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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!

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MediaWiki for Elementary Students

April 30, 2008 in Technology, Wikis, open source | No comments

I was considering a number of wiki engines for my classroom. Having a strong bias as state in this article, I was looking for a self hosted wiki. I put a call out for suggestions on Classroom20.com. PmWiki and Docuwiki were suggested as well as MediaWiki. Ultimately I chose MediaWiki for a number of reasons.

First off, I am familiar with MediaWiki. I didn’t have to learn another wiki markup syntax. Wikis markup vary considerably. I decided that students were best off learning the same markup as used in the Wikipedia which also uses MediaWiki. In addition, MediaWiki is very extensible. While it barely has an administrative backend, it is easy modified by copying and pasting snippets of code from the MediaWiki site. There is also a large collection of extensions that can be used to customize the look and functionality of the site.

Installation of MediaWiki is straight forward, but it usually isn’t among the programs that can be installed automatically using a Control Panel. You need to download it from MediaWiki then upload it to your server, unpacking it at some point along the way. Alternatively, if you have shell access and a SVN client on your server, you can install it by logging into your account, amaking a directory, navigate to that directory and execute:

svn co http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/branches/REL_12/phase3 .

(Don’t forget the space and period at the end!) In either case you will need to continue by setting up MySQL database, then running the floow the browser installer’s instructions.

MediaWiki is not ready for student use out of the box. Access to the wiki and ability to edit is open to the world as configured. You will need to go to MediaWiki User Rights section and paste in the code Under the “Default Rights” setting and paste it into the body of LocalSettings.php. Simple change the true/false statements to meet your needs. You can customize the configuration in a number of other ways. Look to MediaWiki’s Conguration Settings page. You can also find more customization options in the Extensions Matrix.

I configured the wiki to keep the public out:

// Implicit group for all visitors
$wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['createaccount'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['read'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['createpage'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*' ]['createtalk'] = false;

I had create account configured as “true” until all the students registered themselves, then I changed it to false. Otherwise I left group permissions as default. This way only the students can read and edit the wiki. I also toggled upload to true in $wgEnableUploads in LocalSettings.php so they can upload images. The only thing I have not configured is an extension that helps prevent simultaneous editing called Edit Warning. I’ll give it a try when I need it, but it is fairly complex to install. I’d certainly make sure I had everything backed up before attempting to install it!

Now the students are beginning research on their topics. Soon they will be starting to organize their headings and subheadings, then filling in their content. I’m excited to see how the writing process takes place as the students work on their sections of the Wiki. I’m sure I will be learning as much as they as I observe the process.

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