they’re signed in, the sitewide activity stream will be much more meaningful if it includes comments from everyone.

My new plugin, BP Include Non-Member Comments, was built with this purpose in mind. The plugin is activated here on the CUNY Academic Commons, so that all comments on your blog – whether from logged-in users or not – will show up on the news feed.

The plugin has been tested on version 1.1.3 of BP, as well as the 1.2 release candidate. If you want to use the plugin for 1.1.3 or lower, you will need to uncomment the first few add_action and add_filter lines in the plugin file.

Technical caveat: Non-logged-in commenters have BP user_id 0. When BP creates the activity stream, it decides whether or not to show the Delete button by checking to see whether the user_id for the currently logged in user is the same as the user_id of the person to whom the comment belongs. Presumably, though, you don’t want non-logged-in viewers of the activity stream to be able to delete items from the activity stream at all. BP’s core code is not currently set up to make it easy to remove these buttons, so I employed an ugly fix. If you have changed your theme significantly from the default, you might have to adjust the filter bp_nonmember_comment_content (near the end of the plugin) to remove the button properly.

Download the plugin here.

BuddyPress reached Release Candidate status this week. Get BP rc-1 over here (zip).

Also, the new 2010 default theme has just hit the repo. Scroll down on that page and you’ll get the zip of the theme.

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I wrote a plugin this afternoon that solves a small but potentially annoying limitation of BuddyPress: its inability to show comments from non-members in the sitewide activity stream. In a streak of extreme creativity, I dubbed the plugin “BP Include Non-Member Comments”. Read more about it, and download it for your own use, here.

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1. Removing previous comment edits from BuddyPress activity – a plugin
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I find myself in every recent version of WP (and WPMu) searching for the ID numbers for various pages, posts, categories, and/or tags on a number of occasions. I’m not sure when this feature got dropped from the core, but I do remember it was at one time part of the edit post/edit page metadata. As of the latest versions the only way to find ID numbers is to actually edit the page (or post, tag, category, comment, etc.) and look for the ID value in the URL field (pictured below). Not very intuitive, in fact, ridiculous.

ShowID for Post/Page/Category/Tag/Comment plugin actually shows the ID value right from the edit section of any of these elements. Something like the following:

I am going to activate this plugin sitewide for UMW Blogs, because a number of the plugins/widgets we have actually ask for page/posts IDs to exclude pages/posts etc. from a widget, or include categories in a page. And explaining how to find this information without this plugin is just that much more difficult. I really don’t understand why this isn’t a core feature of WP given core widgets (such as the pages widgets) and a wide variety of plugins depend on ID values.

A new open source project from FaceBook, HipHop for PHP, could bring big improvements for PHP developers.  From the description on Facebook’s Developers site HipHop for PHP will translate PHP code into C++, reducing cpu usage by as much at 50%.  And for a big site like FaceBook, written in PHP, this is a pretty significant improvement.  The ease of writing in PHP, with the performance benefits of C++ — sounds like a great combination.  There is nothing except an announcement so far, but expect more very soon.

PHP Magazine, PHP Training, PHP Conferences, PHP Books, PHP Apparel — php|architect

“We think that HipHop has the potential to bring significant changes to the way we use and interact with PHP; … said Marco Tabini, CEO of Blue Parabola.

Facebook Developers | HipHop for PHP: Move Fast

One of the key values at Facebook is to move fast. For the past six years, we have been able to accomplish a lot thanks to rapid pace of development that PHP offers. As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster.

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As much as I love Apple and freely admit they make great products, I also have concerns with Apple’s closed-system approach. While there are some valid points to Apple’s ‘let us do the driving’ philosophy, I think users are better served when technology platforms are open.  So how cool would a Google tablet be?  After all, if they want to beat Windows at its own game, what better strategy than ripping off an Apple idea?

Google’s Tablet versus Apple’s iPad: Open versus Closed?

More importantly, though, Google’s tablet will have one major advantage over Apple’s iPad: it will have an open application platform.

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I have held my tongue as far as comments on Apple’s iPad — there is more than enough other chatter from other quarters.  But a recent article in the New York Times, The Media Equation – To Deliver, iPad Needs Content Providers on Board – NYTimes.com caught my eye in a comment on book publisher’s response to the platform:

…the book industry seems ill-prepared to take advantage of many of the new worlds the iPad opens up…Readers on the iPad should certainly expect that when they buy a cookbook, building in cooking demos would be a no-brainer, but it may be a long while before the industry has the ability to produce books that incorporate multimedia.

Why is it even a question of who will produce these videos?  Haven’t they been watching for the last 5 years?  You know the answer, don’t you?  The readers will do it!  Take a page from the reader book reviews on Amazon — look at what this cookbook fan has to say:

I have to admit I’m a great fan of Michele Scicolone. I got one of her cookbooks long ago, baked the best cookie I’ve ever had, and have been addicted to her wonderful recipes, stories and style ever since. This book continues her tradition of crafting perfect cookbooks. Why do I say perfect? Well, I’m not a professional cook, yet I can follow her recipes and create fantastic meals…

Any doubt that a fan like this wouldn’t be happy to create a short how-to video as they cook one of the recipes?  All they need is an easy way to submit them. The technology piece is easy, and there are certainly partners around who would be happy to help — in fact Amazon seems a little panicky over the threat of the iPad introduction.  Call them — they understand how this whole internet-user-contributed-content thing works.  E-books augmented with integrated reader content — I’d buy that.

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I’ve just knocked up a ‘Social Repo‘ site and would be keen to get some feedback on the general idea.

It’s a WordPress site in microblog mode driven by feeds from our repo via the FeedWordPress plugin. Just an experiment in automating something similar to our Post2Blog plugin.

As a way of making EPrints content more ’social’, I thought that specific subject feeds from different IRs could be aggregated into a single subject site where interested people could follow and comment on the research outputs.

I’m a fan of aaaargh.org which is a site where people share hard-to-obtain texts, mostly academic level material and largely related to critical, social theory. There’s a discussion board attached to it, too. No-one really controls it and it’s a great way of finding hard to obtain texts

Along loosely similar lines, I was thinking earlier that IRs could aggregate their feeds into a site, like my example, that provided a way to search, filter and discuss the source research outputs. If there was a site that aggregated feeds from IRs around the world, pulling in only content relating to critical, social theory, for example, had a twitter account attached, too, as well as useful RSS feeds of its own, I’d be keen to follow it and contribute to the discussion of work as it appeared and looked of interest.

I can imagine that some texts could spark quite detailed threaded discussions.

One way to improve my quick example would be to show the EPrints abstract in the post content below the citation. Alas, that’s not in the source EPrints feed right now. I would also make a few tweaks to the theme so that the permalinks didn’t all point to the source record, but that the source link was clearly provided.

The plugin that we created for the JISCPress project could provide a background service to create semantic tags and do term extraction on the abstract, to automate keywords for each item. Crikey! we could even use the other Linked Data plugin we developed and push the RDF to the Talis Platform, aggregating Linked Data around subject feeds from Institutional Repositories.

I’m sure I can think of more improvements, but as a 30 min exercise, I’ve found it interesting. I think that once a Repo record becomes joined to a WordPress record, it’s got a lot more going for it in terms of added levels of interaction and malleability. Any thoughts?

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