Plugin
I’d missed the news, but the latest version of the Akismet plugin for WordPress includes some tasty stats. As with all things statistical, there’s a few ways to read the numbers, and there are some anomalies (ferinstance, it claims I had a few days of over 1000 ham i.e., valid comments per day and that’s just plain wrong) but the spam stats feel roughly right. They’re not dramatically different from what I was seeing under Mollom, except nobody gets inflicted with Captcha using Akismet.
Akismet history graph
For the first part of this semester I was in over my head with UMW Blogs. We had come up with the idea (through covert communication with other schools not to be named 
) to use FeedWordPress as a syndicating engine. Quite simply, that students create their own blogs and tag posts for their respective courses, which would automatically republish them in an aggregating course blog.
For example, Sue Fernsebner’s History 299 course would tag relevant posts 08fern299, and those posts would be automatically re-posted in the course blog. How are they re-posted automatically? Well, Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin collects all posts, tags and categories into one blog http://tags.umwblogs.org), that by extension gives a single feed for all tags through the WPMu environment. You can see all of professor Fernsebner’s class blog posts one that blog here: http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/08fern299/
And if you just smack the term “feed” at the end of the above URL you then have an RSS feed for every post in UMW Blogs that has the tag 08fern299: http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/08fern299/f…
Now, FeedWordPress just consumes this feed and republishes all the distributed posts in one blog and allows the permalink to point back to the students original blog post on their blog. Perfect, right?
Well, almost. Fact is that the .2.x version of the Sitewide Tags was not actually working with FeedWordPress that well. What was happening was that FeedWordPress was not updating correctly and the permalinks would only point to the post on the course blog, effectively erasing the link back to the student blog. The only way to fix this was to go into the course blog and delete the posts that didn’t link back to the student blog, and update the feed again which works when you manually pull the feed but not when it is automatically pulled in (which was the root of the problem). Well, this issue is no more, the latest version of Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin 0.3.1 fixes the issue with FeedWordPress and has put UMW Blogs back in the Syndicating cloud (I was worried there for a second, and I don’t miss all the duct tape fixes at all).
The moral of the story? It didn’t take long for the WPMu community to make things right, and it didn’t cost UMW anything but a little bit of experimentation, patience, and sharing. I mean who’s afraid of the open source wolf? These times demand many things, and one of them is cooperation and sharing, not fear and closing down. Open source is not proprietary 
WordPress has supported Gravatars for awhile, which is great, but if you’re rolling out a site for a bunch of students to hammer on, it’s not ideal to have to send them to a third party service to set up photos. It’s awkward, and confusing, for new users to have to go somewhere else to add a photo to their profile. And profile photos can be very useful, especially at the beginning of a semester when everyone is just getting to know everyone else in a class, to put a face to a name.
So, for UCalgaryBlogs.ca, I just installed the handy User Photo plugin. Now, any site can enable this, and the users of that site will be able to add photos to their profiles, like this:
The plugin can be configured with custom sizes for the full-size and thumb versions of the avatar, and the avatar image can be deleted and/or replaced at any time.
It’s not completely trivial to enable - because the themes need to be User Photo aware. That’s pretty easy to add, though. For the cutline theme we’re using on a project, I edited a handful of files to add the code, and it works great. On index.php, and single.php, just add this wherever you want the blog author’s photo to be displayed on the post (I put it in the section displaying the post meta information):
<?php if (function_exists('userphoto_the_author_thumbnail')) { userphoto_the_author_thumbnail();}?>Wrapping the thumbnail display code in a function_exists conditional means it will degrade nicely if the plugin is unavailable. Always a good thing to degrade instead of borking.
That results in this display when viewing the post:
Now, if you also want to show avatars on the comments, just edit comments.php to add this code (I put it in the comment meta info section):
<?php if (function_exists('userphoto_comment_author_thumbnail')) { userphoto_comment_author_thumbnail();}?>And that will look like this when displayed on the blog:
If a user hasn’t added an avatar, it won’t display any image. But if they do have one, they’ll get the properly sized version of their avatar image displayed automatically. Easy peasy. It’s a bit awkward having to edit the themes, but it’s not difficult. The hard part will be remembering to re-apply the edits if the themes get updated (hence this post…)
I have been mentioning DSader a lot lately on this blog, and that’s mainly because I have been deep into WordPress Multi-User mode for a couple of weeks now. And between the upgrade to 2.6 and the general overhaul of plugins, themes, etc., I find I’ve devoted no insignificant amount of time to plugin hunting –a truly enjoyable activity. For many of my most valuable WPMu plugins, I continually find I am utilizing DSader’s work. He wrote the following plugins that I can name off the top of my head: Userthemes (a must), Sitewide “Three-in-One” Multi Widget panel, Toggle Admin Menus Sitewide, and the indispensable More Privacy Options, to name a few.
