Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey.   So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting.  As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system.  So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there.  And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.

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These days, with regular blog posts and in the course of a typical work week, I find myself doing a fair amount of writing.  But what struck me recently is how rarely I use Microsoft Word to assist with that writing.  When writing something that requires thought I normally start in a simple text editor.  I find the lack of options helps me focus — and when it comes time to move it to an email, blog post, or even a Word file, it is easy to copy and paste the text.  MS Word’s tendency to drag along boat-loads of non-standard formatting is such a pain I actively avoid using it for any writing destined for web delivery.  Start collaborating with a tool like Google Docs and Word becomes superfluous.

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Flickr, the coolest on-line photo site there is, has always encouraged outside developers to build their own applications that utilize the massive Flickr public database.  I have had a Flickr account like forever, before Yahoo bought them — and have used some WordPress – Flickr plug-ins that utilized the API.  But the problem was you had to find the apps yourself, spread around on developers own web pages.  Well Flickr just launched a new page that provides an easy way to find apps.  I found a cool Facebook app that will display my latest Flickr uploads on my Facebook page — very handy.

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Here is a cool-looking WordPress plug-in. 

It can manage a group of locations, such as store branches, and direct people to the closest location — a store-location type of thing.  What else could this type of functionality be used for?  Maybe a listing that has sitings of a particular type of bird (i.e. eagle nesting sites), and the viewer could find the closest location to them.  Or a research project that shows points along some epic journey (like all the places Washington slept in New England.)

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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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The WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin scans system files, posts/comments and plug-ins for suspicious stuff.  If you have a blog site that you think may have been compromised it can’t hurt to give it a try.  I ran it on a couple of blogs I administer and I’m happy to report that everything looks fine.  One of the things the plug-in looks for is hidden code in your site, especially hidden style elements. This is a way that spammers can insert code into your site — but there are lots of legitimate reasons for these elements too. So the report can look a little alarming or overwhelming at first, so run it when you have some time to scan over the output report.  A good tool to keep handy for when needed.

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