The Education Blogs

Martha Burtis is back in action at UMW, and she returns to us with a project that I am following with great anticipation: blogging WordPress as a CMS. As she notes in her introductory post on the topic:

It often seemed…that when push came to shove, there was always something that prevented WP from being the right CMS solution. Although I think I’ve always suspected that with the right mix of plugins and the right theme, the problems could be surmounted.

Source: bavatuesdays

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The whole syndication-oriented architecture (feed-frenzied learning) many have been playing with using WordPress Multi-User has been moving along pretty well for us at UMW. With the help of just a couple of plugins we have been able to generate a single feed for tags and/or categories throughout UMW Blogs (using the Sitewide Tags Pages plugin for WPMu), and we are then able to republish these sitewide feeds in any blog using FeedWordPress. Moreover, it provides us with the ability to incorporate and re-publish sites with RSS feeds that are outside the UMW Blogs environment.

photo credit: Criterion

OK, I’m officially in full blown UMW Blogs blogging mode, I will most likely prove insufferable for the next month or so, and that’s just the way it is, suckas!

Steve Harris Stalinism Blog (Oh what a header)

UMW Blogs has got a brand new bag, with no small assistance from Andy “EDU” Rush nation who turned me on to the beautiful theme PrimePress (Andy’s the go to theme guy without a question), along with Serena Epstein an Jerry Slezak who provided the gorgeous header images featuring the UMW campus. The redesign took a couple of days with some on and off work, and before I get into the details of that, I wanted to take a quick poll. PrimePress offers you two different looks, and I wanted to know which one people preferred.

I already mentioned that Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin was going to make a whole lot of things much, much easier.  Well, DSader wrapped all the awesomeness into one bitchin’ plugin for WPMu: Sitewide “three-in-one” Multi Widget Panel. I discovered it through James Farmer’s WPMU.org (already proving an invaluable resource) and I just had to test it out.

As a follow up to my last post, I also tested out mapping subdomains with CPanel on a WPMu installation using Donncha’s Domain Mapping plugin. And surprise, surprise, just about the same method works for mapping just a subdomain to a blog on WPMu. To clarify, when I say mapping just a subdomain I mean mapping just one part of a domain, rather than the entire domain. For example, I don’t want the domain 

Well, I have written a bunch about domain mapping on WPMu over the last year or so. Up and until tonight I have been using Richard Bui’s tutorial here along with David Dean’s Multi-Site Manager Plugin.

Update: The latest beta of the Anarchy Media player can be downloaded here, and you might be happy to know it works with WPMu 2.6—huge thanks go to IndyMedia for the tip in the comments below.

I have been meaning to use David Benini’s Plugins List plugin (I love plugins about plugins–the meta-plugin!) which simply allows you to include a list of all the plugins you are using on your site. Simple, yet potentially very useful for others, and a way to give a shout out for all the hardworking folks out there who are truly responsible for making WordPress as great as it is (yep, I’m creeping back to the state of ecstatic fanboy!).

This post will detail how to create an aggregator site wherein people can simply add their feeds to a site and have their content automatically re-published. This example is specifically for WordPress and/or WordPress Multi-User. It depends upon three plugins, so download them ahead of time from the links below:

1) Oz Politics’s BDP RSS Aggregator

2) Andre Malan’s Add RSS extension widget for BDP RSS

3) Charles Johnson’s Feed WordPress plugin

Today I got to thinking about something while talking about building a community site: where is my community right now?