Behind the Scenes

Lafayette College Redesign | Viget Four Labs Blog

Our process began with a full content audit and content inventory, a site map, and wireframes to really dig into the information architecture and user experience requirements of the redesign.

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makerfaire.com: Maker Faire

A family fun festival to MAKE, create, learn, invent, CRAFT, recycle, build, think, play & be inspired by celebrating arts, crafts, engineering, food, music, science and technology

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See the 1.0.1 milestone on our bugtracker for more information.

The session was well-attended and full of energy, and I think we touched on most if not all of the issues implicated in administering an online publishing platform at the College including pedagogy, resources, administration, and learning outcomes. BCTC was generous enough to record audio of the presentation and to post it to iTunes U, and it’s available below for your listening pleasure. For those of you who wonder what Blogs@Baruch is all about or just what it is I do around here, the audio below should answer some of your questions.

Teaching With Blogs

If you’d like to download this to your portable device for mobile edification, you can get the file here (if I link Cacophony will turn the link into an audio player): http://cac.ophony.org/audio/teachingwblogs.mp3.

The 1.0 milestone represents a couple of big changes in our development processes.

1. Versioning

   The most obvious change is the use of version numbers. It might seem at first like a relatively minor and superficial alteration in the way we operate. In truth, it’s a big change.

   Prior to the switch, our development cycles were haphazard at best. Bugs would be fixed and features implemented whenever someone on the development team happened to get around to it. That system (or lack thereof) works pretty well for a small team. But the team behind the Commons has been growing steadily over the past year, both in sheer number and in breadth (of geographical distribution, of areas of technical expertise, of responsibility). Greater distribution requires more thoughtful coordination and communication, and releasing discrete versions is a tool that we hope will help us achieve these goals.

   There are many benefits to discrete versioning. Here are a few prominent ones, off the top of my head:

   • Improved ticket management · Our ticketing system works best when tasks can be clearly assigned to individual developers, and organized according to priority. Version numbers provide a framework for this kind of management, as important tickets get assigned to earlier versions, and developer workload balance for a given release can be easily assessed.
   • Improved roadmapping · Roadmaps – software development language for “schedule of upcoming features” – are easier to understand and to implement when they’re organized by release numbers instead of thrown into a single pile.
   • Improved testing · When features and bugfixes are rolled out one-at-a-time, it can mean near-nonstop testing for the development and community team. Having controlled releases means that testing for a whole set of changes can be managed at the same time, in the days leading up to the release itself. That’s a better use of everyone’s time.
2. Better distinction between development, staging, and production

   In those halcyon days early in the life of the Commons, nearly all development was done in the live production environment. When fixing a bug or launching a feature, I’d edit the site while it was up and running. Danger, Will Robinson! So many things can go wrong when you’re editing a live site, it’s hardly worth enumerating.

   The dev team eventually did set up a development environment. But it was running on a different server from the production site, and so you could never be guaranteed that a fix on the dev site would translate to the live site. Moreover, all those little fixes that would get sneaked directly onto the production site meant the dev site and the production site got progressively more out of synch as time went on, until the dev site was sufficiently different from the live site to be next to useless as a development site.

   Our new setup is much more sophisticated and, we hope, more conducive to quality development. We have a staging environment running in exactly the same operating environment as the production environment. Development environments are all local, which is to say that each member of the development team has a functional copy of the site on his personal computer. To whatever extent possible, development takes place in those local environments, is tested in our staging environment to look for environment-specific bugs, and only then pushed to the production environmnet. The (lofty) goal is that we’ll never have to make tweaks directly to the production site.

3. Version control

   By “version control” I mean something a bit different from (though related to) “versioning” as mentioned above. Version control is a way to keep track of every change made to the files. It used to be that, when I tweaked a template or plugin file, unless I made a backup, the previous version would be overwritten and lost. Now that we’re using Git, we can always revert changes if need be (or browse the source out of mere historical curiosity!).

   The need for version control is all the more pressing as our development team grows. It’s important to keep track of who is changing what. And when you have local, independent development environments, it’s imperative that you have a way of making sure that the changes that I make on my version are not overwritten by the changes made by another member of the team when we merge them together in the staging environment. Git is designed for this kind of distributed development, as it keeps careful track of who edited what (‘git blame’, appropriately enough) and allows graceful merging of disparate edits.

   Using Git with WordPress and MediaWiki posed something of a technical challenge. For one thing, we wanted to track the entire codebase, but not files that users had uploaded to the system. Furthermore, MW and WP store crucial configuration information in the database, which is not tracked by Git. Finally, in order for local development environments to work properly, some environment-specific variables (database passwords, for instance) needed to be abstracted out of tracked files like wp-config.php. Zach at Cast Iron Coding forged a path through this jungle, and we’ve come up with a system that allows us all to keep our versions in sync using Git. In the future, I hope to write in a little more techinical detail just how this works.

   We use Git not just in our local development environments, but on the staging and production servers as well. For instance, when a release candidate has been vetted in the staging environment and is ready to go live, it’s extremely easy to launch the version on the production site: I simply shell into the production server and git pull or checkout the tagged version from the repository.

Regular writing in a WordPress-powered blog can be a useful discipline to start a writing project.  Sure you could do it in some private format, but I find the idea that other people might be reading it provides a little extra incentive to actually keep to a schedule and do the writing.   Been thinking of writing a book, but never quite get around to it – a blog with the Anthologize plug-in might be just the trick to get things moving.

Anthologize

Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

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August 19th I will be giving a webinar on multisite for the guys at webdesign.com. Curious? Then this one is for you. (You need a webdesign.com membership.)

August 21st I will be Skyping in to WordCamp Savannah to talk about some of the best plugins for network installs. This is also awesome, because it opens up HUGE possibilities for other WordCamps that may want a speaker who is unable to be there in person.

August 28th both Ron and I will be speaking at WordCamp Montreal. I’ll be talking about enabling the network and domain mapping, while Ron will be digging deep into code and go over how you can write plugins with the network / multisite in mind. We’ll be driving up, as it’s the closest WordCamp to where we live and a “short” 7 or 8 hour drive. Added bonus is we’ll be bringing our daughter Sarah who is studying to be a graphic designer at the New Brunswick College of Craft & Design. So if you see us there, be sure to say hi and give her plenty of advice.

• July 19, 2010 — WordCamp Montreal (0)
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• December 1, 2009 — More video from WordCamp New York (1)
• October 19, 2009 — WordCamp New York (1)

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As for the rest, it was pretty standard, and only one pretty minor hiccup in regards to the Atalhuapa theme which I will outline below (and the fix below comes care of the inestimable Luke Waltzer).

Basics before upgrade
You know the drill by now: Always back up all files and the database (or in my case databases), and make sure not to copy over wp-config.php as well as the wp-content directory.

OK, done with disclaimers, now for some preliminary steps before copying over the WP 3.0.1 core files, make sure you
delete the wp-content/blogs.php file for those upgrading from WPMu (which is whom this tutorial is for).

You will also need to change the .htaccess file, particularly the line pointing to wp-content/blogs.php, which now needs to point to: wp-includes/ms-files.php

This line in our .htaccess file now looks like this:

RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/(.*) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]

You should also delete your wpmu-settings.php file located in the root install directory.

If you are like me and you are using SharDB to spread your sites/blogs across several databases, you need to update to Ron’s Rennick’s latest version of SharDB.

And where ever Ron is, Andrea is not far behind (or is that vice versa?). In order to ensure that all the blogs using the default theme (which was Kubrick) are changed to TwentyTen, include the following call in your wp-config.php file (a tip you can find thanks to Andrea here):

Our default theme define in the wp-config.php file looks like this:

define(‘WP_DEFAULT_THEME’, ‘default’);

And to contextualize this a bit more, we changed the twentyten theme folder name to default, and moved the old default theme files for Kubrick into a folder called Kubrick for any of the faithful who still want to pursue it (be sure to make it available in Super Admin). Now, all sites on UMW Blogs that once had the default Kubrick theme now have TwentyTen automatically–which also means Menus will work for all those sites, and there are a good number.

Finally, I was sure to upgrade DSader’s More Privacy Options plugin before upgrading given it was throwing errors in the bavatuesdays WP 3.0 setup, I keep the new version of this plugin in the wp-content/mu-plugins directory.

The Actual Upgrade
Now run the upgrade by simply copying all the core files and directories, except wp-content and wp-config.php, into your WordPress install.

After that, go to http://yourinstall.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php and upgrade the database, cross your fingers!

If that works, go to Super Admin–> Update and updates all the individual blogs, this will take a while if you have a lot.

Finally, in the Dashboard you’ll be asked to add a Nonce Salt to your wp-config.php file. Something like:

define( ‘NONCE_SALT’, ‘yoursuppersecretkey’ ); to your wp-config.php file

The Ongoing Aftermath
The upgrade should then be done, but there may be some cleanup. For example, Luke Waltzer pointed me to this fix If you were using Ataluapa in WPMu, you’ll find none of your customized header images in Ataluapa are there, it returns to the default. This is because the theme is looking for the file wpmu-settings.php (now deprecated) instead of wp-settings.php. A quick find and replace of wpmu-settings with wp-settings on the following three files in the Atalhuapa theme did the trick for me:
functions.php
functions/bfa_header_config
functions/bfa_rotating_headers.php

And, that’s about it thus far, it was all rather smooth in the end. Though I am sure many more issues will emerge over time, I’m sure they will prove resolvable and I am quite relieved—especially given 3 sites within sites (what would now be called multi-networks?) http://greenwoodlibrary.org, http://facultyacademy.org, and http://hamptondigitalhumanities.org all survived unharmed. Saying that, I was also relieved to see that mapped domains were also left intact.

And what’s more, Ken Newquist at Lafayette College sent out the following email to the wp-edu mailing list, and it provides an excellent list of issues and updates on their road to an upgrade to WP 3.0. I’ll reproduce it in it’s entirety below, and it is very good to know new activations of Next-Gen Gallery may have issues:

Everyone,

Back in June there was some talk about WordPress 3.0 and its compatibility (or lack there of) with popular plugins and themes. We’ve recently upgraded our production instances of WordPress to 3.0, and I thought I’d give a rundown of the the problems we encountered.

==More Privacy Options==
The plugin continues to work, but it generates a PHP fatal error when you edit a site’s properties as an admin, making it impossible to save configuration changes. The latest version of the plugin fixes this problem.

==nextGen Gallery: Ignoring MultiSite directory options==
nextGen Gallery has issues with WordPress 3.0 multisite. While existing installations are working ok, folks who add the plugin after the upgrade get this error message:

“Directory wp-content/gallery/ didn’t exist. Please create first the main gallery folder !”

The problem is that Blog Directory Path, which is a network-wide option set under the super admin menu, is no longer being respected at the per site level by nextGen. If you manually set the site’s directory path using the site’s ID (available from the main site directory list in the super admin view), then things work properly, but the default setting is now incorrect.

The plugin author is aware of the problem, and is working on this and other MultiSite-specific issues for the next release.
 http://wordpress.org/support/topic/41200…

 http://code.google.com/p/nextgen-gallery…

==nextGen Gallery: Slideshow links don’t work on a static home page==
If you insert a nextGen Gallery into a page, and then make that page your home page, the link to the slideshow will not work.

==Anarchy Media Player==
Anarchy’s settings page no longer loads under WordPress 3.0.

==Mandigo (theme)==
The Mandigo setting page doesn’t load if you’re using Mandigo 1.40.1. It works properly with the current version.

==Mandigo + nextGen + WordPress 3.0==
Here’s a very specific bug — Mandigo uses an older version of JQuery in its theme, one that doesn’t include a particular method that nextGen needs. This causes a fatal error in NextGen, which then causes the JavaScript portions of the Mandigo theme to stop working.

That’s about it, and I’ll be sure to blog any and all issues, problems, or fixes we come across, and I am sure there will be more than a few. In fact, I have to do this fix for Userthemes, thank you Boone.

I also did an initial pass at support for new WordPress 3.0 -> WP network in SharDB. In this implementation the main site’s tables will be in the global database. You can easily set up a test install (to test your plugins, etc. with SharDB). Set up a fresh install that has the network enabled, create your database shards, then configure & install SharDB.

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Photo of André's keyboard by catcubed (http://www.flickr.com/photos/headlouse/1484615917/)

The Sys Admin Appreciation Day website details a number of reasons why all members of the Commons should be grateful to André for his work. And they are all true — André designed and set up our server racks, got the servers running, configured our networks, installed our software packages, performed needed system upgrades, troubleshooted thorny permissions issues, secured the site during malicious attacks, and made himself available for consultation on all sorts of issues. If you’re lucky enough to get a tour of the server room from him –I’ve done it five or six times now; it never gets old — you’ll see his eyes light up as he describes the racks he designed for this project. Sure, those eyes take on a slightly maniacal glimmer as he discusses server cooling systems, but it’s all good! Right?

There are a few things, though, that make André’s work truly special: his contagious enthusiasm for collaborative projects, his passion for open-source platforms and the communities that support them, and (most importantly), his humbleness, sincerity, and openness. The Commons is extremely lucky to have André behind it, not just because of his formidable technical expertise, but also because of the creative enthusiasm that he adds to Development Team.

And, so, on this day, I want to express my gratitude to André, my colleague and my friend, for everything he has done for the Commons. Thank you, André. You rule!

Brown University goes Google

Brown’s CIO, Michael Pickett, told me that student adoption of shared documents and the collaborative features… Now … faculty and staff have come on board as well…He was also quick to note that both Google’s and Microsoft’s solutions in this space were quite good and he recommended that universities evaluate both to see which might meet their needs better.

Brown University has gone Google

Our students were really the ones that led us down the Google path… We also decided to go this direction because of the functionalities that we believe will bring our university together, namely tools like collaborative documents, better email (with nearly 30 times the storage space we had with our previous system!) and video chat.

Gmail@Brown – Brown’s email service for Undergraduates | Brown University

Over 60% of Brown undergraduates already use Gmail to read their Brown email. Moving undergraduate accounts to Gmail is a win/win situation: a great opportunity to give undergraduates the mailbox capacity they need, while also helping the university reduce expenditures.

