The always innovative George Mason University Center for History and New Media has released a new plug-in:  Anthologize.   Which is a platform/plug-in that allows the use of a WordPress 3.0 site as a book publishing tool.  The plug-in is still in a 0.4, alpha stage release, but I figured “what the heck” it is worth a try.  After installing and activating the plug-in you start by creating a Project – this is the book.  The Project has parts – sort of like chapters.  And in each part the interface makes it easy to filter your listing of posts by tag or category to quickly narrow down your listing of posts (if you’ve been organized in your tagging and categorization!).  You can even import content from external sources via an RSS import.  After you have everything organized the export functions creates a nicely formatted PDF or other format – it even includes a table of contents. 

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I wrote early last month on an employee workplace feedback tool we launched using our WordPress MU installation and the Survey plug-in.  Overall the plugin worked well.  Here is a screen shot of one of our forms:

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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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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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Packt publishing has a new WordPress book out:  WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide.  WordPress MU, especially with the BuddyPress set of plug-ins, is a powerful and flexible framework that power a company blog or social networking site.   Just check out SUNY’s new Academic Commons for a fantastic example of what can be done with this combination.  WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide overall is a good introduction to these tools, and even for an experienced WordPress person I found some useful tips and valuable additions to my WordPress ‘tool belt’.  But the book is also not without its flaws.

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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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