Blogs @ William and Mary

Nice to meet you!

We still need to do some fixin’, so if things don’t look right to you, just ping us (wordpress@wmblogs.net).  We’ll be fixing some things (custom theme header images and plugin reactivation in particular) this evening and throughout the day tomorrow.  Please pardon the dust….

“Soon” is relative– but we’re working on moving & upgrading the WMBlogs service today.  During the outage, any page besides this “main” blog will direct you to an outage notice.  Thanks for your patience, & we’ll see you on the other side.

We’re currently testing what we need to test before we upgrade WMBlogs to WPMU version 2.6.3.   The upgrade will change the dashboard on your blogs.  From talking to other Wordpress users who have upgraded, I think the typical blogger experience with the changes is to be a little put out at first but later coming to the conclusion that the new Dashboard is superior.

We’ll be giving everyone plenty of notice so hopefully no one will be shocked by the change.   We’ll be testing plugins so we’ll know which ones must be upgraded, fixed, replaced, etc.  We’re going to try our darnedest to make it as smooth as possible.  (We’re not doing this just for the heck of it, either; we have to keep current for security reasons.)

So consider this the first shot in a short battle to stay on the cusp of current blogging technology!

Yesterday morning & the evening before I spent some time helping a user upload content to a research blog. The site was rejecting his PowerPoint and Word files, first because they were too big, and then because they were a non-approved file type.

To fix the upload issue, I had to adjust maximum allowed upload sizes in two places in my php.ini: the max_post (how much data can be allowed in any POST transaction) and max_upload (how big an individual file can be) variables. Helpfully, Wordpress’s error message changed to reflect the new parameters that weren’t being met–allowable file types for upload.

To fix that issue, I snagged Peter Westwood’s mime-config plugin for Wordpress, making the change suggested in this thread to keep the plugin from appearing in regular users’ Options tab. I wish there was a global solution, but none of the discussions I could find online suggested a way to do so besides hacking core WordPress files–and even then it was a slightly more complicated endeavor for MU than for regular WordPress. So now I can allow non-default file types to be allowed on a per-blog basis, which is fine for now. I probably should have suggested Swem Library’s D-Space as a document repository, but one reason for it not to occur to me immediately is that I’m not familiar with it yet. Users needing to ask for permission to upload Office documents will serve as a tickler for me to do so as soon as I get the opportunity.

I just wrote a guide to setting up a WMBlogs.net blog to use Defensio to manage comment spam. New (and current) bloggers should definitely do this… it’s only a matter of time before evil spammers find your blog. The plugin is already installed when you create your blog, but you still have to activate it and obtain an API key from Defensio.

So here’s this powerful framework, but we have scanty documentation. I realize that Wordpress is highly documented online, but I’m also aware from my installation experience that a lot of what’s available is disorganized, fragmentary, and scattered. Anyone who catches the Wordpress bug will have the motivation to put forth the effort find out more but I have a hunch that providing a little local documentation will lower the threshold for catching it.

With that in mind, I’ve started–in a pretty rudimentary way at the moment–a set of Guide pages for our local installation. All that’s up so far is an edit of a document I wrote to welcome users to our old Wordpress setup. Documentation is, sadly, often an effort that takes place in the cracks of one’s roles and responsibilities–mine is no exception–but if I can gather a modicum of time (that most precious commodity), I’m hoping to grow it into a decent set of user guides.

We’re getting there!

A couple days ago my boss commented that he’s getting a much different vibe out of me working on this project than he got when I was largely concerned with a pilot program involving tablet PCs running Vista; I retorted that there’s a big difference when all you have to do is follow the directions and stuff works (as opposed to following the directions and stuff doesn’t work anyway…).

The main focus of starting this project is to establish 1) some research bloggers and 2) a “mother blog” focused on undergraduate research at William and Mary that would aggregate posts from our research bloggers and have a public tagging capability so interested readers could help categorize postings. We’re using feedwordpress for aggregation via RSS (the author of which kindly and thoroughly explained to me aspects of its operation); TagThis fits the bill perfectly for audience tagging, and even supports tag-use thresholds and other functions more robust than I’d imagined when I thought about what we’d need to accomplish that.

I got Defensio installed to control comment spam (though I can’t say how well it works yet–so far we’re under the spam radar, though I’m sure that will change any time). The developer was quick to address a dashboard bug that arose since I’ve disabled the Plugins management tab in the dashboard in favor of using Plugin Commander.

I don’t want to sound too fanboyish, but it’s as if WPMU is the Big Rock Candy Mountain of CMS/Blogging systems: whenever I want something, I just reach out and it’s there–and it works! And if it doesn’t, there’s an interested, active base of users and authors who are willing to help. From an admin point of view, there’s not much more gratifying than that.

Since my last post, I’ve added more functionality. It’s easy to grow when you’re a newborn!

• Farms-spectagular Theme Pack  has increased the number of themes available by a couple orders of magnitude
• Added New/Updated/Active blogs widgets to this metablog
• Changed the theme here. That header image was distractingly huge! This new theme was easily customized with a W&M image to boot

I’ve also contacted the folks at Defensio to double-check where we fit in their licensing scheme. Defensio is a promising alternative to Akismet. Both are automated comment-spam-fighting tools. I’ve used Akismet with great success, but unfortunately for multi-user applications they want a monthly fee. Unless I’m reading the licensing wrong, I think we can use Defensio at no charge unless our host here becomes wildly popular.

There’s still plenty to do, but the lack of problems so far is keeping me excited & hopeful.

Between last night and this morning I’ve tweaked a few more things. It was a neat feeling when two of my colleagues started working on this site right away and I realized that this thing that was just an idea a couple of days ago is already taking its first fledgling steps toward becoming a community!

At first mail notifications weren’t going out, but that’s fixed now. I spent this morning getting the mail system on this server (tribesrv) working properly so if users have trouble I can communicate with them. I also added the signup link you can see at right, since changing the theme from the default removed the WPMU boilerplate. I’m not sure if I’ll stick to this theme for the server blog; I chose it for the W&M-ish color scheme, but the banner picture is too big. Ideally we’ll have something customized that’s all our own…eventually.

Well, I’ve spent the afternoon getting this host up and running. If I (or you) can see this post, then things must have gone at least mostly right. Here’s to beginnings!