Google Apps vs. Exchange: Microsoft Outlook Perspective on Google Apps EMail

I have lived through several eras of business communication and the most important lesson I have learned is to not cling to the past. Outlook and Exchange mail haven’t changed much in over a decade and it was time for me to move on. I won’t miss Outlook any more than I miss the typing pool.

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• Action-orientated:  any action is better than no action
• Interest:  emotional, perceptual or attachment factors
• Pattern-mis-recognition:  I’ve seen this before (but you is wrong)
• Stability bias:  we’ve always done it this way in the past…
• Social bias:  keep everyone happy

Don’t kid yourself.  In any decision-making process most (if not all) of these biases are present.  As a human they are hard-coded into our DNA – you can’t avoid them.  But you can recognize they exist and manage the process to minimize their impact.   For instance counter pattern recognition bias with problem reframing and role reversal to help participants see the issues from a new angle.  See this McKinsey article for more tips.

The case for behavioral strategy – McKinsey Quarterly – Strategy – Strategic Thinking

…we need new norms for activities such as managing meetings (for more on running unbiased meetings, see “Taking the bias out of meetings”), gathering data, discussing analogies, and stimulating debate that together can diminish the impact of cognitive biases on critical decisions. To support those new norms, we also need a simple language for recognizing and discussing biases, one that is grounded in the reality of corporate life, as opposed to the sometimes-arcane language of academia.

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$blog_list = get_blog_list( 0, 'all' );
foreach ($blog_list AS $blog) {
echo 'Blog '.$blog['blog_id'].': '.$blog['domain'].$blog['path'].'
';
}

Paste that somewhere in a theme file or page template and there you go. Hope someone finds it handy and gets inspired to write a snazzy plugin, possibly a shortcode.

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• August 2, 2009 — WordPress MU Theme Stats (3)
• June 29, 2010 — BuddyPress Author Link (0)
• June 28, 2010 — Another Featured Posts update (12)
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Over time the –1s will trend up towards 0, at least in a healthy organization where, for instance, mistakes in a deployment are corrected given a little extra time.  But equally the +1s trend back down to 0 as the improvements become the accepted and expected standard.  In looking across all projects in an organization we’ll expect to see a range of scores with a balance of +1s, 0s and –1s.  There is a fair amount of just regular work that needs to be done – 0s.  And resources are limited, so not every new initiative can be a +1 – some may fall to just a 0, and some may even hit as a –1.  A –1 needs to be addressed over time, but doesn’t necessarily indicate a lack of planning.  It may just indicate an attempt to keep budget tight, resources pulled off to support another project, and a few unexpected circumstances that kicks a planned 0 down below the grade.  No mistakes indicates that you’re not trying hard enough, while too numerous or persistent –1s could indicate some structural problems.

I like the idea – it fells very real, and focuses attention on what really matters.  On one end of the spectrum, how you add value to the organization?  And on the other where did we miss the mark, why, and how is that corrected over time? 

Secret CIO: A Simple Scoring System For Complex Times — Secret CIO — InformationWeek

Most IT organizations either a) need fixing, because things aren’t working; b) are doing OK because nothing’s on fire; or c) are enabling competitive advantage by boosting revenue, cost savings, customer satisfaction, and overall business value.

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How to Make Time for Strategy – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership

One item that showed up on every CIO’s top-three list was “You were hired to be strategic, but you are forced to spend most of your time on operational issues.” I spoke to five of the Council’s most strategy-minded CIOs about how they managed to get out of the operational morass.

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adaptive path » blog » Chiara Fox Ogan » Strategy & Design; But Wait, There’s More

I’ve put together this this diagram that shows the general tasks that go into a typical site redesign with a new CMS implementation. It shows where the Strategy and Design tasks stop and where Implementation starts. It also shows what roles are involved in the different stages.

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Surround that in php tags.

For added snazziness and extra bonus points on your homework, go grab a copy of the blank widget Blank Build-A-Widget (970) paste this code in there, and you’ve just made a network stats widget. Awesome, you rock

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Andrea & I have had a fantastic time at every WordCamp we have attended and we enjoy meeting other people who use WordPress. If you have never been to one, this will be a great one for you to attend. Whatever you are doing with WordPress, you can be sure that you’ll have a chance to talk to others who have been or are interested in doing the same

• August 10, 2010 — Mark your calendars (0)
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• October 19, 2009 — WordCamp New York (1)

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The magic line is this in your config file:

define('WP_DEFAULT_THEME', 'classic');

In this example, the classic theme is used as the default when a site is created, or when a theme in use is removed. If you are starting fresh with 3.0, the default is the new TwentyTen, so this override is handy.

Added tip: if you have a lot of blogs using the Kubrick theme and wanted to remove it and set the other blogs, do this define first with your new default theme, then remove or rename the Kubrick theme folder (in my it was simply “default”). On a refresh, all blogs using the Kubrick theme will be switched to your new default.

If you just wanted the Kubrick theme to go away and have twentyten show up, you won’t need to do the define above. Just rename the /default/ theme folder. It’ll kick in.

(thanks to Ron for reminding me & MichaelH for the codex note I missed)

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Last Updated Sites widget (98)

I tested it in the mu-plugins folder, but you should also be able to use it as a regular plugin as it only needs to run on one blog. It’s also the older widget code, so you can only use it once, not multiple times, and it has no options. Short, sweet & simple.

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So, if you’re looking to have a widget that will show the last ten blogs, go get it here.

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WordPress beyond blogging from UKOLN on Vimeo.

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In the mean time, you can download my updated version: WP125 Ads Plugin (129). If you have issues with it, please post those issues in the support thread linked above. I won’t be attempting to do other bug fixes or CSS changes.

• July 21, 2010 — Theme Stats Updated (0)
• June 29, 2010 — BuddyPress Author Link (0)
• June 28, 2010 — Another Featured Posts update (12)
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• June 21, 2010 — Everything you wanted to know about creating a network of multiple sites in 3.0 (64)

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Image credit: Thomas Hawk’s No Dark Sarcasm in the classroom

I’m not sure when I got derailed from the Summer of Love, it was all going so well. And then the bastards, scum bags, and profit-driven web denizens seemed to hang over my thoughts like a dark cloud. I’ve been brooding a lot, and generally gnashing my teeth, in fact I’ve found myself pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet. And whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking peoples hats off — then, I account it high time to get back to some tinkering. And the only thing I know how to tinker with is WPMu, which is now gone, so I started playing with WP 3.0 and BuddyPress for a project I am working on (more on this anon).

And for the last few days I have been hacking around in 3.0 and BuddyPress, and doing some research into what is working on UMW Blogs and what isn’t in terms of plugins, themes, etc. And what struck me as I was searching for updated versions of plugins for WPMu (as well as themes for BuddyPress) was just how brilliantly James Farmer has turned the hard, GPL-licensed work of many a WPMu plugin developer that once lived contently on http://wpmudev.org into a subscription-based business model. I mean, it’s as if all those plugins on WPMuDev that the WPMu community consulted and used for years have all but vanished behind a pay wall.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are still a few free plugins there, but the original links to WPMu plugins like Dsaders Userthemes, More Privacy Options, and his Sitewide 3-in-1 Multi Widget Panel have strangely morphed into plugins behind the pay wall. Let’s take a look how this whole SEO, google-inspired, redirect scam works.

So, I look for the 3-in-1 widget and I get to the above wpmu.org page (no link there from this blog, which reminds me that I need to clean up my database, which has become inadvertently full of links to the premium.wpmudev.org site—given the old links to the plugins on wpmudev.org are now all redirected there….scummy). This post about the 3-in-1 plugin is on wpmudev.org, and was submitted to wpmu.org for the WPMu plugin contest sponsored by Farmer and co. for the last few years, and has since become one of the top hits in google for getting this plugin.

Now, what happens when you click the link to get his plugin….

It seems subtle, but what happens here is that wpmu.org is pushing you not to the plugin site (which seems all but gone off wpmudev.org), but rather a plugin cobbled together by the wpmudev premium team that has the same ideas and functionality as dsaders 3-in-1 widget, with one huge difference—its not free to download. Its locked up with the rest of the history of WPMu behind the premium pay wall. And you might say, oh well, such is life. WPMu is defunct now, and those plugins would just be so much internet kipple anyway, so no big loss. In fact, Farmer and his ilk are doing us a favor—they are keeping us clean and honest, not unlike Apple. But what strikes me here, is that those plugins are just as relevant as they were two years ago, we still need to display content from the tags blog in UMW Blogs, and a whole public space of development happened on Farmers server, and when the time was right, he commodified all that work and development to make his brand, seal is google dominance (which is insanely impressive, btw), and I guess he had every right to. He provided the space, and ultimately that means he dicatated the terms. The terms were pretty unilateral in retrospect, and a lot of great work seems all but lost now

And just in the event someone says the example above is an isolated case, let me give you yet another one that I stumbled on while trying to piece together a site.

More Privacy Options, which used to be a plugin that you could get on wpmudev.org through a straight link: http://wpmudev.org/project/More-Privacy-… (I link to that plugin in this post from 2009) and if you follow the link you’ll quickly see it has been transmogrified into a way to sell Farmer’s premium service plugins (links as capital remains its own crazy economy, and one farmer has figured out very well). It points to a page selling their Privacy options for WordPress MU plugin (almost exactly the same plugin as dsader’s, with one or two tweaks for sitewide settings). So, the bava has become a way of driving traffic, and by extension advertising, wpmudev’s premium subscription and I didn’t even realize it. I’m gonna need to erase a whole series of links from my database. Now doesn’t that seem scummy? Not even a redirect to the plugin which is now in the wordpress.org repository, why? Fact is, all these plugins are still relevant, and this link-laid scam makes it seem as if they are all pay-to-play now—how is that for stewardship of a community?

Is there anyone else out there in the WPMu/WP community that sees this shit going on and is like, “Jesus, wpmudev can suck it!” Sometimes I wonder, and add to that they are the only folks pumping out BuddyPress themes, and it would appear that WPMUDev are the main developers for the flagship projects like multi-site and BuddyPress in the WordPress community. Once again, the Google manipulation works, and the emergence of wpmu.org and wpmudev.org as the dominant sites for wpmu, buddypress, and beyond is all too apparent to me these last days of rusty searching.

But then, there is a light, a strong beacon I can hold onto: this list of free (can you imagine that?!) plugins at CUNY’s Academic Commons gives me hope for an developmental education community around blogging, multi-site, themes, and plugins that is not all about link baiting for Google juice to control the world. Long live Boone Gorges! Oh wait, and then there is the awesome work by the hit squad at UBC’s OLT, featured beautifully in this wiki page on their Management Framework development.

My only question is, can the free and open rebellion survive when the essence of the web, a simple url, is being hijacked for profit or eliminated all together by the gold-lined app revolution?

In 3.0, this was made more stringent with the merge. the theme editor was left in with only Super Admins having access to it. Regular site administrators should not have access.

Some themes, however, have additional menu items (options pages) that use the capability edit_themes to access.

If you find this is happening to you, just search the theme’s functions.php file and change the edit_themes cap to edit_themes_options. That should fix it.

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• June 28, 2010 — Another Featured Posts update (12)
• July 21, 2010 — Theme Stats Updated (0)
• June 27, 2010 — Network Privacy (9)
• June 21, 2010 — Everything you wanted to know about creating a network of multiple sites in 3.0 (61)
• July 11, 2010 — WP125 Ads Plugin (6)

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Download it from the repo: Featured Posts

• June 29, 2010 — BuddyPress Author Link (0)
• July 21, 2010 — Theme Stats Updated (0)
• June 27, 2010 — Network Privacy (9)
• June 21, 2010 — Everything you wanted to know about creating a network of multiple sites in 3.0 (45)
• July 11, 2010 — WP125 Ads Plugin (6)

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In a single site WordPress install adds the following privacy options:

• I would like my site to be visible only to Site subscribers.
• I would like my site to be visible only to Site administrators.

In a WordPress network activated on an individual site adds the following privacy options:

• I would like my site to be visible only to Registered network users.
• I would like my site to be visible only to Site subscribers.
• I would like my site to be visible only to Site administrators.

When Network Activated or in the mu-plugins folder in a WordPress network adds the following:

• A privacy selector in the Super Admin -> Options page to allow individual site privacy or the 3 above across the network.
• If the network setting is individual privacy the Super Admin -> Edit Site screen has a privacy selector.

Thanks to D Sader for the original version. Download Network Privacy.

• June 29, 2010 — BuddyPress Author Link (0)
• June 28, 2010 — Another Featured Posts update (12)
• June 21, 2010 — Everything you wanted to know about creating a network of multiple sites in 3.0 (45)
• April 12, 2010 — Disabling the Plugin/Theme editor 3.0 (12)
• May 31, 2009 — ComLuv Beta (2)

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If you were using WPMU, not only did Site Admin change to Super Admin, the location of adding another one changed as well, so heads up.

Under the Super Admin -> Users menu, find the user you wish to promote. Hover over their username and a small “edit” link will appear beneath it. Click it. This will lead you to the user’s profile page.

Scroll down to the “Name” section.

I’ve obfuscated the username in this case, but here you can see the checkbox selected to make this user a Super Admin on my site. Hit the update button to save the chage, and the user now has access to the Super Admin menu.

• June 23, 2010 — What is the mu-plugins folder? (3)
• August 23, 2009 — Show user id in site admin (1)
• June 21, 2010 — Everything you wanted to know about creating a network of multiple sites in 3.0 (45)
• November 20, 2009 — CSS Editor plugins (1)
• August 2, 2009 — WordPress MU Theme Stats (3)

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Support for this folder has actually been in single WordPress since 2.7.

In WPMU, you never saw any reference to this folder from the backend at all. Just drop the code in, and the plugin was already running.

In 3.0, support for this is naturally still there, but the folder isn’t created for you. If you do encounter a plugin (like domain mapping) that needs to run in this folder, simply create it via ftp or through your webhost’s control panel.

