Living Stories is an interesting new tool from Google. Coupled with the WordPress plugin it will allow the creation of a site centered around a particular news story. You can run the code without WordPress, but as with most things WordPress it makes setup much easier. The tool provides a running stream of news articles on the story. It also provides summaries and provides nice features such as auto-collapsing stories you’ve already seen.
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:
I have been using a basic Twitter plug-in to auto-tweet new blog posts to my twitter account. It was always a little fussy, and recently it seemed to stop working — maybe something related to the recent WordPress update? No matter, it seemed a good time to go looking to see what else was available. And so far Twitter Tools is looking very promising. It can be set to pull in Tweets that contain a specific hashtag — allowing selective tweet-posting of new entries. And, assuming this message makes it over to Twitter, you can set your posts to go go to Twitter as well. The big question is how it will work with posts originating from other external tools, like ScribeFire, or scheduled posts — both of which I do a lot. We’ll see…
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:
I am still slowly working through the videos I shot during the WordCamp NYC 2009 event. This was the very first presentation I attended that day entitled “Building Community with BuddyPress” by Lisa Sabin Wilson. It is a great presentation and she nicely runs through all the major features of this powerful set of WordPress plug-ins.
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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