Yesterday morning I went to visit a faculty member—Andy Smith in Historic Preservation—who has been using Google sites for a project she is working on called Fred Buildings. It is actually one of the nicer sites I’ve seen built with Google Sites, and her question for me was about mapping a domain onto Google sites. Any long time reader of the bava knows I am obsessed with domain mapping so being given the opportunity to experiment with domain mapping on Google Sites was a total treat.

Let me start by saying that I didn’t know you could map a domain on a Google Site until yesterday, and they’ve had this service available for over a year and a half. While I tend to avoid Google Sites cause I find the service way too limited, realizing they have domain mapping available made me wish we were a Google School once again so I could experiment more with this across campus, particularly after realizing yesterday that you can map your root domain to one service, and various subdomains to other services without even having a webhosting account. This was a revelation to me, and something I figured out  while experimenting with mapping a root domain to a Google Site and a subdomain to a blog on UMW Blogs (which could just as well be wordpress.com, blogger, typepad, etc.). If you think about it, this provides a way of having a namespace independent of a specific service while at the same time building a unique identity online that will allow you to move from service to service if necessary, yet keep a consistent presence. Something I wish Leigh Blackall had, because when I search his stuff I am spread across three different blogs, and while I like the fact that he moves services regularly (he is a badass in that regard—I could never leave the bava blog), I just wonder how he can stand all his awesome ideas remaining web service vagrants on the open web without a steady URL to call home.

OK, so, that said Leigh (or Big Papa), here’s the tutorial to get you started

First things first, mapping your main domain to Google Sites. One of the limitations of Google Sites is if you map your main domain it has to be www.yourdomain.com, it can’t be just yourdomain.com. So, in order to map you main domain you have to do the following (this assumes you already have a domain name purchased through a service like Godaddy and have created a Google site). First, you need to point your main domain to to Google Sites. You do this in the Total DNS control panel on the service where you registered the domain, in this example I use Godaddy because I have an extra domain there laying around collecting dust.

Click for larger image

As illustrated above, edit the CNAME field (or alias) for the www alias and point that to the host name ghs.google.com and save the changes.

Then I jump over to my Google sites account and go to Manage Site and then look for the Wed Address setting pictured below:

And add the main domain, in this case www.edupunk.net (keep in mind you need to add the www. prefix). After that click add web address, and your domain should map like mine did: http://www.edupunk.net

Now that in and of itself may not be so amazing, because I’ve been talking about domain mapping for a while with WPMu, and the idea that Google would have it makes sense.  What is cool, and is a new discovery for me, is that while the m ain domain points to a Google site, I can have a subdomain like blog.edupunk.net point to another service like wordpress.com, blogger, or the ever great UMW Blogs without having a hosting account. It’s actually quite simple, all I did was add an A Record for the UMW Blogs IP address (174.37.153.244) in the Total DNS control panel at Godaddy:

And then, I created a CNAME (Alias) titled blog and pointed that to the umwblogs.org domain:

Click image for larger version

After that, I can go to a new blog I created on UMW Blogs (which has Domain mapping enabled for any blog on the system) such as edupunk.umwblogs.org and go to Tools—>Domain Mapping and simply add blog.edupunk.net.

And voila, main site on Google Sites here, blog on UMW Blogs here, and potentially several other subdomains mapped to several other services.

Now, to get back to my original example, Andy Smith now has her Fred Buildings project on Google sites here and a blog for announcements and the like here. More proof that no faculty member at UMW can meet with me without getting a UMW Blog, it is impossible, and that’s why I’m the rightest Reverend ever.

As the merge comes closer, the forums are winding down. Most of the time, I’m only answering threads that I can do immediately without digging up additional info. That means I also repeat myself quite a bit. In the interest of making sure all those answers are in one place, here’s my cheat sheet. It’s in a text file on my desktop and I leave it open whenever I jump in the forums.

More tips;
- a link to see all the latest posts to the forums
- the right search page
- in Firefox, use the Linky extension to open all unread threads on that page. Just select down the screen, right-click, open all in new tab. Wait until they load, then grab one & start reading/answering.

godaddy WPMU info

Stopping splogs
Cookies for comments yes it says comment but it does check for splogs too.
Hash cash Same deal. Don’t let the mention of comments fool you.
Stoping spam bogs in WPMU

Timthumb and WPMU

wordpress video plugin (probably not needed with 2.9.x)

Importing a single WordPress blog into WordPress MU the direct to database method, because nobody imports like the bava, NOBODY. Use this method for large sites where the usual export /Import is too big or when you want to also pull the users and options.