Also in the backend, if you are using the mu-plugins folder, is this:

A listing! You’ll note on this example site (other than we really need to clean out the plugins we were testing), must-use plugins are now listed. This will only be visible to Super Admins – regular administrators, even with access to the Plugins menu, will not see this.

While you may be tempted to toss all your plugins in there – don’t. Like stated above, the code placed in here runs automatically and (depending on how the plugin is coded) on every single page load. Also, any files in folders will not be seen. There must be a physical php file there to be read.

Popular plugins that do belong in this folder are ones like Domain Mapping and New Blog Defaults. Please make sure to always read the readme.txt included with any plugin, as it will specifically state if it should be installed in this folder.

• June 24, 2010 — How to add a new Super Admin (1)
• June 21, 2010 — Everything you wanted to know about creating a network of multiple sites in 3.0 (42)
• June 29, 2010 — BuddyPress Author Link (0)
• June 28, 2010 — Another Featured Posts update (12)
• June 27, 2010 — Network Privacy (9)

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Please note that this workaround is very much a hack. It shouldn’t cause any security issues (see explanation below), but it will break the next time you upgrade WP.

Joe’s problem was that the plugin was only working for Super Admins. Administrators of single Sites could not copy new Userthemes, and they were redirected to the dreaded wp-admin/?c=1 when they tried to access the Edit Userthemes panel on the Dashboard. I figured it was a problem with permissions, and it was: all of those functions are triggered only for those users with the capability edit_themes, but for some reason only Super Admins, and not Administrators, were showing up as having that ability. (The weird thing – when I did a var_dump of WP Roles, I saw that Administrator *did* have edit_themes.) Maybe there’s some setting in WPMS that allows users to edit themes, but I couldn’t see it.

So the solution is to change the edit_themes check to something else. switch_themes seemed like an obvious choice to me, since anyone with the ability to switch themes on a given blog would also have had the ability to edit themes on that same blog. So there shouldn’t be a security problem – only blog admins should have the ability to make userthemes.

You’ll need to modify the plugin, as well as a few lines in the WordPress core.

1. Back up. I’m not responsible for anything that goes wrong!
2. Open the userthemes.php file. (I’d link to it, but I can’t find it anywhere on the web. When I’m at a better internet connection, maybe I’ll upload a version for you to edit. Maybe someone out there has a copy to share.) Search for all instances of ‘edit_themes’ and replace with ‘switch_themes’.
3. From your WP root directory, open wp-admin/theme-editor.php. On line 12, change ‘edit_themes’ to ‘switch_themes’.
4. From your WP root directory, open wp-admin/menu.php. On line 173, change ‘edit_themes’ to ‘switch_themes’.

Related posts:

1. Making Sitewide Tags work
2. Sitewide Tag Suggestion in WordPress MU 2.8+
3. Setting up a WordPress/BuddyPress development environment on OS X

And after I’ve been working with WordPress MU for so long (3 years? Already?) I can assure you that it had WAY more fiddly bits and the devs have distilled this down to as little fuss as possible.

What you need to know before you begin

I’ve been reading many questions and blog posts about the “new” multisite feature and wondering how it compares or not to WPMU. The functionality is basically exactly the same. There were no new features added.

If you are currently using WordPressMU and have multiple blogs/sites, you do not need to do this. You are already running a network.

Running a network, especially if you are letting other users sign up, involves sometimes substantially more knowledge about servers that just being a customer on a shared host. If you have difficulty installing WordPress via something like Fantastico and have never done it manually, then running a network is probably not for you.

If you’re new, there’s a few things you need to be aware of.

1. The sites are virtual. They don’t exist on the server, just in the database.
2. The sites are siloed content. While you do have one username and password across the site, you still need to go to each one to do things like post.
3. Your webhost has to support it. By support, I don’t mean answer specific questions about functions, I mean support from a technical perspective. The subdomain sites are driven by the use of wildcard subdomains. For subfolders, mod_rewrite. The mod_rewrite function is also used to serve uploaded files in either format. in other words, Windows servers are a little more trouble.

Getting the Network menu item to show

This menu is hidden by default. If you followed along the development cycle, you may have noticed it was easily visible. The decision was made to effectively hide it so users would have to seek it out and be armed with knowledge (hopefully) before they clicked any buttons willy-nilly.

Find the wp-config.php file in the root of your site, make a backup first, then open it up and add this line.

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

Please paste this somewhere in the middle. I like to stick it after the salts, but that’s just me. It absolutely cannot go at the beginning or the end. If you look closely, there are a couple of comments within the config file telling you not to edit above or below those lines. So don’t.

Save the file. Make sure it gets saved, too, as sometimes you may have a setup where the owner of the file is not you, but Apache. Get your webhost to change the owner so you can edit it, then when we’re all done, change it back for security.

Installing the network part 1

Now when you login, you’ll notice a new menu under Tools -> Network. Most of the options are pre-filled for you, based on your main install. This will now be the main site in your network.

You may or may not be given the choice between subdomains or subfolders. This depends on a few things.

• - subfolders are disabled if your install is more than a month old. Why? Because the subfolder setup stuffs a /blog/ in the permalinks off the main site to prevent collisions between page names and site names. In an exisiting setting, changing your permalinks on you would not be good. This will be dealt with in a future version.
• - If you are using an IP address or just localhost, you’ll only have the option of subfolders. Same as if you entire install runs out of a folder. (Like mydomain.com/wp/)
• - No choice: If your site URL is different than your home URL, meaning your WP install is in a folder and the index.php is a level above, then you can’t enable the network. No really, you can’t. There’s no .htacess tricks you can do. This setup really interferes with the individual sites lookup. Domain mapping won’t fix it either. People have been trying to wrangle it for 3 or 4 years now, and it’s just not possible.

I have seen some unexpected options show up depending on what part of the setup is detected first, so your mileage may vary.

If your installation is in the root of your website, that is the best place for it. You’ll have the choice of either as long as your webhost supports it.

Once you’ve clicked the button it’s on to…

Installing the Network part 2

Wow, wall of text.

There’s two textboxes here. The first one deals with more defines for your wp-config.php file. Copy them , and paste them right in your wp-config.php file you edited earlier. I like to put these lines right after the define multisite line we did earlier. This is just to keep them all together.

The next textbox has htaccess rules. The .htaccess file is a hidden file in the root of your site. Make sure whatever you’re using to look at the file system has “show hidden file” enabled. After making a backed up this file, replace whatever you have in the htaccess file with the new rules. These control how the blogs and extra files are served.

You also need to create a new folder under wp-content called blogs.dir. This folder is where site uploads will be stored. Just media uploads, not posts. They are held in folders with the blog/siteID number in front of them, and then rewritten via the htaccess file to hide that part to the viewer.

Once you’ve saved both file on the server, log out of the WordPress admin area.

When you log back in, you’ll see a new menu box called Super Admin. This area is for global management of your new network of sites. You may now add new sites at will. They show up instantly.

Help! I picked the wrong format!

In case you picked subfolders or subdomains, found out it wasn’t working for some reason or realized it was the wrong choice, you CAN change this without reinstalling. It’s a little tricky and comes with caveats.

Caveat #1 – you have to sacrifice any sites you already made
Caveat #2 – if you’re forcing the subfolder install, it WILL stuff the /blog/ permalink in there and you’ll need a plugin to remove. And I haven’t tested this.

Open up your wp-config.php file and find this line:

define( 'SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL', true ); 

It will be either true or false. True means you’re using subdomains, false means subfolders. Change it to the one you want. Keep the previous caveats in mind.

Don’t forget to subscribe to my feed so I can show you how to use it.

There’s still plenty of good and relevant posts here in the archives, like these ones I’ve hand-picked for new users:
enabling wildcard subdomains
Enabling a theme for just one site
domain mapping

Plugins that have instructions to go in the mu-plugins folder are still relevant. Just create the folder under /wp-content/ and use away!

• June 29, 2010 — BuddyPress Author Link (0)
• June 28, 2010 — Another Featured Posts update (10)
• June 27, 2010 — Network Privacy (9)
• June 24, 2010 — How to add a new Super Admin (1)
• June 23, 2010 — What is the mu-plugins folder? (3)

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Post tags: multisite, network, networks, WordPress 3.0

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First, backup your database(s) and the entire wp-content folder. Then hit the Upgrade button.

You’ll notice immediately after doing the auto-upgrade that there’s a yellow message in the admin area that states the following:

The wp-content/blogs.php file is deprecated. Please remove it and update your server rewrite rules to use wp-includes/ms-files.php instead.

So, go ahead via ftp or through your web hosts control panel and delete the blogs.php file from the /wp-content/ folder. It’s been moved and renamed to /wp-includes/ms-files.php for you already.

You’ll now need to update your .htaccess file so your uploaded images will continue to display properly for your users. Find the line that says:

RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/(.*) wp-content/blogs.php?file=$2 [L]

and change it to this:

RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/(.*) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]

You will also need to add a nonce salt to wp-config.php. You’ll get a warning about it and it will look similar to this:

 define( 'NONCE_SALT', '6xF{&bvT_PAsmbnG<72.dJH>D8R8M!M{~r.U]-~j:rG!g!0(g7hvz)+/h9 IY7Ge' ); 

Stuff it in there with your other salts.

If you decide to upgrade manually, replacing the new files, make sure you snag the new TwentyTen default theme, as well as make the above changes. Feel free to finally dump Kubrick & Classic.

One of the things you will instantly notice is the renaming of the menus. Now that you’ve completed the basic upgrade, make sure your entire network gets updated by visiting the Super Admin -> Update page. As before, this will step through the blogs (now sites) a chunk at a time, applying any needed database changes.

Additional notes:
Since you are upgrading from WPMU, you are already running a network of sites. Please DO NOT follow the Create a Network instructions, as you will not need them.

If you’re running our multi-site plugin, no worries! It has worked smoothly for us and reportedly others who have upgraded MU.

In case you are running a version of WPMU earlier than the 2.9 branch, please step through upgrades manually to 2.9.x as outlined in the codex. Then you can continue as above.

• June 17, 2010 — The age of Thelonious and WordPress 3.0 (8)
• April 28, 2010 — Upgradephobia (6)
• April 12, 2010 — Disabling the Plugin/Theme editor 3.0 (12)
• January 24, 2010 — SharDB update (8)
• January 21, 2010 — Testers, start your engines (6)

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I’ve been watching the download counter whirl by.

This release marks the official end of separate WordPressMU development. The exisiting functionality is now a part of WordPress core and is know as a Network of Sites.

So, for existing MU users, you’ll see some terminology changes in the backend:
- Blogs are now Sites
- Site is now Network
- Site Admin is now Super Admin

If you’re using a plugin that has hard-coded references to the site admin menu areas, they will need to be updated. The wp-content/blogs.php file is deprecated. You will need to remove it and update your server rewrite rules to use wp-includes/ms-files.php instead. We’ll be writing an extensive tutorial for upgrading over the next few days.

I know a lot of you are super-cautious and do not upgrade right away anyway, to make sure all the kinks are out. Now that the MU functionality is in core WordPress, it has been tested and re-tested probably more than it has ever been.

What happens to us? Well, first off a little nap and some catching up on the piles of client work and things. This blog will remain, as many people will be running their current MU installs for a while. Plus, the archives are pretty darn useful.

Going forward, we will still be here – with a new look, a slightly different name and a small shift in focus to the new users. We’ll still intersperse with more advanced things, highlighting a few goodies that are now open to use, and more of the how-to’s you’re used to. Maybe even more often! I smell a relaunch in the air.

• January 21, 2010 — Testers, start your engines (6)
• June 18, 2010 — Upgrading from WPMU to WP 3.0 (39)
• January 14, 2010 — 2.9.1 released, last before merge (6)
• January 6, 2010 — Merge News (1)
• January 5, 2010 — The merge begins (22)

© andrea for WPMU Tutorials, 2010. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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One of his quick tips was for this Firefox add-on, which makes it easy to include some of your site tracking tags into shortened URLs used on services like Twitter and Facebook. 

A Firefox sidebar to easily shorten URLs, plus add Google Analytics tracking tags. Great for measuring traffic from Twitter. Snip-n-Tag currently supports five of the most popular URL shortening websites, including tr.im, bit.ly and tinyurl.

Snip-n-Tag :: Add-ons for Firefox

Related Posts

• Watch your website visitors
• Google apps is great for group work
• MS Office as a front end to Google Docs?
• Brown takes the Gmail plunge
• Evolving role for e-portfolios

Howard takes on a writing assignment where he is to turn his Brooklyn backyard into an urban farm with enough produce to provide all his food for one month.  Perhaps in modern America’s supersize, convenience-food culture this seems like a tough challenge.  But let’s face it – most of us could fast for 30 days and survive.  Howard’s book has it funny moments, especially in the early chapters.—at one point I had to put the book down because I was laughing hysterically on the commuter train and was afraid my fellow passengers would think I was insane (at least more so than usual.)  But by the fourth or fifth chapter I grew tired of Howard’s whole desperate approach which in many cases almost predicted his eventual disastrous outcomes.

Frauenfelder has his share of bad outcomes, but somehow seems to avoid disaster.  Not so much because the outcomes are very different from Howard’s (although he does manage to keep all of his fingers attached, something Howard couldn’t avoid.) but because of his attitude both going in and coming out of a project.  Is DIY more expensive and time consuming than buying pre-packaged?  Yes.  Is a successful outcome less likely to occur?  Yes.  So why bother?  For Frauenfelder the reason is to enjoy a stronger connection to the world around us.  Consider a package of shrink-wrapped lettuce purchased in the local sprawlmart vs.  home grown, raised from seed, backyard lettuce.  Backyard lettuce certainly has been chewed on by some of the local fauna (i.e. slugs or rabbits) and may not look as pretty,  But it carries a personal satisfaction that shrink-wrap never will.