So, there is no question DSader has been a veritable mensch when it comes to sharing with the WPMu community, and I’d like to say thanks. But before I even can he comes out with an updated version of his Sitewide Comment Tracking plugin for WPMu that reminds me just how deeply indebted I am to his work. If you haven’t tested it, I highly recommend it. It tracks the comments you have left on numerous blogs within the WPMu community. So, for example, If I leave comments on various blogs, I can track them from the Comments–>My Comments tab. It provides an awesome interface to quickly scan where you’ve commented and who has responded, an amazingly powerful feature for a controlled, yet deeply distributed architecture like WPMu.
Here’s what it looks like:
DSader's My Recent Comments plugin for WPMu
Think about it, this is an amazing way to let faculty and students know how they can track response to their comments easily, something which isn’t all that easy in the regular blogosphere. So an engineered improvement to make the community potentially more manageable. And so many of DSader’s plugins are just like that, it’s as if he were programming for UMW, he comes from an educational setting and it’s amazing how many of our needs and desires are met and satisfied by his work
Update: While writing this I received an email from him telling me the Sitewide 3-in-1 Widget panel has been updated, with a bug or two fixed, Is DSader sick or what? What can I say, it’s people like him that make this whole thing so much funner and cooler. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!
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. Lo and behold, it works like a charm as long as you remember to install Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin.
What’s more, DSader notes that this plugin can also be edited to…
pull from multiple blogs by editing one line of code ("clones" the widget output while applying the same widget control options to each clone):
<code>
`$featured_blogs = array($options['blog_id']); // Clone multiple panel outputs such as ...
// $featured_blogs = array($options['blog_id'],3,354);`
(inspired by http://dailytestimony.net/plugins/)
In other words, there may be a way to select a specific number of blogs from a WPMu installation that can be fed into a specific tag cloud. Now this would be an awesome plugin in and of itself, for it could provide a way to aggregate tags for a series of distributed student blogs for a course, which could then be presented back on the mother blog as the course tag cloud. Something similar to what I was imagining way back when in this post.
Anyway, awesome work fromDSader and if you’re itching to see the plugin in action, I have it running on UMW Blogs already
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 jimgroom.org to only host one WordPress blog because I plan on using this domain name for other things like a MediaWIki or even Drupal installation:) So, all I do is create a subdomain such as blog.jimgroom.org and map that to a blog on my WPMu installation.
Assuming the domain is already pointed to your host and you are using CPanel like me, just create the subdomain and point the document root to your WPMu installation. In the following example I added a subdomain blog to jimgroom.org and then pointed it to my WPMu installation using the Document Root field (which is at public_html/wpmued-org for my personal installation).
After you do this, you can map subdomains for all your favorite domain names to one WPMu installation and save yourself the headache of updating numerous blogs on numerous domains that need numoerous updates and themes and plugins and whatnot. One installation to rule them all!
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. The combination of the two have worked great for me thus far, and I liked that with this combination each mapped domain could act like its own, stand-alone WPMu install—with each domain have the possibility of unlimited dynamic subdomains—a feature I’m not so sure is available with this plugin. That said, you did have to be brave enough to muck around in the database.
Well, that was then, this is now. Donncha just released a plugin that brings domain mapping for WPMu to the masses in the form of a simple, easy-to-use plugin. Is Donncha on a roll or what? Last month it was the Sitwewide Tags Plugin (though it’s much more than the name suggests) which kicks major ass. This week it is the Domain Mapping Plugin, which is for many the Holy Grail for WPMu admins.
So, I just got around to testing it out on a WPMu install that uses [[CPanel], and it is actually pretty painless, though not entirely automated. Keep in mind this will only work for installation that have sub-domains setup, no love for sub-directories just yet.
