Learning the World

In looking at WordPress Mu as a possible lightweight CMS for campus organizations and departments, I’ve found myself on a quest … a quest to figure out if/how WordPress can display an inline list of posts from a given WordPress category.

So what do I mean by that? Well, consider this actual use example from the “Research Tools” database I ported over to Drupal for a recent Library redesign project. The original database contained a number of records relating to research tools (journals, indexes, etc.) relating to a particular subject area. These records were assigned to categories like “Africana Studies: Major Research Tools” and “Africana Studies: Other Research Tools”. The original database then dynamically served up lists of these research tools on a single “Africana Studies” themed web page.

Continue Reading »

My wife uses WordPress for her blog, and complained the other night that she was no longer able to use the Flash uploader to add photos to her web site. Digging around the web for an answer, I came across this support post on WordPress.org: Image/Media Uploader problems? It walks through some common problems, and then gets to this big:

3. Update your Adobe Flash to the latest version (esp you Linux users!): Flash. NOTE: NOT TO VERSION 10. The new Flash version 10 is incompatible. The latest version 9 of Flash is what you want. There will likely NOT be a fix for this any time soon, since the problem is actually with Flash 10 itself. Stick with Flash 9 for the time being.

This raises the question of how one installs Flash 9 if you’ve already got Flash 10. Adobe doesn’t make this easy — I couldn’t find a direct link from the Adobe Flash home page — but fortunately Google dug up the archived version page:

• http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html#fp9

The problem is even after reverting back to Flash 9, this still doesn’t work. Oh I can click the button now and select a file, but once selected said file never uploads; the browser just sits there. Searching it around, it appears I’m not the only one experiencing this.

So the short answer seems to be “use the browser uploader and hope the flash one is fixed … someday.”

podPress is a podcasting module for WordPress created by Mighty Seek. It allows you to customize your feed, attach (but not upload) files to the feed, and track statistics about who’s doing what with the podcast (e.g. playing it on the site, downloading it, etc.)

It comes with an audio player (I haven’t mucked about with the video options yet) that allows audio to be played on the page.  It supports built-in previews showing you how the podcast’s entry will look in the most popular podcasting directories (including iTunes and Yahoo).

The good news is that it appears to work out of the box with WordPress Mu, which is fantastic. One of our major goals for the WordPress pilot is to be able to support podcasting, and I think this would be a great tool for doing it. It also helps that almost every podcaster I know who uses WordPress also uses podPress … and I know a lot of podcasters.

The only downside to the app that I can see is that you can’t upload files as part of it; you need to upload the file using the “add media” buttons in WordPress, copy the path to said file, and then paste that path into the podPress portion of the page.

It’s clunkier than I expected; if nothing else I’d like for it to be able to browse the user’s media directory. I can see this cutting and pasting of urls being a little clunky for new users, but given the rest of podPress’s feature set, I think we can live with it.

An absolutely essential component of any WordPress roll-out we do is support for LDAP, either directly through an LDAP module or indirectly through Shibboleth support. Fortunately, there’s a current LDAP plugin available that handles the first part; I’m still looking into what Shib support there may be.

• LDAP Plugin for WordPress Mu

This plugin worked out of the box for me with WordPress Mu 2.6.x, which is always a nice thing.

I’m looking at doing a pilot of WordPress Mu as a campus-wide blogging platform, and I’m curious as to what others experiences have been with the software. At this point I’m kicking the tires and figuring out what plug-ins we’d need to include to do what we want to do.

I see four big needs for the blogging platform:

• Blogging (it does this out of the box, no big deal)
• Podcasting (in theory, I think it creates RSS enclosures for uploaded files, but I’d rather that give people a finer degree of control)
• Video Insertion (plugins for YouTube, Hulu, etc.)
• Photo Galleries

PodPress seems a logical choice for Podcasting, but I’ve heard mixed reports about how well it works with Mu. Photo Galleries are another challenge; we’re debating going with a hosted service like Flickr vs. a locally installed option like Gallery. Authentication is the big issue there; if we go with Flickr, everyone has to maintain their own accounts. If we go with Gallery or something hosted locally, then we have a better chance of integrating it into our existing authentication schemes.

Using Mu? Curious about our own experiments? Post a comment below.

It looks like there’s a bug in Moodle 1.9’s “Advanced Uploading of Files” that prevents students from seeing faculty responses submitted as revised files/comments unless a grade has been assigned to the assignment. This happens even if the assignment was set to “No Grade”. I haven’t seen this one in the wild yet, but I understand how it would be problematic. 

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-16553

Hosts Courtney Bentley and Ken Newquist kick off the early October edition of the ITS Coffee Break with a discussion of fall projects, including a slew of student video projects and “Spaces”, a new intercollegiate workspace for faculty that’s powered by Moodle and Shibboleth. In Tech News they look at new political and utility apps for the iPhone, check up on a chess match being played between Earth and the International Space Station, and consider Nintendo’s answer to Apple’s iPod touch: the DSi.

Getting the Podcast

• Download the MP3 directly
• Subscribe to the Soapbox podcast rss feed using an aggregator (you only need to do this once; subsequent shows should download automatically)
• Subscribe to the Soapbox feed via iTunes

A demonstration of the very nifty Drupal Admin Module. I’ve been experimenting with using this module; it seems like a good way to expose the guts of Drupal, which can confuse even veteran users.

There’s a feature request in tracker to allow activities to be copied within a course. It’s something that was suggested as a possible project for Moodle Hack/Doc Fest and it just came up on our own campus this week.

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-11288

One of the ideas we came up with at Moodle Hack/Doc Fest II at Kenyon College was to request a change to the Moodle 1.9 gradebook that restored the ability to assign weights to all categories on one screen, rather than having to go digging through the interface for each individual category. This is functionality that existed in Moodle 1.8, but went away when the new gradebook was rolled out in 1.9.

We made a bunch of noise about it, as all of us at Hack/Doc voted in favor of the change. A number of others voted for it as well, eventually racking up 28 votes, and now a proposed patch is available for download.  

This is what I love about the Moodle community; you can propose a feature or fix, rally folks to your cause, and next thing you know, there’s a patch. Now granted, it doesn’t always work this way — sometimes people don’t agree with you, and the feature dies on the vine (unless you code it yourself) but a) most of our fixes have been accepted and b) you