For Frauenfelder DIY is about the journey, not necessarily the outcome.  A less-than-perfect outcome is not a failure and if it informs future iterations it may well lead to future successes.  Embrace this reality, and you adopt an approach that keeps the size of these failures small and manageable.  For Howard the focus is always on the outcome, with failure not even an option.  As a result he too often seems to be fighting the world around him rather than embracing it.  And ultimately he misses out on the fun and joy that Frauenfelder and his fellow DIY-er’s find.

Related Posts

• Did the internet take a wrong turn?
• Software development? Let users do the work!
• Taking hidden bias out of decision making
• Making the Switch to better change
• 40th Anniversaries — 1969 was a heck of a year

Let us now bullet-point our praise for Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, two Tokyo-based architects who have turned PowerPoint, that fixture of cubicle life, into both art form and competitive sport. Their innovation, dubbed pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter"), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each.

Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down

Related Posts

• Making smooth presentations

New in the Featured Posts plugin: a short code. Set it up, pull in a feed, pick & choose your posts, slap the shortcode in a page you’ve set to home and there you go.

Download it from the repo: Featured Posts

• October 26, 2009 — Featured posts plugin and widget (33)
• June 28, 2010 — Another Featured Posts update (10)
• June 27, 2010 — Network Privacy (8)
• May 12, 2010 — Upgrading to 3.0 (8)
• April 12, 2010 — Disabling the Plugin/Theme editor 3.0 (12)

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Post tags: feature, featured post, plugin, post, rss feed, update

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I started off explaining briefly how to enable the network. Then, I walked users through installing the domain mapping plugin, setting it up, and doing all the DNS work. It’s exactly the same as it always was in WordPressMU, but now that we are just about post-merge, I am finding many people think it is much easier. On the technical side, like I just said, it is exactly the same. Exactly. Guess it’s a matter of perception.

This is a great technique and will be handy for a lot of people, so if you are planning a WordCamp and want to see us there and have me give this presentation, hassle your local organizers. It looks like we’ll be going to New York and Montreal this fall. If you want to sponsor a trip, even better.

If you’re here because I hassled you into signing up to the feed, welcome!

• June 9, 2010 — BuddyPress Child Themes (2)
• December 1, 2009 — More video from WordCamp New York (1)
• November 26, 2009 — Domain mapping updates (2)
• October 19, 2009 — WordCamp New York (1)

© andrea for WPMU Tutorials, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: chicago, domain mapping, presentation, slides, speakers, speaking, WCChicago2010, wordcamp

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• June 9, 2010 — I went to WordCamp Chicago and all you get is this lousy blog post (2)
• December 27, 2009 — Merge news and Buddypress awesomeness (7)
• December 1, 2009 — More video from WordCamp New York (1)
• November 30, 2009 — Free BuddyPress themes (3)
• November 22, 2009 — Buddymatic Theme Framework (19)

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We in technology often fall into this trap  — this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this type of response to an issue. Why do we do this?  Because for the most part we’re focused on the technology.  Which isn’t a bad thing.  But how about a focus on the customer and what they need?  Which is easy to use, quick to implement technology.  Some thoughts:

1. Find the shortest way to accomplish standard customer tasks.  Then invest time in making them even shorter and easier.  Time is money for your customer and every second counts.
2. Make furniture and fixtures fade into the background.  For instance they don’t need to be able to change colors and layout on their control panel interface — that’s furniture.  What they need is an easy streamlined way to add and edit content.
3. The customer is not always right.  Listen to what the customer asks and solve their problem, don’t just answer their questions.  In my tech support issue mentioned above I received a solution which involved accessing another control panel with its own different login and a whole different toolset.  While it did answer my questions, upon pondering the situation anew I realized my whole approach was incorrect, and there is actually an easier, more direct way to accomplish the task.  The answer I receive stated essential “If you want to do it that way you’ll need to log into this other tool and do this other setup task.”  What they should have said is “Why are you doing it that way?  (Customer is not always right) And “we normally see people have better success doing it this way.”

A customer focused approach in tech support, application design, and other technology implementation creates value and will be seen as an asset.  Too much of a technology focus creates hassle and a perception of technology as a cost — and these days we’re all trying to cut costs.  I don’t know about you, but I’d rather been seen as an asset.

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For a book with a motorcycle on the cover it was surprisingly philosophical – like with references to Kant and Heidegger (a real pissant and a boozy beggar according to Monty Python)  But then again with a doctorate in philosophy the author is not your typical motorcycle mechanic.  Crawford draws quite a bit on his own negative experiences in both the academic world and the white-collar world of a think tank job, and draws conclusions from those experiences that came off to me as somewhat colored by the experience.  Not that, in a world where Dilbert comics and the popular TV series The Office often feel more like fact than fiction, we don’t need to skeptically question the modern white collar office.  And the educational system that prepares the new recruits – we do.  But there has always been a certain tension around the role of the employee in a business workplace, be it Charles Dickens, Will Rogers, or Scott Adams.  I don’t know that we’re any worse off today than we were 100 years ago, and in many ways maybe a little better.

Crawford does raise some great points.  In a section on the idea of displaced agency he refers to the modern tendency for interactions to be pre-determined by technology.  Take a modern public restroom with its sensor driven toilet flushers, faucets and paperless hand driers.  You the user don’t get to determine when the toilet flushes, how hot the water is that you use to wash yours hands or how long the hot air runs over your hands.  Some designer far removed from your current circumstance has determined those details for you.  What a personally unsatisfying experience it can be – and how absurd that we no longer get to determine these little variables ourselves.  Project this design esthetic into places of our lives that really matter, and it is pretty clear how dehumanizing technology can be when poorly implemented. 

Where technology is well implemented is allow workers to be the master of their own stuff; make decisions based on their personal experience; participate in a community of fellow workers/enthusiasts/professionals; and take responsibility for the outcomes.  Roles should be defined in the workplace so that experience in a particular area is respected.  And there is a clear pathway from neophyte to progress to this master status.  Designers far distanced from an experienced can’t create a truly human situation.  The richest and most human experiences happen when the designers are also the users – think open source software like WordPress, or an owner-built cabin.  We don’t all need to drop out of the rat race, and become motorcycle mechanics (tempting as that may be.)   But the qualities and ideas behind the notion of craft can inform and define a pathway to excellence on a human scale.

Max Bloomquist brings his considerable talents to Crawford’s meditation on the meaning of work and disparity between blue collar and white collar occupations. Crawford draws on his own experience—he quit a miserable think tank job and has found joy and meaning working as a motorcycle mechanic—to question the presumed value of the cubicle working world, deplore society’s disconnection from the material world and vividly convey the reward of working with one’s hands. Bloomquist reads with authority and erudition; his steady, everyman narration makes Crawford’s well-founded arguments even more persuasive.

Amazon.com: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of…

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Cycling Cap Pattern on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

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As competitive environments increase in speed, complexity and volatility, organizations and individuals are compelled toward a dynamic learning mindset. Dynamic learning is defined as rapid, adaptive, collaborative and self-directed learning at the moment of need.

Agile Learning: Thriving in the New Normal – Chief Learning Officer magazine

Learning needs to be integrated into work – and not vice versa – and "learning" in all its forms  needs NOT to be tracked or controlled in LMS – but enabled and supported within a more open collaborative enterprise (workflow) system…  

The state of learning in the workplace today

Establishment of formalized communities of practice can help fill in the gap.  Informal employee networks already exist in the workplace, and are a major factor in knowledge transfer and shared problem solving.  But their informal nature risks a lack of focus and non-alignment with strategic objectives.  Establishing formalized learning networks can mobilize workers and create a just-in-time learning resource that matches today’s requirements in the fast-paced workplace.

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This change from a mechanical/hardware driven function to software control has been subtle, gradual, and I think largely unnoticed by most people unless something goes wrong – as the recent Toyota cars running out of control with suspected software malfunctions.  For most consumers this change has been a good thing, resulting in cheaper, better functioning products – the iPad has certainly garnered plenty of attention.  But as Richard Stallman pointed out almost 25 years ago, software is policy – and manufacturers will always favor their needs (control, earn a profit) over the end-user’s needs (make my stuff do what I want.)  Hardware can be open source – like the Arduino controller – which is a supportable business model.  Or manufacturers can ignore, or even actively encourage open source hardware hack projects to evolve – as with the Canon Powershot camera.  Many will argue that we should let the marketplace reward and encourage these enlightened approaches (I will not longer consider iPod or iPad purchase due to the closed proprietary platform).  And not use legislature to pressure the more closed, and outright hostile to end-user control (as with Apple) manufacturers to open up.  I’m not quite sure what the answer is, but I do think an active, public debate is needed.  I support calls for the US Department of Justice to open monopoly investigations into Apple’s practices around the iPhone and iPad apps support.  There may not be enough there to justify prosecution, but it is worth the time to look.

CHDK Wiki

CHDK – Unleash the POWER in your Canon PowerShot!

What is CHDK?

• Canon Hack Development Kit;
• Temporary – No permanent changes are made to the camera.
• Experimental – No warranty. Read about the risks in the FAQ
• Free – free to use and modify, released under the GPL.

Right to Repair

The need for Right to Repair legislation has become a necessity in order to protect the rights of car owners to decide where and how they have their vehicles serviced, whether at a new car dealer or an independent service facility.

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Upgrading a WordPress MU install to the WordPress 3.0 RC with the built in upgrade feature is now possible with the WordPress Beta Tester plugin. Here are the steps:

• Make a backup of your database and files in your MU install
• Install and activate the latest (0.92) version of the Beta Tester plugin
• Go to the beta tester admin page under Tools->Beta Testing
• Choose the Bleeding edge nightlies radio button & Save
• Click on the head on over and update now link to go to the Update admin page
• Click on Upgrade Automatically
• After the upgrade is complete, click on your Dashboard icon

Issues & errors may be reported at WordPress Trac. Note that some themes and plugins may need to be updated to work with WordPress 3.0. Please try to determine whether an issue is plugin/theme related or an issue WordPress. Issues with themes and plugins should be directed to the theme/plugin author.

• November 26, 2009 — Facebook Dashboard Widget Update (0)
• September 29, 2009 — Option Arrays (5)
• September 28, 2009 — Writing Plugins (for WP & WPMU) (6)
• September 26, 2009 — Community Service (3)
• June 18, 2010 — Upgrading from WPMU to WP 3.0 (31)

© ahome for WPMU Tutorials, 2010. | Permalink | 27 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: upgrade, wordpress, wordpress mu

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I figured it was a plugin, so I deactivated all my plugins—no go. I then figured it was something unique to the sites within the bavatuesdays network (after seeing it worked in other networks), but that was not the case either cause I am not having the same issue on http://movies.bavatuesdays.com. And while it ultimately corrects itself with a refresh of the page, it is rather odd. Anyway, anyone having similar issues, I’d love to hear your fix, if you found one.

Update: What’s more, after I published this post, the visual editor buttons once again disappeared. How bizarre (cue music).

So, here is a quick look at my wp-config file, with bold annotations of what you should keep if you are doing the multi-site option:
// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'database_name_here');
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'username_here');
/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password_here');
/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');
/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');
//Note: the following elements are specific to a WPMu/Multi-Site setup, and there is no sign of them in the config file for 3.0, so be sure to copy them over. But comment out define('DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'yourmaindomain.com' ); -if you have issues on a multi-site setup because that one was giving me redirect problems on my setup.
/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('VHOST', 'yes');
$base = '/';
//define('DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'yourmaindomain.com' );
define('PATH_CURRENT_SITE', '/' );
define('BLOGID_CURRENT_SITE', '1' );
//End Note.
/**#@+
* Authentication Unique Keys and Salts.
define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
* Change these to different unique phrases!
* You can generate these using the {@link https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1...;WordPress.org secret-key service}
* You can change these at any point in time to invalidate all existing cookies. This will force all users to have to log in again.
*
* @since 2.6.0
/**
* WordPress Database Table prefix.
*
* You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique
* prefix. Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!
*/
$table_prefix = 'wp_';
/**
* WordPress Localized Language, defaults to English.
*
* Change this to localize WordPress. A corresponding MO file for the chosen
* language must be installed to wp-content/languages. For example, install
* de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to 'de' to enable German
* language support.
*/
define ('WPLANG', '');
/**
* For developers: WordPress debugging mode.
*
* Change this to true to enable the display of notices during development.
* It is strongly recommended that plugin and theme developers use WP_DEBUG
* in their development environments.
*/
define('WP_DEBUG', false);
//Note: sunrise.php is specifically for mapping domains on blogs, and you will need to include this in your wp-config file for multi-site if you want to map domains.
// uncomment this to enable wp-content/sunrise.php support
define( 'SUNRISE', 'on' );
//End Note.
/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
/** Absolute path to the WordPress directory. */
if ( !defined('ABSPATH') )

define(‘ABSPATH’, dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/’);
/** Sets up WordPress vars and included files. */
require_once(ABSPATH . ‘wp-settings.php’);

That’s it, really not too bad, but enough to screw an idiot like me up, so I figured I’d share it out.

Sennett takes a broad view of the concept of craft.  It is not just the domain of arts and crafty hand work, or some nostalgic longing for a simpler time.  For Sennett it is “an enduring, basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake.”  It involves a connection between “head and hand” with the person actively engaged in a process of exploration and adaptation.  The craftsperson not only solves problem, but investigates to determine what the problems are.  The process of Linux programming is as much a craft as parenting – a physical, hand-worked object in not a required end result.  But, as with these two examples, it does involve participation in a community, which helps define, regulate and develop the practice of the craft.

This innate desire to perform a job well can be easily squashed by environmental or management pressures or the individual’s own loss of perspective.  A craftsperson must be engaged in the work in a way where their contributions influences the final product.  Requirements to follow some set of procedural rules that are seen to be disconnected from the real environment and result in inferior work will quickly demoralize people, and kills the craft instinct.  Workers stop caring about the work.  Craft does not require an obsessive attention to the art of the work, in fact just the opposite.  This is where the community connection can help avoid any tendency for individuals to lose perspective on the performance requirements of the task at hand.  From a management perspective, fostering a culture of craft, through activities as cultivating communities of practice, cross-functional project teams and a commitment to iterative, user-centric design should result in greater efficiencies, better products and happier customers.