Here is how I got it to work with CPanel:
After you install the plugin you will find the Domain Mapping subtab under the Manage tab. Once you go there you will see the following:
Domain Mapping Subtab
The logic here is simple, each WPMu blog will have access to this subtab once the plugin is installed. If someone has a blog on your system and they have a domain they want to map, they would need to do two things:
1) From where ever they purchased their domain, they would need to point their domain to the nameservers of the WPMu install. For example, if your WPMu install was hosted on Bluehost, they would need to point them to NS1.BLUEHOST.COM AND NS2.BLUEHOST.COM.
2) After that, they will need to go tot the Manage–>Domain Mapping tab and specify the IP address of the WPMu site and have them put in their domain. (You can decide how you want to share the IP address with them.)
That’s it on their end, pretty simple. But on the admin end there is one more step if you are using CPanel.
You need to create an addon domain for the mapped domain and point it to the directory with the WPMu installation. For me it looked like this:
Add Domain Trick in Cpanel
You can see that the domain is added normally, but the document root is changed to point to the actual directory with the WPMu installation. After that, it works like a charm. Now, this was simple and awesome, and for folks who aren’t using CPanel it will probably work automatically once someone points their domain to the correct IP address. But with CPanel there is one extra step, and while a relatively easy one, it does rule out strict automation of the mapped domains. But, th upside is that at the end of the day even I can map domains with out hacking Apache settings or putting our WPMu install in imminent danger. Disco!
So, can UMW Blogs map domains now? Well, I gues we can now, can’t we
If you haven’t tried out the Simple Tags plugin yet, I promise you it will never be too soon. This plugin is extremely powerful, and strikes me more as a full blown application within WP than a simple extension of WordPress. I haven’t even begun to play with all the features it offers, but here are a number I have noticed already:
- Customizable Tag Cloud within pages, posts, and the sidebar
- Customized list of related posts based on tags
- Customized list of related tags
- Auto link feature for tags which will search posts and automatically “discover” tags
- Suggested tags based on both external and internal database comparison
- Display tags in RSS feeds
- Embedded tags
- Meta tags in header for search engines optimization
This plugin makes about three or four others I use redundant, and more than that it works just as well in WPMu, and has a nice interface for management complete with widgets and the whole nine yards. I hope Simple Tags marks the the future of WP plugins, for this is a very powerful tool that brings the functionality, ease, and possibilities of tagging within WordPress to the next level. A must have in my opinion.
While text encoding is proving hellacious for me with WPMu, embedding iframes has never been easier (keep in mind there are risks involved, so think before you drink!). I found a pretty cool plugin for WPMu (there is also one for a single WP install, so don’t get confused), Google Maps Quicktag, that is specifically designed for embedding a Google Maps iframe into WPMu. But, as it happens, it works with just about any iframe making it not so Google Maps centric. For example, the bava is now running this plugin and the ability to embed Flickr photosets is once again a possibility.
I blogged this feature over at UMW Blogs here, but I’ll reproduce that post below to give you a quick how-to featuring my favorite photo set on Flickr (with thanks to Chris Lott for the link).
Did you know you can embed a Flickr Slideshow on your UMW Blog? Below is an example, along with a quick how-to:
It’s a three step process assuming you already have a set on Flickr you want to embed:
1) Copy the full URL of the photo set on Flickr and then paste it into the flickrSLiDR application found here. After that, click on the create SlideShow button and copy the code generated (which will be an iframe).
2) Then go to your UMW Blog and activate the Google Maps plugin which will allow embedding iframes on your blog.
3) Finally, create a new post, and paste the code generated by flickrSLiDR into the Code tab of the text editor (not the Visual tab) and your slideshow should appear magically
I think the sir in this title should really be Andre Malan who recently created the Add to BDP RSS WordPress plugin, his first plugin for WordPress. This is functionality I have dreamed of for over a year now. In short, it is a plugin that adds a sidebar widget so that people can quickly and easily add their feeds to a BDP RSS-powered aggregation page.
Why am I so excited about it? Well, we have done a fair number of aggregated course blogs that bring numerous students posts into one space. BDP RSS has proven an excellent option for its ability to parse feeds cleanly, but adding feeds to the aggregator was heretofore only something an administrator or very brave professor could do. Well, that isn’t the case anymore, one more obstacle to progress destroyed by Brian Lamb’s student dream team.
So, in an effort to further explore how this plugin works on WPMu, I added it to the bava and would ask anyone who reads this post to add a feed to the sidebar form titled “Add RSS Feed.” It is simple, and you can see your results on the bavafeeds page.
