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:
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.
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:
So I’ve got a test BuddyPress site up and running — for testing/learning purposes only. And I like what I see. I’ll probably blow the site up and rebuild it a few times just to try out different configurations. The activity stream is a key feature, allowing people to follow actions (posting, commenting, etc) across the site and content types.
What features are needed in a workplace social network system? And could BuddyPress, the WordPress multi-user collection of social networking plug-ins, be used to power it? Yammer uses has recently taken off at my workplace, and its success here is serving as a real example of the types of communication and collaboration people are looking for in the workplace. Here are a couple of thoughts, observations and opinions: Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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