If you have explored BuddyPress at all, you will have noticed not only the lack of free themes available, but also the trouble in just finding them. We aim to change that with the Free BuddyPress Themes site. Not only will it feature whatever free BuddyPress themes we can find anywhere online, we will be releasing BuddyPress themes as well. One thing I am especially excited about is taking existing GPL WordPress themes and “BuddyPress-ifying” them.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the rss feed when you get there. Got any suggested free themes? Let us know!

• June 27, 2009 — Week #3 Build a better blog site – User themes and plugins (4)
• May 11, 2009 — BuddyPress Themes & skinning (14)
• November 22, 2009 — Buddymatic Theme Framework (8)
• August 13, 2009 — Another new release, and upcoming (6)
• June 6, 2009 — Spam blogs and Buddypress (9)

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A quick note that Chris has released a new version of his Facebook Dashboard Widget (Download link) that is compatible with WPMU.

• December 9, 2009 — Twitter Digest (4)
• December 3, 2009 — MU 2.9 beta (5)
• November 22, 2009 — Buddymatic Theme Framework (8)
• October 26, 2009 — Featured posts plugin and widget (13)
• October 19, 2009 — WordCamp New York (1)

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Donncha has updated the domain mapping plugin for WPMU. Get it here.

The biggest changes include subfolder blog support, and remote login – which means you can be logged in to the main domain and have it carry over to the mapped domain. Sweet!

More news about our own domain mapping plugin coming in the next month. Watch the wpmu forums Monday for more plugin news, because we’ll need testers.

Random Posts

• August 23, 2009 — Show user id in site admin (1)
• December 11, 2009 — After the Deadline (0)
• September 28, 2008 — The Road to Well-Mu (7)
• March 20, 2009 — news for the week ending March 20 (4)
• November 19, 2009 — Our slides from WordCamp New York (1)

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As everyone begins to put their final audio and video projects onto their blogs I wanted to mention a few plugins and tricks that might be helpful. The first plugin is Podcasting. You can use this plugin to include audio (mp3 and mp4) and video (mov and mp4) in your posts. With the plugin enabled you’ll have a new panel in your Add New Post page called Podcasting

It will take a File URL which you can get when you upload the file by clicking the File URL button in the upload interface.

Just copy the file URL from the upload screen and paste it into the File URL box of the Podcasting panel and click Add. After you click Add the Podcasting panel will look like this

Clicking Send to editor will add the required text to your post for including the .mov, .mp4, or .mp3 file. If you used iMovie or Garageband to create your audio or video file it may have saved the file as a .m4v or .m4a. You can just change the extension to .mp4 and it should upload to your blog. You can adjust the settings for the Podcasting plugin by visiting the settings under the Settings panel.

If you are using an online video service like Youtube then you can enable the WordPress Video Plugin. This plugin will allow you to embed a video in your post using a short code like [service videoid]. You can reference the Short code instructions for examples on using the plugin for each of the supported services. You should also be able to use the Press This bookmarklet found under Tools to embed video and other files in your posts. You can find some good examples of using Press This at http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/automate-blogging-tasks-with-press-this-for-wordpress/.I hope this helps you complete your projects and if you have any problems just contact Instructional Technology.

I ported Buddymatic from the Thematic Theme Framework. In a standard WordPress or WordPress MU blog, Buddymatic is functionally the same as Thematic. In a BuddyPress enabled WordPress MU install, the BuddyPress components in the framework are activated to provide BuddyPress theme functionality. Buddymatic and child themes can be used on WordPress, WordPress MU, BuddyPress home and BuddyPress member blogs.

Thematic child themes can be used with Buddymatic by changing the template (in style.css) from thematic to buddymatic. The child theme may require additional styling for the BuddyPress components. The framework uses buddypress.css in the child theme for BuddyPress specific css. Included in the download is a sample child theme and Coffee with Friends by Daisy Olsen.

• December 9, 2009 — Twitter Digest (0)
• November 30, 2009 — Free BuddyPress themes (1)
• November 26, 2009 — Facebook Dashboard Widget Update (0)
• October 19, 2009 — WordCamp New York (1)
• August 13, 2009 — Another new release, and upcoming (6)

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On some installs, you may want to have the ability to make quick css-only changes to your theme that are applied just to the blog you are on. Or maybe you’d like to give your users this ability, like you can get at wordpress.com. There are a few plugins available to help you do this. These plugins allow you to add styling rules to the existing theme without editing the actual theme files.

Template Override
Custom User CSS
My CSS Editor
Persistent Styles
Style Tweaker
MyCSS
Custom CSS plugin

and also:

ComicPress/CommPress Companion Although originally designed to be used with the ComicPress theme, it works on any theme, on any setup, and it has a color picker. Throughly tested with WPMU, and I highly recommend you check it out.

They all work by hooking into wp_head in the theme’s header.php file, so if it doesn’t appear to work, that may be why. This way, the styles all get rendered regardless of theme, so if users are switching themes frequently, they will need to know this. If you’re using a small handful of carefully selected themes, and just need to make minor color to graphic changes between them to distinguish each blog, then any one of the plugins above are really just invaluable.

Also, I have not checked any of these plugins for security issues, but you definitely have plenty to choose from.

• June 27, 2009 — Week #3 Build a better blog site – User themes and plugins (4)
• November 30, 2009 — Free BuddyPress themes (1)
• September 29, 2009 — Option Arrays (4)
• September 28, 2009 — Writing Plugins (for WP & WPMU) (2)
• August 23, 2009 — Show user id in site admin (1)

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This past weekend we were in New York city for WordCamp NYC. What a blast! Everyone we met was so awesome, and I gave out a ton of hugs. There was such a great spirit during the whole weekend, full of learning & sharing.

