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WPMU + Buddypress Test http://maxiecollier.testbp.org

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By keywordseoservices
March 9, 2010

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Customize the Suspended blog page

A very little-know and hidden feature in WordPress MU is the ability to add a customize page that is displayed when a blog is suspended or archived. Only Site Admins can archive or suspend a blog, and you can do this in the Site Admin -> Blogs menu. Hover over the blog in question and see the extra links.

Screenshot-1

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This blog has been archived or suspended.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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By Andrea
March 8, 2010

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First Day at #WCIRL

So, day one of WordCamp Ireland draws to a close, there is a dinner tonight but the talks and sessions are over for the day.

I briefly helped John Handelaar during his talk on WordPress MU, but my main talk was on WP Super Cache. Thank you Hanni, Jane and Sheri for recording the talk. Hopefully it’ll be available online next week. In the meantime here’s the OpenOffice slides of my talk.

I must extend a big thank you to Sabrina Dent and Katherine Nolan for organising a great day and to the sponsors who made the weekend possible.

Looking forward to the dinner tonight, and the rest of the conference tomorrow.

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By Donncha
March 6, 2010

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2.9.2 released

Yesterday, Donncha released WordPress MU version 2.9.2. 2.9.2 contains fixes for the major outstanding bugs in MU. Unless a security issue surfaces in either WordPress or WordPress MU, this is expected to be the last version of MU.

Thanks Donncha :)

 

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By Ron
March 4, 2010

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Podcasting Made Simple for WPMU: A Multimedia Blogger’s Dream

If you’ve been looking for a decent WPMU-compatible tool for podcasting, your answer is here. The Blubrry PowerPress Podcasting Plugin is a free, open source tool made by and for podcasters.

This plugin has been thoroughly tested with WPMU and the developer claims it as as one of the advanced features of the plugin. If you’re looking to attract more vloggers and podcasters to your blogging community, this is one tool you cannot live without. Never underestimate the power of a viral video clip or popular podcaster. Monetizing your blogging community could be as simple as tapping into your bloggers’ talents and making multimedia posts a possibility for them. Multimedia blogging is a key factor in social media optimization, because any content that is good is very likely to be shared. When people share your bloggers’ content among friends and associates online, it generates links back to your site and establishes your blogging network as a source for valuable or interesting content.

PowerPress Features Include:

  • Full iTunes Support: Adds iTunes compliant podcast feeds to your WordPress blog.
  • Integrated Media Players: Audio/video web players with video embed support from sites such as YouTube and Ustream.tv.
  • Modifiers: Easily add, modify and remove podcasts form blog posts and pages.
  • Migration tools: Quickly migrate from PodPress, Blogger or Movable Type without losing episodes.
  • Multi-podcast support: Create separate podcasts by category (category casting) or by media format.
  • Supported Media Formats: mp3, m4a, ogg, wma, ra, mp4a, m4v, mp4v, mpg, asf, avi, wmv, flv, swf, mov, divx, 3gp, midi, wav, aa, pdf, torrent, m4b, m4r.
  • Integration: Synchronize with Blubrry’s Free and Premium media hosting and statistics services.

Media Player Options:

PowerPress also comes with five audio mp3 players to choose from when displaying your podcasts:

If you’re migrating from PodPress, all you have to do is install PowerPress, Configure the “PodPress Episodes” setting in PowerPress to “Include in Posts and Feeds”, and then disable PodPress. It’s that easy and you won’t lose any of your episodes.

PowerPress iTunes Support and Features:

The ability to tag and categorize videos and podcasts within WordPress is really important for increasing their exposure to search engines and social networks. This plugin supports that need by providing category casting and tag casting, which also adds iTunes compliant attributes to tag feeds. If you’re offering podcasting capabilities as part of a paid blogging service, then you need a plugin that will help your users comply with iTunes listings, tags and file formats, since iTunes users are the overwhelming majority of many successful podcasts. PowerPress also allows you to upload artwork to iTunes from directly from within PowerPress settings.

The episode entry box is shown above. As you can see, it’s very simple to post media through Edit Post screen. If you’re looking to add podcasting capabilities to your blogging network or your single user blog, PowerPress makes it very easy to get off the ground without having to worry about all of the technical requirements for interfacing with the necessary third parties that make a successful podcasting engine. You can find more information about the plugin’s extensive features and download it at the WordPress repository.

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By Sarah Gooding
March 4, 2010

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Email in 2009

I just ran the following code on the 2009 archive of my inbox.

grep "From: " 2009|cut -f 1 --complement -d " "|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr|less

I received the most email from bots and scripts, among them WordPress.com, Twitter and Facebook. Of the real people here are the top 5 names you may recognise:

  1. Maya Desai (109)
  2. Matt Mullenweg (96)
  3. Sheri Bigelow (76)
  4. Michael D Adams (37)
  5. Barry Abrahamson (34)

This was of course inspired by Matt’s post in January. I should do the same for Twitter replies/messages and for blog comments. I somehow doubt there would be much overlap between Twitter DMs and emails.

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By Donncha
March 3, 2010

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Automagically Generate Screenshots of URLs on Your WordPress Blog

If you’ve ever illustrated a post or page with a screenshot, then you know how time-consuming it can be to take the screenshot, edit it to a reasonable size, and then upload the image to blog. Do yourself a favor and make use of a plugin that will get the screenshot live without you having to do anything more than input the URL. Below is an example usage in a post. The output automatically links the screenshots to the websites:

Many thanks to the folks over at Binary Moon who wrote the BM Shots plugin in order to serve their wpvote.com site. This is an incredibly useful (and free) tool for anyone using a WordPress or WPMU blog. It’s not available in the WordPress repository, so you’ll need to download it from the plugin developer’s site.

