Jon Mott and David Wiley have posted their paper on Open learning.  Well done, nicely argued, with good supporting references.  Bravo!  Their basic point is traditional Content Management Systems — i.e. Sakai, Blackboard — reinforce the the management side of teaching to the detriment to the innovative, student-centered, learning side of the equation.  And while I agree with much of their argument, I’ve come to realize that this approach also misses some important  points: Read the rest of this entry »

Client asks “can I list multiple authors on an article in our CMS?” After a quick search and a little playing around I could give my standard WordPress answer “it turns out there is a plug-in for that!”  The Co-Authors Plus plug-in nicely met our needs.  We list both the author’s display name and the Biographical Description in the author tag line with the meta information at the head of the post.  And based on the suggestions in the plug-in’s readme.txt file I created the following function to generate the display:

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Here is another session from WordCamp NYC.  The topic is WordPress-as-content management system, and the story of the transformation of the Harvard Gazette.  They took the paper’s static html site and transformed it to a WordPress powered site in just 3 months.  It is always interesting to see how adaptable WordPress is to fit various needs, and the Gazette implemention is very well done.  both video and audio versions of the session are presented below.  Watch for the discussion about their administrative interface — they have customized the edit-posts panel in a very nice way that divides the listing according to category.  Making it easier for editors to get right to their content.

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I want to like Drupal, but despite a fair amount of effort I haven’t been able to get over its shortcomings.  Four years ago we had a need to create a web-driven resource library serving dialect training mp3s to students.  I did some research and found a really great model powered by Drupal.  I’d heard a bit about the system, and after researching it sounded like a good fit for our needs.  But as I started digging into a test implementation I found myself feeling a little overwhelmed, so I hired a consultant to serve as a technical resource.  We continued that relationship over the course of 2 months, with weekly phone conferences which were really training/technical consultation calls.  I got the application up and running, and even expanded its functionality over the last year with the help of a really dedicated student worker.  Now I’ve done a fair amount of PHP work, and extensive work with other open source systems like WordPress — and this student worker also had a really strong PHP background.  Neither of us ever got to the point of really liking Drupal, or feeling like we wanted apply it to any other projects.  Why?

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Making a commitment to a PHP framework is like committing to exercise everyday — you know you should do it, but tomorrow always seems like a good time to start — and of course tomorrow never comes.  I’ve been debating between CodeIgniter and Symphony for a couple of months.  And not making up your mind is another good way to put off actually doing something.  I attended the PHP CodeWorks conference last week and the CodeIgniter session was pretty good.  The first point Ed Finkler made was that it really doesn’t matter what you pick — get whatever works for you.  CodeIgniter does have a successful commercial company, EllisLab (makers of expression engine CMS) behind it, plus an active developer community.  I believe the upcoming new version of ExpressionEngine is also being built on top of CodeIgniter.

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Casey Bisson at Plymouth State University up in central New Hampshire is working to make PSU an all WordPress environment.   Casey was a speaker at the WordPress Education I helped put together last year, speaking on his Scriblio library project (built on WordPress).  He recently sent an email on his latest work to move the school’s web content management to a WordPress MU installation, along with links to posts on his blog.  Hopefully Casey will have time to take a spot on the program for the April 2010 WordPress University workshop — in the meantime check out his blog posts for all sorts of good information and inspiration.

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