Here’s the slides from our presentations. Our sessions were also filmed, so as soon as they are up on wordpress.tv, I’ll let you know.

Random Posts

• May 31, 2009 — ComLuv Beta (2)
• September 16, 2009 — How to upgrade WPMU (0)
• March 2, 2009 — Menus and Navigation bars (1)
• December 27, 2008 — Hello world! (3)
• April 29, 2009 — Picking the right web host (10)

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On UCalgaryBlogs, I’d modified the adminbar to include a link to the current site’s dashboard if a person was logged in, making it easy to get to the members-only side of WordPress without having to go through My Blogs and finding the right blog, then mousing over the pop-out “Dashboard” link. Most people never found that, and it’s not very intuitive.

So, I hacked in a hard-coded link to Dashboard in bp-core-adminbar.php. This worked, but meant I had to remember to re-hack the file after running a BuddyPress update. I forgot to do that right after I ran the last upgrade, and got emails from users asking WTF?

I decided to figure out the best way to add in the Dashboard link without hacking the actual plugin files. Turns out, it’s drop-dead simple. Yay, WordPress.

In your /wp-content/plugins/ directory, create a file called bp-custom.php (if it’s not there already), and drop this code into it:

<?php
  // custom functions for tweaking BuddyPress
  function custom_adminbar_dashboard_button() {
    // adds a "Dashboard" link to the BuddyPress admin bar if a user is logged in.
    if (is_user_logged_in()) {
        echo '<li><a href="/wp-admin/">Dashboard</a></li>';
    }
   }
  add_action('bp_adminbar_menus', 'custom_adminbar_dashboard_button', 1);
 ?>

When in place, your BuddyPress adminbar will look something like this:

Yes, I know I should do something to properly detect user levels and privileges, rather than just providing the Dashboard link all willie-nillie to anyone that’s logged in, but the link itself just provides access to whatever Dashboard features the user is allowed to see, so there’s no security risk. Better to just say that a user can see the Dashboard for any site they’re logged into, and let WordPress deal with restricting access properly.

I should also deal with the possibility of WPMU being configured as a subdirectory vs. subdomain (the /wp-admin/ link will bork if you’re using subdirectories – better to use the real code to sniff out the base url of the current site…)

Well, James Farmer and company are at it again, and the latest business venture is a WordPress Plugin App store a la iPhone apps. Another pay to play solution that is asserts that “the future of WordPress is premium plugins.” This development, like most of Farmer’s moves over the last year or so with wp.mu, blogs.mu, etc. have been rather depressing for me to watch.  What we are witnessing in the WordPress community is both a crisis and a crossroads, a fork in the logic of what this open source community stands for, and in many ways the reality that the GPL license was originally imagined for (operating systems like Linux) is not cutting it for an open source, web-based application like WordPress (thank you, Martha).

The logic of a paid service for re-worked WordPress plugins that are still under GPL is not outside the GPL license, people can still charge for re-coding plugins that others have offered up freely. And, by extension, I could get a paid membership to that service and download all those plugins and distribute them freely to anyone under the conditions of that same license. Fact is, both solutions create real issues. Those people who develop plugins with the idea of making them freely available can have their work appropriated, modified and sold at a profit, and for those who do try and profit from their work can have their own plugins or themes taken and given away freely, at least after someone pays the entry fee.

So given that, why don’t a whole bunch of us pool a dollar or two and gain access to the premium plugins site, and then redistribute everything freely? It’s within the letter of the GPL law, and it would make for a far more affordable and equitable re-distribution of wealth in the community.  Well, we don’t and won’t do it because it’s an abrogation of a bigger contract, a community contract of WordPress users that I believe has formed around the idea of openness and sharing back. What we are seeing now is the attempt to commodify that logic so that themes and plugins begin to represent some form of wealth within the open source community that needs to be traded on the open market.  But in my mind it is exactly this emerging logic of open source entrepreneurs that understand applications and code as commodities that will bring down a community of users, and represent a challenge to any movement towards sharing and openness.

We can not live by the letter of a license, we must think through the implications of our actions for a community that has moved further and further away from the prevailing political logic of the open source movement, which is namely to freely share software, which in turn provides zero cost of entry and public collaboration. Additionally, it allows individuals to re-imagine the software and build on that independently. And it’s with that last point where we see the attempt to commodify a community that can only be as strong as its diversity and openness.  The more a few people try and dominate this space and control “the market” so to speak, the less open the application and the more impoverished the community becomes over time.

I’m a fan of WordPress, and I’ve been in the game for a while now. That said, I’m not a developer, I am a member of a community and a movement that sees the possibility of people openly sharing their ideas and work apart from some kind of monetary compensation of the fruits of their labor as a possibility for something different.  A new model for sharing openly out of a passion and belief in the possibilities rather than professionalizing this development as a career or job. Look what professionalization did for politics in the US, it is the wrong direction, and I think it is time for the WordPress community to take a stand on what they believe and how they will deal with this challenge. Drupal has figured out this model, and the community is tight, despite the letter of the GPL law, and that has everything to do with the people, so we need to stop hiding behind licenses and establish who we are and where we are going before the community implodes. The logic of capital and commodification will tear us apart unless we are vigilant, making money must be subordinated to sharing openly. The more we commodify, the sooner we die!