From a management perspective it all comes down to a respect and appreciation for the dedication and contributions of individuals.  As our work days get increasingly disconnected from the physical world we don’t need to leave the concept of craft behind.  In fact it may be exactly the recipe to preserve attention to quality, innovaton and efficiency in a human-centric manner.

Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.

The Craftsman – Sennett, Richard – Yale University Press

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The plugin imports RSS feeds every hour. You may find that you need to decrease your Simplepie cache time to make it work:
add_filter( 'wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime', create_function('$a', 'return 600;') );
reduces the RSS cache to ten minutes, for example. Put that in your bp-custom.php file if you are having problems with the plugin.

At the moment, the plugin uses the Author field from the RSS feed to look for a matching author in your WP database. If it doesn’t find one, it uses the unlinked text ‘A user’, as in ‘A user edited the wiki page…’.

Thanks to Andy Peatling, whose External Group Blogs served as the inspiration for a good part of the code.

Visit the plugin homepage for more details.

• BP TinyMCE. This plugin is messed up, and I have part of it switched off, but I still use the filters that allow additional tags through, in case people want to write some raw HTML in their forum posts, etc.
• BP Groupblog. Allows blogs to be associated with groups, displaying posts on that group’s activity feed and automatically credentialing group members on the blog. I did some custom modifications to the way the plugin works so that clicking on the Blog tab in a group leads you to subdomain address rather than the Groupblog custom address (thereby also ensuring that visitors see the intended blog theme rather than the BP-ish theme).
• BP MPO Activity Filter. This plugin works along with More Privacy Options to ensure that the new privacy settings are understood by Buddypress and that blog-related activity items are displayed to the appropriate people.
• BuddyPress Group Documents. This one is crucial to our members, who often use the plugin to share collaborative docs.
• BP Include Non-Member Comments makes sure that blog comments from non-members are included on the sitewide activity feed.
• BP External Activity – an as-yet unreleased plugin I wrote that brings in items from an external RSS feed and adds them to the sitewide activity feed. We’re using it for MediaWiki edits.
• BP Group Management lets admins add people to groups. Very handy for putting together a group quickly, without having to wait for invites.
• BP System Report. We’re using this one to keep track of some data in our system and report it back to members and administrators.
• BuddyPress Group Email Subscription allows users to subscribe to immediate or digest email notification of group activity. Right now we’re running it on a trial basis with a handful of members, in order to test it. (Here’s how to run it with a whitelist of users, if you want)
• BuddyPress Terms of Service Agreement, another as-yet-unreleased plugin (this one by CAC Dev Team member Chris Stein) that requires new members to check TOS acceptance box before being allowed to register.
• Custom Profile Filters for BuddyPress allows users to customize the way that their profile interests become links
• Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets. Lets the admin decide the default state of BP widgets on the front page.
• Forum Attachments for BuddyPress. Another of our most important BP plugins, this one allows users to share files via the group forums.
• Group Forum Subscription for BuddyPress. This is our legacy email notification system, which is going to be in place until I get back from my honeymoon and can replace it
• Invite Anyone lets our users invite new members to the community and makes it easier to populate groups.

Questions about any of these plugins or how they work with BuddyPress? Ask in the comments.

The plugin can be used to pull items from any RSS feed and add them to your BP activity stream, with customizable text. It’s feature-light right now (and requires some hand-coding to work) but it’s still pretty much the coolest thing ever. I will update it to be better when I get around to it.

Get BP External Activity here.

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A few people have asked recently for a list of the plugins installed on the CUNY Academic Commons. In the spirit of Joe’s post, here I thought I’d make it public. I’m going to limit myself to the BuddyPress plugins here, for the sake of simplicity. (I’d like to write a series of posts on the anatomy of the CUNY Academic Commons; maybe this will be the first in that series.) Here they are, in no particular order other than the order in which they appear on my plugin list.

• BP TinyMCE. This plugin is messed up, and I have part of it switched off, but I still use the filters that allow additional tags through, in case people want to write some raw HTML in their forum posts, etc.
• BP Groupblog. Allows blogs to be associated with groups, displaying posts on that group’s activity feed and automatically credentialing group members on the blog. I did some custom modifications to the way the plugin works so that clicking on the Blog tab in a group leads you to subdomain address rather than the Groupblog custom address (thereby also ensuring that visitors see the intended blog theme rather than the BP-ish theme).
• BP MPO Activity Filter. This plugin works along with More Privacy Options to ensure that the new privacy settings are understood by Buddypress and that blog-related activity items are displayed to the appropriate people.
• BuddyPress Group Documents. This one is crucial to our members, who often use the plugin to share collaborative docs.
• BP Include Non-Member Comments makes sure that blog comments from non-members are included on the sitewide activity feed.
• BP External Activity – an as-yet unreleased plugin I wrote that brings in items from an external RSS feed and adds them to the sitewide activity feed. We’re using it for MediaWiki edits.
• BP Group Management lets admins add people to groups. Very handy for putting together a group quickly, without having to wait for invites.
• BP System Report. We’re using this one to keep track of some data in our system and report it back to members and administrators.
• BuddyPress Group Email Subscription allows users to subscribe to immediate or digest email notification of group activity. Right now we’re running it on a trial basis with a handful of members, in order to test it. (Here’s how to run it with a whitelist of users, if you want)
• BuddyPress Terms of Service Agreement, another as-yet-unreleased plugin (this one by CAC Dev Team member Chris Stein) that requires new members to check TOS acceptance box before being allowed to register.
• Custom Profile Filters for BuddyPress allows users to customize the way that their profile interests become links
• Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets. Lets the admin decide the default state of BP widgets on the front page.
• Forum Attachments for BuddyPress. Another of our most important BP plugins, this one allows users to share files via the group forums.
• Group Forum Subscription for BuddyPress. This is our legacy email notification system, which is going to be in place until I get back from my honeymoon and can replace it :)
• Invite Anyone lets our users invite new members to the community and makes it easier to populate groups.

Questions about any of these plugins or how they work with BuddyPress? Ask in the comments.

Related posts:

1. New BuddyPress / bbPress plugin: Group Forum Subscription
2. New BuddyPress plugin: Invite Anyone
3. Upgrading from BuddyPress 1.0 to 1.1

This new service from Google is quick and simple.  Although at the moment I can’t seem to get it working with my current blog theme.  Technology — its great when it works!

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And to give you an idea of how useful this would have been for me last semester while teaching the Digital Storytelling class, I’ll do a quick rundown of the links in the navigation menu of that site, to show you how this new menu feature saves me hacking the theme and installing a plugin to do what can now be done out of the box.

1) Blue Arrow: One of the recurring issues when turning a blog into a website with a static frontpage in WordPress, depending on the theme, was the double Home tab in the navigation menu. You would have the default home link built into the header of the theme, and the new home link for the new homepage you created as the static frontpage. The custom menu feature solves that by allowing you to add a custom home link –bam! Major issues for creating sites and portfolio spaces on UMW Blogs made easy.

2) Green Arrow: In my Digital Storytelling class I had a separate category for all posts that were assignments, announcements, and student posts as a way to separate them out.  However, for each of them to have their own tab on the navigation menu, I had to use a plugin I got from Luke Waltzer called Blog-in-Blog, which basically pulled posts only from a particular category into a page you decided. But, this meant creating a page for each category, and then including the short code from the plugin. Those steps are no longer necessary now, you simply add the category of your choosing to the custom menu in the order you want. DISCO, once again, this is huge.

3) Yellow Arrow: no surprise here, this is a regular old page that had tyrrany over the navigation menu up and until now, unless you were ready and willing to hack the theme or go plugin crazy.

4) Pink Arrow: A custom link to another site. A simple addition, and I can’t tell you how many times over the last year I could have used this, especially when trying to hack in a link to the course MediaWiki site, forum, etc.

All in all, this gets me fired up because finally this allows anyone with no hacking chops to simply create a more dynamic navigation of the site the are creating, whether it be a course blog, portfolio site, straight-up website, etc. This was a long time in coming, as I said, but a subtle change that in many ways profoundly redefines the architectural possibilities of WordPress at UMW for faculty and students alike. Of all the changes thus far, this is by far the one I am must excited about in several versions

For the second straight year, we’re awarding the Blogfessor of the Year Award to Zoe Sheehan Saldana, of Baruch’s Fine and Performing Arts Department. The award comes with priority support from the Schwartz Institute on all online publishing endeavors. Of course, Zoe already has that because she’s so awesome.

Zoe developed three sites on Blogs@Baruch this academic year.  Last Fall, she did a Do-it-Yourself Publishing site that used FeedWordPress to syndicate nineteen individual journals where students documented making their own books from scratch (some digital, some not).

This Spring, she used a site in her Basic Graphic Communication course… here’s a description of her course and how she used her course blog from her “About” page:

…this course

This course introduces the graphic design process and methodology. Conceptual and creative thinking is stressed and understood through problem-solving assignments based on research, readings, and classroom demonstrations. The student is introduced to graphic design principles and exposed to historical and contemporary models and current standards of advertising and design. The Macintosh computer is included as the primary graphic design environment. This class is a prerequisite for all advanced Graphic Communication courses. Complete course guide available here, as a PDF file.

…this blog

This blog is a venue for presenting, exploring, and discussing work, ideas, and topics pertaining to the course.

And, finally, together we developed a site for the Focus on Photography Exhibit which served initially as a processing space for members of the Baruch community to submit photos that they wished to be considered for a physical exhibit (which opened last week at the Mishkin Gallery).  The site’s since evolved into an online companion displaying close to 200 images submitted by Baruch students, faculty, and staff.  The submissions process used the TDO Mini Forms plugin to collect information from applicants, allow them to upload their images, and then it published those images to password protected pages where the exhibit judges could asses them. After decisions had been made about which images were accepted for the physical exhibit and which were not, Zoe hacked the Monotone WordPress theme (ideal for photo blogging) to create the online exhibit, which will live beyond the one at Miskhin. The amazing photographic ability of Baruch folks is a topic for another post, but I encourage you to take your time and click through the exhibit to see the fantastic images these folks have captured.

What’s so great about Zoe, beyond her gracious personality and charm, is that she’s exactly what an educational technologist like me needs to get better at what I do: someone who asks questions that I don’t know the answers to, patiently awaits the answer, and works to arrive at a consensus around what can be done with the tools, time, and resources available.  She’s a great collaborator and a creative teacher.  And, as she showed in talks she gave at last year’s CUNY WordCampEd and this year at the Baruch Teaching and Technology Conference, she has a strong grasp of the pedagogical, political, and philosophical impulse behind what we’re trying to do with educational technology at the Schwartz Institute.  As her course blogs and her own art show, she’s an O.E.: Original Edupunk, and both Baruch and the Schwartz Institute are lucky to have her around.

image credit: lumax art

Email Options on settings page

I’m quite happy to announce the release of a more-or-less stable (we hope!) version of BuddyPress Group Email Subscription, a BuddyPress plugin that allows for fine-grained, user-controllable email subscription to group content in BuddyPress.

This plugin is different from some of my others in that it was truly a group endeavor. The base of the plugin was written by David Cartwright, with a little bit of code from me. A nearly complete rewrite of the front-end and most of the guts of the plugin was undertaken by Deryk Wenaus. I wrote the daily and weekly digest functionality, along with some of the settings pages and various bugfixes throughout. The current codebase of the plugin is probably 60% Deryk, 30% me, and 10% David.

It was my first time working on a truly collaborative software development project like this, and it was a real pleasure working with both of these gentlemen. Thanks, guys.

Get BuddyPress Group Email Subscription here.

Related posts:

1. New BuddyPress / bbPress plugin: Group Forum Subscription
2. Group Forum Subscription for BuddyPress 1.1
3. Adding an “email to members” checkbox to the BuddyPress group activity stream

These instructions will still be relevant for the final release. The only difference is when the release is final, you will get an upgrade notice.

Thanks, Pete! Writing that post was on my list.

(Did you get the part about backing up first?)

• April 12, 2010 — Disabling the Plugin/Theme editor 3.0 (11)
• December 3, 2009 — MU 2.9 beta (6)
• June 23, 2009 — WP-Devel plugin (1)
• June 18, 2010 — Upgrading from WPMU to WP 3.0 (32)
• June 17, 2010 — The age of Thelonious and WordPress 3.0 (7)

© andrea for WPMU Tutorials, 2010. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: beta, development, plugin, test, upgrade

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This is where Blogs@Baruch enters the picture. I joined Luke in a training session to introduce WordPress to the 2010 peer mentors, each of whom will lead a section of Freshman Seminar come September. Before our session with the peer mentors, we discussed some of the high and low points of the 2009 blogging season in Freshman Seminar. It should be said at the outset that Blogs@Baruch’s support of Freshman Seminar was amazingly successful in 2009 especially in light of the limited time for planning. Blogs@Baruch supported 60 section blogs with 20 students a week for a total of 1200 freshman bloggers, each of whom were tasked with writing six blog posts over the course of the semester, one after each of the required workshops.

But feedback from the peer mentors indicated that buy-in was low among freshmen. Last year’s peer mentors expressed frustration at having to chase after freshmen and repeatedly remind them to complete their blogging assignments. They also told us that the blogging assignments themselves left something to be desired, and that their procedural nature (to report back on the workshop just attended) tended to put a damper on students’ enthusiasm for the task. And finally, the peer mentors expressed a desire to customize the look of the section blogs.

We took each of these critiques seriously and decided to rethink the approach of Blogs@Baruch to Freshman Seminar in light of the concerns raised by peer mentors.  Luke already had plays to open up the WordPress blogging environment, including giving more control to peer mentors over theme selection and plug-in activation, and incorporating social networking functionality through BuddyPress to create a more networked and collegial environment for peer mentors and first year students alike. Luke invited me to join the team that oversees Freshman Seminar to help him address the second critique, that is, to rethink the role of blogging in the Freshman Seminar curriculum. And so last Friday we collaboratively facilitated two sessions with peer mentors, part of which was a brainstorming session to develop more compelling blog post prompts.

photo credit: everdred

The blog post prompts that follow invite students to reflect on the processes of identity construction through various lenses. In different ways, these blog post prompts encourage students to integrate online, social, and multimedia tools into their student identities, and to consider how aspects of their personal history can inform and ultimately enrich their academic work. If they seem repetitive, that’s because they are. Students are actually not required to complete any of them — which is a whole different issue — but in any case, we are hoping to entice them to do some. The idea is to make the blog post prompts so interesting that students feel compelled to do them!

