At OpenEd09 I was part of a very necessary conversation. We were talking about different ways in which our respective universities use WordPress MU. The consensus was that in order for us to be truly successful we need to be sharing much more. Sharing our frameworks, sharing our plugins and sharing our hacks. Boone Gorges frames the conversation nicely here and talks about what is needed from developers. Enej and others responded by reviving the OLT Dev blog. However, Matthew Gold rightly said this:

But we need to build more lasting channels of communication soon, lest we miss some important connections

So here is my attempt to provide those connections:

WPMU For Education blog

The basic idea is an aggregation blog for “WPMU for education” developers. Jim Groom provided a blog from his WPMUEd domain so that a new channel, dev.wpmued could be created. I used the Add Link Widget with FeedWordPress to turn this blog into an aggregation of content from developers who are working on developing WPMU in education using the method that Jim and I came up with. I seeded it with a few of my often read WordPress MU in education blogs (myself, Jim, D’Arcy, Boone, OLT and CUNY Dev).

But we need more, much more. If you know of any other blogs that write on this subject, please add their feed to the site.  Here is the current master list of institutions that are using WordPress MU. If you have any connections to any of them help the community out by contacting them and asking them to share what they are doing. Also, before you add your feed remember to turn the number of posts up (if you have more than 10 feeds to contribute). If you use WordPress you can include a mutli-tag feed by going “your-url/tag/tag1,tag2,tag3/feed”.

This can be a powerful way to boost our combined development prowess as well as a fantastic demonstration of the power of WordPress to support a community.

the actual conversation happening (photo credit Michelle Lamberson)

Adding your feed is as simple as dropping the URL into the text box on the left sidebar. Add the password (wpmued) and you are done. I’ll be checking for new feeds periodically but you can give me a shout and I’ll activate it ASAP.

Future plans:

I plan to use Wiki Append to pull important content from the wordcamped wiki into pages (it would be done already but wiki-append is having some problems). I think the wiki can act as  a second channel of communication. I will post again as soon as all of that is set up. In the mean time, edit the wiki, give it some much needed love!

I’ve also been playing with a branding idea. A year ago I came up with the idea for the UBC BlogSquad of having badges for contributors. It has worked really well as it reminds everyone of the existence of the aggregated blog (including the blogger themselves). It also immediately identifies you as part of the community. Of course, these were all first and second year students and I am not sure if seasoned bloggers want to pollute their blog with badges. If you do, feel free to grab one below. If you don’t like the design feel free to take your own shot at it (icon design is definitely not my strong suit). If you think the idea is stupid and that something else would work better, let me know in the comments below.

so here is a mapping of my plan for a UBC content management strategy. It is designed to overcome two obstacles:

1) Content changes, therefore the content stored in repositories has to change and be updated when the source is updated. This is overcome by using a wiki (this has been Novak’s vision of content management for a while) that produces RSS feeds along with an aggregator like Feed WordPress that updates the repository when a feed gets updated (that feature is still buggy at the moment, but I will get to fixing that ASAP).

2) The second obstacle is the fact that RSS and JavaScript are not easily searchable (a must for a content repository or even an end user site). Republishing is a must until we find an easy way to index and search RSS and JSON.

So here is what it looks like (click on it for larger view):

So it’s 4:30 in the morning and I am nowhere near ready to go to bed. So instead I did the final quality testing for my “add user widget” WordPress Mu plugin.

This plugin eliminates the question that I’ve been asked plenty of times “what if a student who is not in the class adds themselves to a course blog?”. I think the answer is simple (and I think Jim and Brian would agree with me)… just delete and/or ban the user. However, in order to eliminate this barrier on implementing course blogs I modified the plugin to allow professors to enter a list of student emails. If the student’s email is in the list they can then add themselves to the list. This means that in conjunction with my Add to BDP RSS widget that Professors or institutions can decide whether anyone can add themselves, subscribers to the WordPress Mu system or only users that are in a specific list. This will now work for all three of the course blog types that I created.

This plugin is a modification of sidebar add user widget by DSader. It adds a whole bunch of control functionality that allows admin to change who is allowed to add themselves to a blog and also what type of permission is allowed. It also changes the way that the widget appears depending on the user’s status. It was developed primarily for course blogs.

Final, final update:

WordPress. org has started to show OLT some love and we are now rapidly publishing all of our plugins there. The new direct link to download sidebar add user widget is here and the plugin page is here.

Final Update:

Now that OLT has a place to house its plugins I will no longer be maintaining add user widget on this site. Instead it will live on blogs.ubc.ca. The direct link is here.

Update: V1.2.4

Fixed the problem with the plugin not reloading user’s status when they first add themselves.

Update: V1.2

Changed the way restricting users works. Now the admin can simply set a password in the widget control menu and users who know the password can add themselves to the blog.

Download V1.2.4

Download V1.2.1

Download V1.0

Installation:

Just drop into the mu-plugins folder.

Any problems/suggestions just leave a comment