Blogging

You are currently browsing the archive for the Blogging category.

WPMu 2.7.1 beta 1 released

April 6, 2009 in Blogging, Social Networking, buddypress, open source | 4 comments

WordPressMu version 2.7.1 beta1 is now available. Released on April 2, this marks an important landmark for its companion BuddyPress.

BuddyPress has rested on RC1 waiting for changes to the core WordPress Mu application. According to core developer Andy Peatling’s blog post of February 11, the release of BuddyPress stable has been predicated upon the release of a new version of WPMu that includes integrated site-wide plugin support.

Whether this version includes such a feature is not entirely clear, but a survey of the changes from trunk at r1648 to branches/2.7 at r1715 reveals six plug-in related files that have been created or changed. The inclusion of wp-admin/wpmu-sitewide-plugins.php makes me optimistic.

WPMu developer Donncha indicated that the current beta version is pretty stable. My experience with WPMu is that the time between beta and release is typically on the order of days or a couple weeks.

Tags: ,

Two more WPMU plugins for K12

February 17, 2009 in Blogging, Technology, open source, wordpress | 1 comment

As I ramp up our school’s WPMU blog platform, I look forward to rolling out the new 2.7 interface. I have updated and tested my favorite plugins. DSader’s More Privacy Options, and Peter’s Collaborative Email still work. To make things even better I found a pair of plugins that will make our configuration more secure and give greater control over user privileges.

First off, there was a security hole wherein students could view pending comments that have not been approved by an administrator. Dean Matteson discovered this flaw when he realized that student comments were appearing without his having reviewed them and wrote about in his blog. He came up with a plugin that blocks access to the comments page.

Looking for new plugins for our school site I found the WPMU Menus plugin that not only solves this problem, but it allows you to enable or disable not only comments, but almost every other function in the dashboard interface. Site Admin Options reveals new choices.

wpmu_menu

The screen shot encompasses only half the options available. Beyond security, this allows administrators to greatly simplify the back end user interface making it easier for younger students to navigate.

wpmu_menu2

This takes care of the comments security issue. I tested it further by appending edit-comments.php to the blog backend urls. I was still unable to access the comments page and it redirected me to the profile page.

The next plugin of particular interest is Role Manager. Role Manager is not a WPMU plugin. It must be enabled and configured on each individual blog. Role Manager allows you to change the permissions on any existing role or group of users. It also allows you to create new roles as well. Go to Users–>Roles.

roles1

While logged in as admin, you can also configure the permissions of an individual user by accessing their profile.

roles2

Of course, if you give a user the permissions to access a feature, you also need to enable access in the Menus.

I look forward to relaunching our school blogging platform this March with a fresh new back-end interface, greater security, and a simplified dashboard for our students. If anyone has any input regarding use of WPMU for the K12 setting, I’d love to hear from you!

Tags: , , , , , , ,

WPMU 2.7 improves navigation

February 2, 2009 in Blogging, Technology, open source, wordpress | 2 comments

WordPressMu 2.7 was released a few days ago. I have been using the beta version on my BuddyPress test installation and our school’s blogging platform. At school the updates from 2.6 to 2.7b to 2.7 went without a hitch by means of ftp. On the BuddyPress site, the svn switch from trunk to tag 2.7 was a breeze.

I have been using WPMU since December 2007 for our school’s blogs starting with version 1.3. In the space of 13 months, there have been ten versions of WPMU, each representing significant improvements.

Version 1.5.1 brought a badly needed overhaul to the administrative interface and each incarnation including 2.6.x and 2.7 have built upon these improvements. To contrast the differences take a look at the following screenshots. The first one is an administrative view of the blogs page in version 2.3:

Credit Jim Groom

Credit Jim Groom

In version 1.3 all administrative options are under the site admin tab. Most weren’t as cluttered as Jim’s installation, but it gives you an idea. In stark contrast, here is the blog view in version 2.7:

wpmuadminblog

The new version looks strikingly better, but it also adds much to the navigation. The left side navigation. Clicking on a menu item brings up any submenu options. The Top menu bar were moved above the blog header and integrates viper007bond’s WordPress Admin bar. The bar can also be configured to appear on nonadministrative site pages once a user is logged in.

I look forward to customizing WPMU 2.7 for our school blogs. It will also be time to revisit the plugins that will help secure and administer blogs in a K12 setting. I’ll be writing about options soon. Are there any others using or considering use of WPMU for the K12 environment?

Tags: , , , ,

WPMU 2.7 slated for release today

January 28, 2009 in Blogging, Social Networking, Technology, open source, wordpress | 7 comments

Donncha O Caoimh tweeted:

WPMU 2.7 is just about ready. Unless someone has found a showstopper bug or has a great patch, it’ll be out later tonight

This is great news for all WPMU users as well as those waiting for a release of BuddyPress. Once the current beta is tested with a WPMU 2.7 release, the march toward the release of the second beta, then BuddyPress final. It would seem that the final release of BuddyPress is likely to occur by the Middle of February based upon the old release date and the number of days between the announced delay and the actual release of WPMU 2.7.

Donncha also believes that automatic updates should work in WPMU 2.7 for subsequent versions. This is a great security enhancement and convenieince for WPMU administrators.

The current SVN revision for WPMU is 1644. The includes/version.php still lists the code as 2.7-beta. I look forward to updating my installations this evening.

Tags: ,

MediaWiki embed in WordPress

December 30, 2008 in Blogging, Technology, open source, wordpress | 7 comments

Matt Leifer commented on my post about the advent of BuddyPress wondering if there was some sort of integration with a wiki and WordPress. His question aroused my curiousity as I use WordPress and MediaWiki. Indeed there is a very interesting WordPress plugin that works MediaWiki.

Append Wiki Page by Enej Bajgoric at the University of British Columbia is a WordPress extension that allows users to actually embed a MediaWiki page within an individual blog post. Install this plugin and a new option appears at the bottom of the edit post page.

wiki-inc

Simply type in the url of the desired wikipage and it appears in the post when you publish it. Here is a screencast illustrating its use. It includes edit links to the wiki, so that a reader could actually move from the blog post to the actual MediaWiki page and edit it if they have those priviledges. I first saw this on Jim Groom’s post/wiki on installing BuddyPress and wondered how he did it.  In a round about way, I found out how.

I like this plugin and it generally works well. I think that it has a great deal of potential in education and documentation. My only problem is that it, for some reason, will not work correctly when I use it with wikis on my server. If I link to any other wiki page, it works fine. I can only assume it is because of some setting on my server. I certainly would like to resolve this (any offers for help gracefully accepted) as the Append Wiki Page plugin is a great tool.

Tags: , ,

« Older entries