This is what we’ve come up with so far:

1. If you were an iPhone app, which one would be you and why?

2. Use Grooveshark to make a playlist, a soundtrack for your life, and write a blog post explaining the significance of each song.

3. Cheap eats: Write a restaurant review of a inexpensive lunch spot in the Baruch area or around where you live. Include a photograph of the food.

4. Audit your Facebook account, and write about it; OR Google yourself, and share what’s true and what’s not.

5. Pick a stereotype that you think you embody and expand upon, shatter, or embrace it.

6. Consumer identities: What are the five most important brands that you use throughout the day? Why do you think you are drawn to these brands.

7. Choose a cartoon character that is in some way like you, post a picture or a video of this character, and write a blog post explaining your reasoning.

8. Using Paint or a similar program, paint how you see yourself, and post it with an explanation.

9. Record everything you eat in a day and share it. Reflect on what this reveals about your culture and identity.

10. Take photos or record a video of your commute to school. Describe the various spaces you pass through during this process. For instance you might compare the experience of being on the street in your neighborhood, versus being on the bus or the train, versus at Baruch. What stands out to you?

11. Find images related to your heritage on Flickr, and write a blog post explaining their significance.

12. Write a post about your favorite genre of art, and share an example.

13. Take and share a photo of something at Baruch that doesn’t work OR of some ironically defaced signage in the city at large.

14. If you had $1m and had to give it to a charity, which  and why? OR Respond to an open ended, critical thinking philosophical/ethical question, like for example: Is it acceptable to lie under certain circumstances?

15. Search for your name or an idea about you on flickr, and post the first photo that comes up. Compare it to a photo that you think more resembles you.

I plan to revise this list of prompts based on the feedback of the ever-supportive edtech community at CUNY and beyond. Any suggestions? Help me make these prompts irresistible!

• Convenience: You don’t need an internet connection
• Speed: Because you’re not transferring files remotely, there’s no save or reload lag
• Power: You have total control over the environment, in a way you don’t on, eg, shared hosting
• Safety: You can set up as many parallel environments as you’d like on your local machine, and if you destroy one of them, you can wipe it out and replace it in just a few clicks

I just got a new computer and so have been going through the process of rebuildling my local dev environment. For the benefit of those just getting into web development, here’s how I set it up, with a bit of explanation. Keep in mind that I’m working with OS X 10.6, developing for WordPress; if you’re running a different operating system, or developing for a non-PHP based framework, your setup will differ from mine.

1. Create a /sites directory: To make navigation from the command line a bit easier, I like to keep all my development environments in first-level directory called sites. Open a Terminal window and type:

   mkdir /sites

2. Download and install MAMP: Strictly speaking, MAMP isn’t required on OSX, since the OS comes with Apache, MySQL, and PHP installed (enabled through System Preferences > Sharing > Web Sharing). But MAMP has a nice preferences interface, and comes with useful tools like PHPMyAdmin, so I use it. Get MAMP and install it.
3. Configure MAMP: Open MAMP and click the Preferences button.
   • Configure Start/Stop. I like to uncheck the “Stop servers when quitting MAMP” box, so that I don’t have to keep MAMP open all the time.
   • Switch the ports. You can use the port settings that MAMP comes preconfigured with, but I like to change it because it can make managing domain names a bit easier. Click “Set to default Apache and MySQL ports”. The downside of changing this setting is that each time you start up MAMP (for me, that’s every time I start the computer, which is once every week or so), you’ll need to type in your OSX administrator password. That’ll happen when you save your settings at the end of this step, too – don’t be alarmed.
   • Switch the Apache root directory. On the Apache tab, change the root directory to /sites.

   When you click on OK to save your preferences, you will probably be asked for your admin password. Your local environment is now up and running, and it’s time to configure it to handle WordPress.

4. Configure your hosts file: By default, you can reach your local installation in a browser by visiting http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1. The first option doesn’t work very well with WordPress (WPMU, at least), and the second one isn’t very attractive. We can set up a more attractive host name by editing the /etc/hosts. Open /etc/hosts, ideally at the command line with

   sudo nano /etc/hosts

   ‘sudo’ is important here, as you’ll need admin rights to change this file. Modify the line that says

   127.0.0.1		localhost

   so that it says

   127.0.0.1		localhost boone.is.awesome

   Now clearly you don’t have to use ‘boone.is.awesome’ (though you probably should, because I am awesome). You can use any combination of words you want, separated by periods, like a URL – ‘local.dev’, perhaps. Don’t use a real URL. Save the file (if you’re at the command line, hit Ctrl-X, and then Y when you’re prompted to save) and test your new hosts file by visiting http://boone.is.awesome (or whatever) in a browser window.

5. Create a database: In MAMP, click the “Open Start Page” button, which will open the MAMP start page in the browser. Click on the PHPMyAdmin link on the start page. PHPMyAdmin is a graphical interface for your MySQL database that you might find handy as you do development. Click the Databases tab, and create a new database – I’m calling mine ‘wp-trunk’. You may also want to choose a default text encoding: ‘utf8_general_ci’ works pretty well if you think you might be doing development in different character sets (Cyrillic, Arabic, etc).
6. Download WordPress: I like to get WP via SVN, which makes it easy to keep track of any core hacks I might make. Here are the Terminal commands to create an installation called ‘wp-trunk’:

   cd /sites
   mkdir wp-trunk
   svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk wp-trunk/

   You’ll see a bunch of files being downloaded. In this example I’m downloading the trunk, or development, version of WP, rather than the stable version. If you’d like to get a specific version, say 2.9.2, use svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9.2 wp-trunk/ instead. (More on using svn with WordPress, from Mark Jaquith)



7. Install WordPress: In your browser, go to http://boone.is.awesome/wp-trunk (or the corresponding path on your machine). This should load the WordPress installer. If you’ve followed along with my instructions, the settings in this image ought to work for you. You’ll notice that I’m using the root MySQL account, with the default password, because it automatically has all privileges on all databases. You should obviously never do this on a database that is connected to the internet. I should also note here that I’m installing the beta of WP 3.0, but the same process will work for any version of WP, even WPMU. With MU, though, you may have some problems if you choose the subdomains option for secondary blogs.
8. That’s it! You should now be able to log into your installation at http://boone.is.awesome/wp-trunk/wp-admin. When I plan to use an installation of WP to develop for BuddyPress, I check out the trunk version of BP in a similar fashion to step 6:

   cd /sites/wp-trunk/wp-content/plugins
   mkdir buddypress
   svn co http://svn.buddypress.org/trunk buddypress/

Related posts:

1. Google Summer of Code, WordPress, and BuddyPress
2. TinyMCE in Buddypress
3. Upgrading from BuddyPress 1.0 to 1.1

BP System Report records regular summaries of statistics related to your BuddyPress installation. You can then compare any two snapshots using the built-in comparison tool, which calculates percentage differences. The information currently gathered by the plugin:

BP System Report

• Members: total number, number active during report interval, percent active, total friendship connections, average friendships per member
• Groups: total number, number active, percent active, total group memberships, average group membership
• Public/private/hidden groups: total number, number active, percent active, total membership, average membership
• Blogs: total number, number active, percent active

The plugin is quite beta, so still might be buggy. Please feel free to report problems.

Future versions of this plugin will include:

• more analytical data collected
• CSV export
• better admin control over report frequency

Regarding this last point: the BP System Report defaults to twice-daily reports. If you’d like to adjust it manually, deactivate the plugin, edit the line
wp_schedule_event( time() + 30, 'twicedaily', 'bp_system_report_pseudo_cron_hook' );
in bp-system-report.php to say ‘hourly’ or ‘daily’ or ‘weekly’ (or some custom time you define in bp_system_report_more_reccurences() )

Download BP System Report here.

Check out the plugin page for more information and to download BP System Report.

Related posts:

1. New BuddyPress plugin: Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets
2. New BuddyPress plugin: Invite Anyone
3. Removing previous comment edits from BuddyPress activity – a plugin

This morning I wrote a bit of code to add that kind of functionality to group activity streams. There are three functions, each of which goes in your plugins/bp-custom.php file.

First, adding the checkbox to the activity box. Notice that it only shows up when you’re on a group page.

function cac_email_activity_checkbox() {
	if ( !bp_is_groups_component() )
		return;
	?>

	
		Email this update to all group members? 

	
	<?php
}
add_action( 'bp_activity_post_form_options', 'cac_email_activity_checkbox' );

Second, handling the data when it gets to the server and sending the emails. Obviously, you’ll want to change the text of the email to match your own site and your own preferences.

function cac_email_activity_handler( $activity ) {
	global $bp;

	if ( $_POST['mailme'] == 'mailme' ) {

		$subject = sprintf('[CUNY Academic Commons] New update in the group "%s"',  $bp->groups->current_group->name );

		$message = strip_tags($activity->action);
		$message .= '

';
		$message .= strip_tags($activity->content);

		$message .= '

-------
';

		$message .= sprintf('You recieved this message because you are a member of the group "%s" on the CUNY Academic Commons. Visit the group: %s', $bp->groups->current_group->name, $bp->root_domain . '/' . $bp->groups->current_group->slug . '/' . $bp->groups->current_group->slug . '/' );

		//print_r($message);

		if ( bp_group_has_members( 'exclude_admins_mods=0&per_page=10000' ) ) {
			global $members_template;
			foreach( $members_template->members as $m ) {
				wp_mail( $m->user_email, $subject, $message );
			}
		}
	}

	remove_action( 'bp_activity_after_save' , 'ass_group_notification_activity' , 50 );
}
add_action( 'bp_activity_after_save', 'cac_email_activity_handler', 1 );

Finally, you’ll need some Javascript to make the AJAX activity submission work correctly. This is really just a copy of what’s in the bp-default JS file, with a few added lines to make it work.

function cac_email_activity_js() {
	if ( !bp_is_groups_component() )
		return;
	?>

	var jq = jQuery;
	jq(document).ready( function() {
jq("input#aw-whats-new-submit").unbind('click');
			/* New posts */
	jq("input#aw-whats-new-submit").click( function() {
		var button = jq(this);
		var form = button.parent().parent().parent().parent();

		form.children().each( function() {
			if ( jq.nodeName(this, "textarea") || jq.nodeName(this, "input") )
				jq(this).attr( 'disabled', 'disabled' );
		});

		jq( 'form#' + form.attr('id') + ' span.ajax-loader' ).show();

		/* Remove any errors */
		jq('div.error').remove();
		button.attr('disabled','disabled');

		/* Default POST values */
		var object = '';
		var item_id = jq("#whats-new-post-in").val();
		var content = jq("textarea#whats-new").val();
		var mailme = jq("#cac_activity_mail:checked").val();

		/* Set object for non-profile posts */
		if ( item_id > 0 ) {
			object = jq("#whats-new-post-object").val();
		}

		jq.post( ajaxurl, {
			action: 'post_update',
			'cookie': encodeURIComponent(document.cookie),
			'_wpnonce_post_update': jq("input#_wpnonce_post_update").val(),
			'content': content,
			'object': object,
			'mailme': mailme,
			'item_id': item_id
		},
		function(response)
		{
			jq( 'form#' + form.attr('id') + ' span.ajax-loader' ).hide();

			form.children().each( function() {
				if ( jq.nodeName(this, "textarea") || jq.nodeName(this, "input") )
					jq(this).attr( 'disabled', '' );
			});

			/* Check for errors and append if found. */
			if ( response[0] + response[1] == '-1' ) {
				form.prepend( response.substr( 2, response.length ) );
				jq( 'form#' + form.attr('id') + ' div.error').hide().fadeIn( 200 );
				button.attr("disabled", '');
			} else {
				if ( 0 == jq("ul.activity-list").length ) {
					jq("div.error").slideUp(100).remove();
					jq("div#message").slideUp(100).remove();
					jq("div.activity").append( '
' );
				}

				jq("ul.activity-list").prepend(response);
				jq("ul.activity-list li:first").addClass('new-update');
				jq("li.new-update").hide().slideDown( 300 );
				jq("li.new-update").removeClass( 'new-update' );
				jq("textarea#whats-new").val('');
				jq("#cac_activity_mail").removeAttr('checked');

				/* Re-enable the submit button after 8 seconds. */
				setTimeout( function() { button.attr("disabled", ''); }, 8000 );
			}
		});

		return false;
	});
	});

	<?php
}
add_action( 'bp_activity_post_form_options', 'cac_email_activity_js', 999 );

This morning I wrote a bit of code to add that kind of functionality to group activity streams. There are three functions, each of which goes in your plugins/bp-custom.php file.