Handy MU plugins in the repo:
the wpmu tag results page There’s been some interesting ones show up lately. Subscribe to the feed tag to keep up.
Sitewide Tags
Unfiltered MU
Donncha’s Domain Mapping
Blog topics to categorize the blogs
New blog defaults

How to domain map blogs A writeup I did for WP webhost. This is cpanel-specific.

How to make a page template

Donncha’s blog the original (and only) dev of WPMU

Top pages from this here blog:
Installing in a subfolder mostly for previous version, as the 2.9.x branch fixes this
Make a listing of the blogs on your site
Free ebook on how to install WPMU

500 errors and 1and1 webhost If you’re having issues installing MU there.

installing on windows

Switch to blog and showing the main blog’s nav bar on other blogs. This code goes in the other theme’s header.php file.
just before the nav bar code put

right after the navbar code put

then it will always show the pages from Blog #1.
Yes it works for other code, but fair warning – switch to blog can get expensive. Think hard before using it on sites with lots of blogs.

When your permalinks don’t work, either mod_rewrite isn’t enabled, or isn’t explicitly enabled on your vhost in apache. You’ll need this line:
AllowOverride FileInfo Options

And the last one: Check your error logs!

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These are slides to accompany an eight minute ‘Lightning Talk’ for the dev8D conference in London, 24-27th February 2010. Each slide is a link to a blog post I have written on ways to use WordPress and WordPress Multi User, that are not about blogging.

Brief notes are available from slide 12 onwards.

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• BuddyPress: A university’s social network
• WordPress: Beyond Blogging session at IWMW10
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• Jailbreaking WordPress with Web hooks

I was looking at the posts on WPMu Development for Education earlier this morning, and I came across this post from The College of Wooster’s (or should I saw WOOT!ster’s) WPMu/BuddyPress install Voices. The post was about new themes added to their system, something I am always interested in, but it also gave me the opportunity to check out the hard work Jon Breitenbucher has been doing on Wooster’s blog-based publishing platform, and I am extremely impressed. What I am really blown away by is how he is using BuddyPress Groups as course instances, and the way they’ve set it up, courses are linked to groups, and through those groups course pages you get access to the latest blog posts, wire comment activity, group members, and a link to the course blog. Additionally, there’s also a fourm integrated through an integrated bbPress. The whole design gives the course a really nice landing page and overview for anyone coming in from the outside, I love this setup.

And what’s more, the group course blogs have the option of being public or private enables the option of privacy that so often gets misunderstood in this platform as non-existent.  People do have the choice in such a environment to make a decision about open or closed, most LMSs do not give the average course instance. One of the public blogs, Geology 105 is an open course that is blogging about Natural Hazards. As it turns out, professor Gallagher’s Geography 240 course is also dealing with the topic Natural Hazards. And the fact that these two courses are following a similar topic openly might allow Jon and  to actually put in place something we were talking about at WordCamp NYC, namely a sharing of ideas across our two campuses.  The platform provides a means for us to do this easily, and if eaither of these courses were in an LMS, would we have the same options? Would I have been able to discover the work at Wooster so easily? And while some say we need to rethink the LMS and work within that space to make in do these things more readily, I for one feel none of that compulsion. Working in an open source platform that provides the means to share and converse so readily precludes the need for reinventing the wheel with proprietary software. Why waste our time, now let’s get his party started right, Jonny B:)

We added a few new themes today and have many more in the wings. The themes added today are Black Canvas by StudioPress and Antisocial, Canvas, Geometric, Groovy Blog and Groovy Video by WooThemes (no affiliation with Wooster that we are aware of). All of these themes have extensive options, which allow you to customize the themes. In the case of Canvas you have over 90 options from which to choose in customizing the look of your site. Enjoy and contact us if you have questions.

In the past I and others have experienced some problems with the way that More Privacy Options for WPMu interacts with BuddyPress – or, to be more exact, with the way that the two don’t recognize each other. Blogs marked as private via MPO were getting plastered all over the public activity streams. In the past I have suggested some unpleasant but more or less functional core hacks, but now I’ve developed a plugin that does the job in the right way. It’s called … drumroll … BP MPO Activity Filter.

Check it out here.

Related posts:

1. Removing previous comment edits from BuddyPress activity – a plugin
2. New BuddyPress plugin: BP Import Blog Activity
3. New BuddyPress plugin: Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets

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.

Related posts:

1. New BuddyPress plugin: BP MPO Activity Filter
2. Removing previous comment edits from BuddyPress activity – a plugin
3. New BuddyPress plugin: BP Import Blog Activity

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.