BM Shots makes use of the WordPress API to resize images that are called through either shortcodes or functions added to your theme. Some images take longer than others to load because of the site they’re coming from, but they’ll usually show up upon page refresh. There are two ways to put the plugin into action after downloading and installing it:

Shortcode:

This is the easiest way to use the plugin and it allows you to make the screenshot any size you like:

[browsershot url="http://link-to-website" width="foo-value"]

PHP Function:

Add to your theme’s functions.php file:

bm_mshot ($url, $width = 250);

Then add the template tag wherever you want it:

<?php
$url = 'http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/';
$width = 300;
echo bm_mshot ($url, $width);
?>

Use it. Love it. Save time. :)

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By Sarah Gooding
March 2, 2010

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WordPress 3.0 now Feature-Freeze

Freezy Breezy not only over Europe but as well within the project. Today WordPress 3.0 12:00 UTC/GMT went feature freeze.

There was a slight shift in the development timeline last weeks that resulted in a hop from Feb 15th to March 1st. The other dates were shifted accordingly making May 1st as the new planned release date of WordPress 3.0. I think that date is promising and sportive at once.

As you may know WordPress 3.0 is to be shipping with a multi-site feature that was previously available as the WPMU fork. The fork was merged into the core trunk which leaded to a lot more code that is not always new because both projects were next to each other for quite a long time and only loosely connected. In the end the MU fork did not get that much development attention that at the end of May/ beginning of June 2009 it was announced to merge both projects. So maybe within the period of one year that might become reality!

From the merge wordpress.com-like as well as buddypress-based sites will benefit. For the core project this means a lot of more work. Comparing the original plans from December last / January this year I would assume that this bears more work than estimated (so I won’t swear on May 1st as release as of today) and it might be likely that things will break in 3.0 for existing MU or WP installations.

Next to the 3.0 release cycle and the Merge another important date should not get unnoticed in the wordpress-timeline. On January 22th, 2010, the WordPress Foundation was officially established which might open more stability in the development for the org and com side of the project as well as for sister-projects like Buddypress and all the plugins (canonical or not) that are interconnected in the wordpress domain.

Posted in wordpress mu.

By hakre
March 1, 2010

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100 ways to use a VLE – #14 Writing a blog

I is writing a blog!

Though you may be reading this on my blog, for some practitioners and learners using a blog is an alien idea and they may not even know what a blog is, or what blogging means.

A VLE can be a quick and easy way for practitioners and learners to start blogging and learn the value of blogging.

A blog is an abbreviation of web log (weblog) and to put it simply is a log of commentaries, observations or reflections that is placed on the web.

Maintaining a reflective journal, thoughts about assignments, or writing notes about lessons; these activities can all be done on a blog.

However…

Not everyone has the confidence or the technical ability to start a blog.

Now I know that starting a blog is a piece of cake, however that may be easy, it is not necessarily such an effective practice for a complete class, curriculum area or a whole college.

Some institutions may consider putting a WordPress MU Server for blogging purposes. However this may not be an option for all colleges. If a WordPress MU Server is put in, then you can link to college systems to ensure that every learner can create their own blog.

Though one issue is not just technical confidence, but also confidence in what is being written. It’s one thing to write a reflective journal and be very open, it is a fundamentally different thing to post those reflections on an open blog for all to read. A learner is likely to be less open if they know everyone, their mum and their employer is going to be reading it. So you might want to close it off to just the learner (or learner group) and the tutor. This requires a modicum of technical confidence; can we assume that every learner can do this.

So though blogging systems such as WordPress or Blogger are great tools for individuals, they don’t really scale with groups or whole colleges.

This is where the VLE can come in.

It’s already configured with logins for learners, so that’s one job done, learners and staff who already use it have a familiarity with it as a tool.

You can use included blogging tools, but for some learners even a discussion forum might be a useful starting point. Advantage of built-in blogging functionality will be (hopefully) that it generates an RSS feed.

Blogging has real potential to enhance and enrich the learning experience of many learners; the VLE can be the right tool for some practitioners in introducing the concept to their learners.

Regardless of the above, if learners want to use other tools such as WordPress, Typepad, Blogger, instead of using a provided blogging tool on the VLE, then practitioners need to consider how they are going to incorporate these blogs into the learning activity. An obvious route is to use RSS feeds from these blogs.

The VLE is not an ideal blogging tool, but for many practitioners and learners it can be a useful and scalable blogging tool.

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Posted in wordpress mu.

By James Clay
February 26, 2010

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Come work for Incsub / Edublogs… we’re hiring a Plugin Master!

Incsub & Edublogs are expanding rapidly in 2010 and we’re looking for an advanced WordPress plugin developer to join the team full time.

The successful applicant will be responsible for developing and improving plugin functionality at Edublogs and also contributing plugins to Incsub sites including WPMU DEV and WP Plugins.

The role offers massive scope to develop your passion for all things WP as part of the fastest growing and most exciting WP development group on the web, as well as be a key part of one of the largest blogging platforms out there.

Experience / Qualifications

To fit this role you’ll have to be able to demonstrate:

  • Outstanding plugin development skills
  • A commitment to speedy and quality delivery
  • Great personal / support communication skills

You’ll also be happy to work from home, manage your time accordingly, be independent, able to take the lead, pro-active and seriously ambitious.

Conditions

We’re keen to offer the right person an attractive package complete with flexible holidays and the opportunity to lead up Edublogs development and other new Incsub projects.

Apply

Email admin[at]incsub[dot]com with samples of your work and a brief summary of your experience (please make absolutely sure you link to or attach plugins solely authored by yourself).

Links demonstrating your awesome communication skills would be great too :)

And please feel free to ask any questions about the role.

Cut of date Friday 5th March 2010.

Here’s a pdf of the role for easy printing.

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By James
February 25, 2010

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