First, adding the checkbox to the activity box. Notice that it only shows up when you’re on a group page.

function cac_email_activity_checkbox() {
	if ( !bp_is_groups_component() )
		return;
	?>

	<label for="cac_activity_mail">
		Email this update to all group members?
		<input type="checkbox" name="cac_activity_mail" id="cac_activity_mail" value="mailme" />
	</label>
	<?php
}
add_action( 'bp_activity_post_form_options', 'cac_email_activity_checkbox' );

Second, handling the data when it gets to the server and sending the emails. Obviously, you’ll want to change the text of the email to match your own site and your own preferences. The line “remove_action( ‘bp_activity_after_save’ , ‘ass_group_notification_activity’ , 50 );” is there to prevent an email notification from being sent if you’re using the Group Activity Notification plugin, a big official release of which is coming soon :)

function cac_email_activity_handler( $activity ) {
	global $bp;

	if ( $_POST['mailme'] == 'mailme' ) {

		$subject = sprintf('[CUNY Academic Commons] New update in the group "%s"',  $bp->groups->current_group->name );

		$message = strip_tags($activity->action);
		$message .= '

';
		$message .= strip_tags($activity->content);

		$message .= '

-------
';

		$message .= sprintf('You recieved this message because you are a member of the group "%s" on the CUNY Academic Commons. Visit the group: %s', $bp->groups->current_group->name, $bp->root_domain . '/' . $bp->groups->current_group->slug . '/' . $bp->groups->current_group->slug . '/' );

		//print_r($message);

		if ( bp_group_has_members( 'exclude_admins_mods=0&per_page=10000' ) ) {
			global $members_template;
			foreach( $members_template->members as $m ) {
				wp_mail( $m->user_email, $subject, $message );
			}
		}
	}

	remove_action( 'bp_activity_after_save' , 'ass_group_notification_activity' , 50 );
}
add_action( 'bp_activity_after_save', 'cac_email_activity_handler', 1 );

Finally, you’ll need some Javascript to make the AJAX activity submission work correctly. This is really just a copy of what’s in the bp-default JS file, with a few added lines to make it work.

function cac_email_activity_js() {
	if ( !bp_is_groups_component() )
		return;
	?>
	<script type="text/javascript">

	var jq = jQuery;
	jq(document).ready( function() {
jq("input#aw-whats-new-submit").unbind('click');
			/* New posts */
	jq("input#aw-whats-new-submit").click( function() {
		var button = jq(this);
		var form = button.parent().parent().parent().parent();

		form.children().each( function() {
			if ( jq.nodeName(this, "textarea") || jq.nodeName(this, "input") )
				jq(this).attr( 'disabled', 'disabled' );
		});

		jq( 'form#' + form.attr('id') + ' span.ajax-loader' ).show();

		/* Remove any errors */
		jq('div.error').remove();
		button.attr('disabled','disabled');

		/* Default POST values */
		var object = '';
		var item_id = jq("#whats-new-post-in").val();
		var content = jq("textarea#whats-new").val();
		var mailme = jq("#cac_activity_mail:checked").val();

		/* Set object for non-profile posts */
		if ( item_id > 0 ) {
			object = jq("#whats-new-post-object").val();
		}

		jq.post( ajaxurl, {
			action: 'post_update',
			'cookie': encodeURIComponent(document.cookie),
			'_wpnonce_post_update': jq("input#_wpnonce_post_update").val(),
			'content': content,
			'object': object,
			'mailme': mailme,
			'item_id': item_id
		},
		function(response)
		{
			jq( 'form#' + form.attr('id') + ' span.ajax-loader' ).hide();

			form.children().each( function() {
				if ( jq.nodeName(this, "textarea") || jq.nodeName(this, "input") )
					jq(this).attr( 'disabled', '' );
			});

			/* Check for errors and append if found. */
			if ( response[0] + response[1] == '-1' ) {
				form.prepend( response.substr( 2, response.length ) );
				jq( 'form#' + form.attr('id') + ' div.error').hide().fadeIn( 200 );
				button.attr("disabled", '');
			} else {
				if ( 0 == jq("ul.activity-list").length ) {
					jq("div.error").slideUp(100).remove();
					jq("div#message").slideUp(100).remove();
					jq("div.activity").append( '<ul id="activity-stream" class="activity-list item-list">' );
				}

				jq("ul.activity-list").prepend(response);
				jq("ul.activity-list li:first").addClass('new-update');
				jq("li.new-update").hide().slideDown( 300 );
				jq("li.new-update").removeClass( 'new-update' );
				jq("textarea#whats-new").val('');
				jq("#cac_activity_mail").removeAttr('checked');

				/* Re-enable the submit button after 8 seconds. */
				setTimeout( function() { button.attr("disabled", ''); }, 8000 );
			}
		});

		return false;
	});
	});

	</script>
	<?php
}
add_action( 'bp_activity_post_form_options', 'cac_email_activity_js', 999 );

Related posts:

1. New BuddyPress plugin: BP External Activity
2. New BuddyPress plugin: BuddyPress Group Email Subscription
3. New BuddyPress plugin: BP MPO Activity Filter

Looks like it might. And it integrates with my Flickr account, too.

Pretty slick. It handles media uploads, categories, tags, pages and posts. I just might have to pick up a license…

With all the moving parts in one install, yes that does mean there is an increased risk of something breaking whenever one of those parts gets upgraded. You can mitigate those risks, however.

1) Backup. Every time you upgrade anything, you have to do a backup first. This way, in a worse-case scenario, you can put things back the way they were. Backups are your backup plan. The critical areas are your database(s) and the wp-content folder. How to manually backup wordpress mu.

2) Do your homework. Check the various support forums for each component that needs upgrading and see if there have been any reported problems. Part of lessoning the fear & panic is knowing what to expect, especially the pitfalls.

3) Relax & remain calm. The worst time to upgrade is late at night or when you are in a hurry. Mistakes can be made far more easily then, and if something does go wrong, you’re likely to be more stressed & overtired. (unless you work well at night, as some do) If you’ve made your backups & have support forums threads open in other tabs in your browser, then you know you can manage.

4) Wait. I’m not suggesting to delay critical upgrades indefinitely, but you can usually afford to wait a week when it’s more convenient to do upgrades on a number of plugins & themes & core, than spread out. You could spend every other day upgrading something if you clicked the links every time they showed up.

For extra credit: while WordPress & MU make it clickably easy to upgrade from the backend, another skill used in fixing messed up upgrades is knowing how to do them manually. Some of us rarely use the internal upgrade process, preferring manual control. The brief version of this is simply replacing the files on the server with new copies.

• June 18, 2010 — Upgrading from WPMU to WP 3.0 (32)
• June 27, 2009 — Week #3 Build a better blog site – User themes and plugins (4)
• June 23, 2010 — What is the mu-plugins folder? (1)
• June 17, 2010 — The age of Thelonious and WordPress 3.0 (7)
• June 1, 2010 — Testing the automatic upgrade to WordPress 3.0 (27)

© andrea for WPMU Tutorials, 2010. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: advice, upgrade, wpmu

Need real genuine helpful support? MU Support.

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• Francesco Laffi has a two-part project. 1) He’ll be working on a rich media component for BP, building on his already popular BP Album. 2) He’ll be constructing a reporting/moderation plugin for BP group forums, which will allow the general user base to play a role in moderating good and bad content within a community. I’ll be co-mentoring Francesco with Andy Peatling, the lead dev for BuddyPress.

  Read more about Francesco’s proposal, in his own words.

• Stas Sușcov will be working on BuddyPress in educational contexts. The germ of his idea is to take ScholarPress Courseware (with its scheduling, bibliography, and assignment tools), combine it with a nice gradebook (maybe something like KB Gradebook), and put it inside a BuddyPress shell. I’ll be co-mentoring Stas’s project with Jeremy Boggs, developer of Scholarpress.

  Read more about Stas’s proposal, in his own words.

I am very excited to get started working with these great students!

Related posts:

1. Setting up a WordPress/BuddyPress development environment on OS X
2. New BuddyPress plugin: BuddyPress Group Email Subscription
3. More Import from Ning goodness – ( Ning to BuddyPress / WordPress )

This is not created by default. You must create it in the wp-content folder.

The “mu” does not stand for multi-user like it did for WPMU, it stands for “must-use” as any code placed in that folder will run without needing to be activated. An actual file has to be there; if all the files are in a subfolder, they will not be read.

You can now see the content of that folder in the backend, under the Plugins menu. When visiting, you’ll see a sub-item called “Must Use”, if you’ve created that folder and placed files within.

• June 21, 2010 — Everything you wanted to know about creating a network of multiple sites in 3.0 (2)
• April 12, 2010 — Disabling the Plugin/Theme editor 3.0 (10)
• April 8, 2010 — Disabling the update reminder 3.0 (0)
• January 21, 2010 — Testers, start your engines (6)
• January 14, 2010 — 2.9.1 released, last before merge (6)

© andrea for WPMU Tutorials, 2010. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: beta, merge, mu-plugins, WordPress 3.0

Need real genuine helpful support? MU Support.

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I also got rid of the pesky copy-and-paste requirement in favor of a direct .csv file upload.

Check out the plugin at its new homepage.

Related posts:

1. Import From Ning now imports Ning content into BuddyPress
2. Importing Ning users into WP
3. New WordPress plugin: Simple Import Users

All this is a good argument to be using software solutions that are more under your control. Like – drumroll – WordPress and BuddyPress.

Enough moralizing. I whipped together a plugin this afternoon called Import From Ning that will allow you to get a CSV export of your Ning community’s member list (the only content that Ning has a handy export feature for, alas) and use it to import members into a WordPress installation.

As of right now, it does not have any BuddyPress-specific functionality. But the data that it does import – display name, username, email address – are enough to populate at least the beginnings of a BuddyPress profile. The next thing to add is the auto-import of certain profile fields. I might try to do this tomorrow. The plugin is based on DDImportUsers – thanks!

Instructions:

• Download the zip file and unzip into your WP plugins directory
• Look for the Import from Ning menu under Dashboard > Users (unless you’re running a recent trunk version of BuddyPress, in which case it will be under the BuddyPress menu)
• Follow the instructions on that page

Download the plugin here.

Related posts:

1. More Import from Ning goodness – ( Ning to BuddyPress / WordPress )
2. New WordPress plugin: Simple Import Users
3. Import From Ning now imports Ning content into BuddyPress

The aim of most website hacks is to gain access to the source code of the website to insert links to spam sites. If you disable the plugin & theme editor, you place another barrier between a hacker and the source code of your install. Cleaning up a couple hundred themes, is not an insignificant task. And, even one hack will cost you far more time than the convenience of the editors are likely to ever save you.

I’ve written a plugin that we will be installing in all of our MU installs before upgrading to WP 3.0 that disables both editors.

You can download it here: Disable Theme/Plugin Editors in WordPress 3.0 (165).

Updated: If the plugin causes issues with your theme’s options you can also add a line in wp-config.php to disable the editors

define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT',true);

That was added to after I wrote this post

• April 8, 2010 — Disabling the update reminder 3.0 (0)
• December 9, 2009 — Twitter Digest (4)
• December 3, 2009 — MU 2.9 beta (6)
• November 26, 2009 — Facebook Dashboard Widget Update (0)
• October 26, 2009 — Featured posts plugin and widget (31)

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Performing Diasporas is centered around artists-in-residence — in 2010-2011, Maya Lilly; in 2011-2012, Randy Weston; and, both years, Mahayana Landowne — each of whom’s work engages questions of group and individual identity formation. These artists will perform throughout their residencies, and also lead and participate in workshops. Much of the programming, however, will be directed at incoming students. The first year experience for the next two years will revolve in large part around exploration of the project theme: the Freshman Text will be about diasporic identity, the artists-in-residence will perform at August’s Convocation, and significant components of Freshman Seminar and the curricula of selected Learning Communities will be devoted to the theme.

As part of the Steering Committee planning this project, I’m especially excited by a few particulars. Too often the administrative labor of higher education falls into silos whose work is narrowly focused and lacks programmatic coordination with other initiatives at the College. This project is structured to counter that impulse by drawing several partners into a collaborative effort to inject consideration of both the arts and the themes of identity and diaspora into the curriculum. Obviously, this will most directly impact our first year students. But it’s also good for everyone at the College for the various moving administrative parts to find synergies. The project will raise the profile of BPAC, inject the first year experience with a variety of new ideas, and dovetails nicely with Dean Jeff Peck’s Global Studies Initiative.

The project also will also help lead Blogs@Baruch into its next phase. Last Fall, we began supporting Freshman Seminar. 1200 first year students wrote more than 6500 blog posts to 60 weblogs, all of which were aggregated ultimately into a single space. FRO Blogging was a success, if solely because we were able to pull it off with little time to plan. Feedback from last Fall’s students and the Peer Mentors who led the seminars suggested the desire for more creative leeway and fewer required blog posts (students were expected to author at least six reflections on enrichment workshops they attended over the course of the term). The feedback also showed appreciation for the social component of the project; students used their blogging to get to know each other and to form community, something that’s always a challenge at a commuter campus like Baruch.

We’ve redesigned FRO Blogging to incorporate this feedback and to intersect with the goals of Performing Diasporas. There will be three specific components to FRO Blogging in Fall 2010:

• Students will be required to write blog posts at the beginning and end of the semester reflecting on their adjustment to college and, in the middle of the semester, will post monologues about their own backgrounds that they develop with their Peer Mentors (who will receive training). Selected monologues will be shaped and then performed by professional actors at an end-of-the-semester event: “Baruch’s Voices.” In Spring 2011, students who are interested in performing their own monologues will workshop them and then perform at a series of Coffee Houses.
• Each seminar will be asked to develop its blog over the course of the Fall semester. We will push this process along by crafting prompts that are distributed weekly and that encourage students to reflect upon and share their own stories. Peer Mentors will guide the process, with assistance, and students will be nudged, but not required. At the end of the semester, the most fully developed sites will be recognized with an award. This is an experiment in voluntary buy-in, and we realize that student investment of effort will be uneven. Yet, the constraints of a non-credit course make this approach necessary, and the goal is less to have students develop polished public spaces than to get their feet wet thinking critically about how to present artistic and intellectual material on the open web.
• Finally, I’m excited to note that we’ll be rolling out BuddyPress this Fall, which will add a social networking layer to Blogs@Baruch, and afford students additional opportunities to connect with and get to know one another.

Ultimately, what I like most about this project is that it treats our students as creators and makers of knowledge, not merely as consumers. Baruch students are among the most interesting students in the world, and yet few of them seem to realize this (in fact, that’s one of the things that makes them interesting). Performing Diasporas, because it will draw our students inside productive processes and creates multiple opportunities for them to see and share the art in their own lives, is going to be something special to watch.

• April 12, 2010 — Disabling the Plugin/Theme editor 3.0 (10)
• January 21, 2010 — Testers, start your engines (6)
• January 14, 2010 — 2.9.1 released, last before merge (6)
• January 6, 2010 — Merge News (1)
• January 5, 2010 — The merge begins (22)

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Ideally, have a test site you can play with (many MU people do) and just manually upgrade the WPMU install to the WordPress beta. Poke around, see if anything broke.

