Matthew and Boone are part of a group that has launched the CUNY academic commons — a major new campus community initiative built utilizing the WordPress multi-user set of BuddyPress plugins.  Even a brief tour through the commons site will demonstrate what a powerful tool BuddyPress can be, when held in capable hands, and in their talk it was great to hear non-resource-intensive the effort can be.  WordPress continues to prove to be a tool with lightweight investment and technology needs that packs quite a feature punch.  Boone is also an active contributor in BuddyPress plug-in development, with many plug-in contributions in the WordPress repository. Read the rest of this entry »

Ioannis Yessios from Yale University’s Instructional Technology Group is a leader on campus in adapting the capabilities of WordPress to meet the needs of faculty and students.  He is also a contributor to the WordPress Plug-in repository with GalleryPress, WP-CAS w-LDAP, and Anonymizer.  In this presentation he talks about these plug-ins, and the projects that inspired them, along with other plug-ins and techniques that have proved useful in his group’s work with WordPress: Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to everyone who attended and helped make today’s WordPress University workshop so great. If you missed it you can see some of the activity at Twitter hashtag #wpuni10 or on the official event twitter account at http://twitter.com/wpuni10 .  Below are photos from the day.  And check back here soon for audio and video of the sessions, which were great thanks to a fantastic group of presenters. Jay, Yianni, Casey, Jane, Matthew and Boone — you all rock! Read the rest of this entry »

Here is another video from WordCamp NYC — BuddyPress Theming with John James Jacoby.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

WordCamp NYC had so much good stuff going I missed plenty of interesting talks.  One thread I caught a whiff of, and made a note to explore further, is the use of child themes in WordPress site design.  The feature is quite new, just appearing in version 2.7.  The ideal is that the parent part of the theme handles the structural type elements, and the child handles the decorative stuff.  I missed the child-theme talk at WordCamp, but luckily the session is now posted on WordPress.tv – explore your inner child and get own WordPress child themes going!

Read the rest of this entry »