If you have read my in-beta codex instructions for enabling the Network, you do not need to do this if you are upgrading from a WPMU install. it will detect that the network is alreayd running, becasue the config files & htaccess already has lines in there.

You will notice some new terminology and the site admin menu has changed position. Blogs are now Sites, sites are now Networks, and the site admin has a cape. Er, I mean, is called a Super Admin.

The UI team has been working hard of late, and things are still moving around. For that reason (and a heavy workload of paying clients) I’ve been holding off on writing about all the changes – because there’s still some tweaks happening.

Grab the beta zip here.

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This week, the WordPress Bible landed in my mailbox.

This thing is HUGE. Also? It goes very in depth. It is not a simple introduction and you dive right in to the deep end of the pool. The first chapter I read was the one on WordPress MU (naturally). Aaron really did a nice job of going over the basics and a lot of WPMU’s little quirks. There’s a ton of information in here on bulding your own plugin too.

BuddyPress for Dummies – contrary to what you may think, this book is as up to date as was possible. I know Lisa was editing it up to the last, right before it went to print. Open source is a living breathing thing, but overall, if you are new to BuddyPress and really need someone to gently show you the ropes, well you can’t get any better than this.

WordPress MU 2.8 is put out by Packt Publishing. While the version says 2.8, almost all of the information is still very relevant. There’s a lot of information in here about using certain plugins and editing your theme. It is very much more of as how to and not a why kind of book.

And if you are so new to WordPress in general, you’re not even sure how it functions on a single install, I can highly recommend WordPress for Dummies.

Disclaimer: yes, I used Amazon affiliate links. That’s pretty much an internet standard these days, but if you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you know that I only recommend products I truly think are helpful.

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• Premium BuddyPress Themes
• Simple Multi-Site e-book/Plugin
• Remove /blog permalink e-book/Plugin

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Related posts:

1. Forum Attachments for BuddyPress
2. Help me alpha test BuddyPress Forum Attachments
3. Group Forum Subscription for BuddyPress 1.1

What’s more, Matt Gold and Boone Gorges will be featuring their awesome work with the CUNY Academic Commons and the cutting edge work they are doing with Buddypress. Their approach to the social network for faculty and graduate students at CUNY should be of pressing interest to just about every college and university out there right now—they are making a social network that respects people’s pre-existing spaces online while simultaneously providing an essential network for the folks of CUNY.

And while unlike the WordCampEd events this one isn’t free, I hope they figure out a way to stream and/or capture these sessions because I for one am dying to see them.

And on a broader note, it is fascinating to see a professional organization like NERCOMP devote an entire conference to WordPress, I think it is more than warranted and a sign of things to come. More campuses exploring and hacking on open source applications like WordPress to start re-imagining the social implications of web-based communities for publishing, research, teaching, and learning. It points to one possible future of how colleges and universities can start re-imagining their web presence as more than a brochure, but an open, dynamic space that exposes and shares the thinking happening at these institutions, and the next logical step is for us to start making more meaningful connections between individuals at the distributed learning institutions. Something as simple as a new platform, provides something as beautifully powerful and complex as a rich network of teaching, learning, and scholarship.  We need to explore these possibilities together. NERCOMP’s “WordPress University” seems like an excellent step in that direction.

Image credit: Bionic Teaching’s “WordPress Revolution”

This plugin, BP Group Management, creates a new administration panel to the Dashboard, accessible only by the sitewide administrator, which does the following:

• provides a sortable list of all groups (public, private, and hidden) with their created-on dates and ID numbers
• allows admins to delete groups easily
• allows admins to view lists of current members, and to promote/demote/ban them
• allows admins to add any member of the site directly to the group, skipping the need for invitations

Download the plugin here.

The version of the plugin in the repository only works for versions of BuddyPress 1.2 and greater. For a mostly functional version of the plugin that works with BP 1.1.3 (no guarantees on any other versions, but it should work down to BP 1.1 at least), click here.

Deactivate, archive and spam are the ones you will use. Right now, there is no difference (code wise) in what happens. Each action here will result in the same page being displayed. It does, however, set a different flag in the database for each one. (I plan on filing a trac ticket for further enhancement.)

By default, when a blog is suspended or inactive, a very plain page is generated with a simple message.

This blog has been archived or suspended.

Let’s say you want to pretty this up. Maybe show it with the same look as the main blog on the site, or insert a contact form. Or even, as the first example I saw, slap Google ads on it in cases where you’re suspending spam blogs.

The way to do this is surprisingly simple. All you have to do is place a file with your customizations in the wp-content folder.

blog-deleted.php will show if a user has elected to delete their blog. Remember, if a user deletes their blog, it is only marked as deleted in the backend. If a site admin deletes a blog, it is really really gone. This gives the user a chance at recovery.
blog-suspended.php will show if a blog has been deactivated in any way (archived, deactivated, or spam).

I spent probably too much time trying to figure out how to pull in exisiting blog headers for page customization here. Just do a simple HTML page with whatever you want. I wanted mine to look like my main blog theme, so I just copied the HTML from the source of the front page, deleting items I didn’t want.

So, to recap: whip up a page called blog-suspended.php, toss in whatever you like and dump it in wp-content. Bob’s yer uncle. Here’s a live example of a deleted blog and also a deactivated one.

Many, many thanks to Andy Bailey from Comment Luv who did the hard work of actually figuring this out, and reminding me to whip up the tutorial.

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• January 14, 2010 — 2.9.1 released, last before merge (6)
• November 26, 2009 — Facebook Dashboard Widget Update (0)
• September 29, 2009 — Option Arrays (5)
• September 28, 2009 — Writing Plugins (for WP & WPMU) (6)
• September 26, 2009 — Community Service (3)

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Another day, another plugin for BuddyPress. In BP < 1.2, it was impossible for site admins to manage group membership in groups where they weren't also the local admin. This is good in a lot of situations, but in some applications of BP it can be a pain - the system administrator needs more power in order to correct problem, wreak havoc, and so on. In BP 1.2+ the situation is better - admins can manage groups more - but it's still not all that easy to see everything in one place. This plugin rectifies the situation by allowing site admins to manage the members of groups across their BP installation from a single screen.

Read more about it.

Related posts:

1. New BuddyPress / bbPress plugin: Group Forum Subscription
2. New BuddyPress plugin: Invite Anyone
3. Streamlining Group Blogs

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.

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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• August 19, 2007 — Wordpress and WordpressMU differences (2)
• October 27, 2007 — Is it really a bug? (1)

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Brief notes are available from slide 12 onwards.

Related posts

• BuddyPress: A university’s social network
• WordPress: Beyond Blogging session at IWMW10
• Feeding WordPress with EPrints: A Social Repo?
• OPACPress: Our Talis Incubator proposal
• 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:)

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

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.

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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• July 3, 2009 — Building a Better Blog host: Week 4, the SEO and stats edition (1)

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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

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.

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?

Related posts

• WordPress: Beyond Blogging session at IWMW10
• WordPress: Beyond Blogging!!
• OPACPress: Our Talis Incubator proposal
• Jailbreaking WordPress with Web hooks
• Scholarly publishing with WordPress

Maybe it’s just cause I live in a particular bubble on the internet, but over the past six months or a year there has been what seems to me like some serious momentum towards thinking through WordPress (and/or WPMu) as a serious alternative to Learning Management Systems. And posts like this interview with Kyle Jones as well as Joe Ugoretz’s tour-de-force two part series on how he is putting the idea of WordPress as a LMS into action are pretty badass. This is some amazing stuff, and I really think Kyle Jones nails what the appeal of WP as an LMS is for many with this quote from his interview at wpmu.org:

But [offering faculty and students a hands-on approach to designing their learning] is what makes using WordPress MU wonderful as a LMS: We’ve modified and tweaked it at the students’ request, making their learning space what they need it to be – not what some company says it should be.

And, on top of that, Kyle captures the engine that is driving this emerging cooperation amongst and between a distributed group of faculty, students, and technologist all over the world:

We learn from each other, we steal from each other, in the end we try to give back to those who have helped us.

That really sums up what this vision of openness is as we work through our issues, tinker with the tools, think through the implications, and share back what we’ve learned. I might be crazy, but I still have faith that through this kind of process we can take back the means of imagining our own spaces for teaching and learning from the expedients of institutional efficiency, cause it’s exactly the imagination of these spaces that is a necessary and integral part of the teaching and learning process as Joe Ugoretz’s posts make all too clear. I may be biased, but I can;t help but think what we are seeing in the educational community working with WordPress, is just one part of a larger momentum of people using a variety of tools to escape the prison house of learning that is the LMS. And that brings me to a bigger point, I really don’t think we are simply using WordPress to ape the LMS, but rather to re-imagine the ideas that under gird this design: give students ownership of their work, control over the design, and the ability to seamlessly integrate a wide variety of other tools they already use to network online. More than that, the bigger push is to put students in a pace they own and share back what they choose, an expectation that they take ownership of their work and identities online.

Paternity leave is over, and the bava is back!!!

Anyway, rather than re-iterating the bid here. You can read it in full by clicking here.

Comments are very welcome. Thanks.

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• WordPress: Beyond Blogging session at IWMW10
• WordPress: Beyond Blogging!!
• Feeding WordPress with EPrints: A Social Repo?
• Jailbreaking WordPress with Web hooks

WPcares was launched during the event to raise money for Haiti. The original goal was $1,000. Last I checked, it was over $3,000 and this will be matched in donations from

• StudioPress
• RocketGenius
• iThemes
• Headway Themes
• WebDev Studios

Wow. This is why I love the community SO FREAKING MUCH.

The WordPress Foundation was also launched.

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.

Please visit their site for more information.

And, visitors to site may have noticed the clean design over there. It is the new 2010 theme, which will be the new default theme for this year.

Update: there will be some important terminology changes. Dougal gives a rundown over here between sites and networks.

I’ll go into this in depth at a later date, when trunk gets more finalized.

Random Posts

• April 21, 2009 — 2.7.1 released, and an overview (6)
• July 13, 2009 — WordPressMU 2.8.1 now out, features and a couple bugs (4)
• September 30, 2007 — Where to find error logs (3)
• July 19, 2009 — Buddypress Blog Author Link (6)
• July 31, 2008 — Introducing Ron (1)

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Last week, in the post where I announced my new WPMU plugin Shared Blogroll, I briefly mentioned the use case that I had in mind, which was of course education-focused. Yesterday and today I did some more work on the plugin itself (MORE AJAX 4EVA) and some of the supporting players. I thought I’d spell it out a little more so that others could implement what is probably the coolest system for shared blogrolls on earth, or at least on WPMU, which amounts to pretty much the same thing.

The plugins

• Shared Blogroll. This creates a widget that allows bloggers to embed a link category from any other blog on the system on their own blog.
• Add Users Sidebar Widget. This plugin is already pretty great, as well it should be seeing as it’s written by good-looking Canadians. I made some edits to the plugin to make it a bit more flexible.
  1. First I removed the RSS box from the Add User widget. For most of my users, it’ll confuse; for all of them, it’ll be redundant, since they’ll all be using Wordpress blogs and thus will have feeds that are very auto-discoverable.
  2. As the plugin stands in the repository, links are automatically put into the blog’s default link category (or, if they’re using FeedWordPress, the FWP link category). For most users, that’s something unhelpful like “Links” or “Uncategorized”. I altered the plugin so that the blog owner can choose which link category the added links will be put into. As I’ll discuss below, I think that this will add a lot of flexibility to the way that the plugins can be used together. You can download the text of my modified version of Add Users Sidebar Widget here: add-link-sidebar-widget.txt. Save as .php before uploading – and make sure that you uninstall previous versions of the plugin before uploading, or you might get whitescreened to death.
• Optional step. The default WP Links widget is set up so that you can’t select to display an empty category of links. As you’ll see below, I want to have instructors create a new category for their blogrolls, and I figured it’d be pretty confusing if they couldn’t create a sidebar widget corresponding to a link category until at least one student had posted a link (thus populating the category). So I wrote a little plugin that replaces the default Links widget with one that allows you to pick an empty links category. Drop this into mu-plugins: link_widget_allow_empty_cat. Be warned, though, that this plugin deregisters the default Links widget, which might have the effect of removing every links widget on your installation of WPMU. (I haven’t tested it.) For me, it’s OK, because I don’t have any active users yet. As an alternative, you could edit the core of WP (making sure to back up, take note of where you made the edit for future upgrades, blah blah blah) in the following way. In wp-includes/default-widgets.php, line 139 reads

  $link_cats = get_terms( 'link_category');

  Replace it with

  $link_cats = get_terms( 'link_category', 'hide_empty=0');

  That should leave all of your pre-existing links widgets in place.

The process

The immediate goal of this setup is to allow a class blogroll to be shared effortlessly between members of a class. (Though I can imagine lots of other very cool uses.) Here are the directions I’m going to give to instructors and students on how to leverage these two plugins to make it happen.

Instructors

• Create a new Link Category for your class blogroll – let’s say you call it “ENG 110 Blogroll”.
• Add a Links widget to the sidebar, making sure to select “ENG 110 Blogroll” from the category dropdown.
• Add an Add Links widget to the sidebar. Again, be sure to select “ENG 110″ blogroll as the target category for added links.
• Give your blog’s ID number to your students and give them the following directions.

Students

• After creating a blog, visit the professor’s blog and enter your site’s URL into the Add Link sidebar widget.
• Add a Shared Blogroll widget to your own blog’s sidebar. Enter the professor’s blog ID number as the source blog, select “ENG 110 Blogroll” from the dropdown list, and Save.

I hope that the instructors and students get into this blogroll sharing thing. It distributes what would otherwise be a huge amount of work for the instructor, or *worse yet*, for me.

Related posts:

1. New WPMU plugin: Shared Blogroll
2. Blog-specific email plugin for WPMU users
3. Streamlining Group Blogs