Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’Preview of Next Version of Shadowbox ThemeNovember 18th, 2009 by Alex ChapinI attended part of the LIS website team meeting today and gave a presentation of the ShadowBox theme and some of the new features that will be available in the next version including updates to author pages, more custom header options and most importantly, higher contrast text in comment fields. I also gave a preview of some new ShadowBox variations based on the new college website design. Below is a screencast from that meeting:
Towards a Unified Curricular Technology UXNovember 16th, 2009 by Alex ChapinI recently created a version of the ShadowBox theme for Measure, an instance of Moodle used at Middlebury for online assessments. As a starting point, I used the Anomaly Theme Pack, created by the Patrick Malley, the Themes Manager for Moodle.org and the Creative Director of the NewSchool Learning design shop. I merged some of the styles and markup Patrick had developed with code from the WordPress ShadowBox theme to create a similar look and feel to the WordPress version. This is a great example of the power of open source to build upon and synthesize the work of others (much of this theme designers current work in no longer open source…)
The goal is to create a more unified user experience (UX) and make it easy for faculty and students to move from one platform to another. You’ll noticed that Measure has links to WordPress and Segue in the upper right corner. These same links can be put in the same place on WordPress blogs that use ShadowBox. I’d also like to put these same links on all Segue sites to help with the transition away from Segue to other platforms.
For more information about Measure, see the Measure Blog. Capture Quick StartNovember 6th, 2009 by Alex ChapinThe Curricular Technology team is working on the figuring out how to document technology, no small task… We are all in agreement that it would be good to have some sort of “quick start” documentation that provides people with the basics to get started with a given tool or a given task/objective. Below is a screencast of a “quick start” demo I did for how to capture. See: Capture > Presentation > How to do it. This screencast is definitely too long for a quick start, but the idea of using a screencast in conjunction with step-by-step instructions for quick start documentation is appealing. For other examples of screencast quick starts and/or overviews see: Alas these screencasts are a lot of work and am not sure how effective they are or how they can be improved… Though I think generally they should be as short as possible. ShadowBox Theme Introductory ScreencastNovember 3rd, 2009 by Alex ChapinI made a ShadowBox theme introductory screencast during a presentation of the theme to Academic Consulting Services. This screencast describes some of the WordPress UI challenges I was trying to solve with this theme. The first was finding a consistent way to display the log in link and information about a given user’s role on a blog. I also wanted to create a UI for setting theme colors and layout and other options. Finally I wanted to more consistently map some of the blog editing UI onto the blog itself so people could more easily add new posts or edit existing posts. (click on the Am working on a new release of ShadowBox that includes the display of category and tag RSS links, custom author pages and more header options. For more information, see ShadowBox Changelog. Contact me know if you would like to see a preview of this new version. Meeting Notes 2009-09-01September 2nd, 2009 by Alex ChapinThis meeting focused on brainstorming about the use of curricular technologies at Middlebury in terms of:
Reseach: Twitter plugins for WordPressAugust 17th, 2009 by Alex ChapinThe Helpdesk received a request for a WordPress Twitter plugin. If we decide it would be good to have such a plugin, what kind of functionality would useful for the Midd community. See: http://blueprintds.com/2009/01/19/top-twitter-wordpress-plugin-roundup/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/ http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2007/04/10-best-twitter-tools-for-wordpress-blogs/ Research: What is exported from a WordPress blog?August 6th, 2009 by Alex ChapinWhat gets saved when you export a WordPress blog? I know the format of the export file is XML and that all posts, pages, categories and authors are exported. See: Not sure if files, sidebar settings, themes or roles can be exported…. There are tools that exist to migrate WordPress blog to other platforms, but not all or perhaps any of them will migrate files… WordPress to DrupalThere are two main modules for migrating WordPress content to Drupal, see: WP2Drupal interacts directly with the database, whereas Wordpress_Import uses the WXR export file. It is not clear whether these migration modules also migrate WordPress files. There is Drupal code out there for migrating files on a remote server to Drupal, see: It also looks like Drupal is working on a migration framework, see: Fall 2009 Course Website RecommendationsJuly 28th, 2009 by Joseph AntonioliThe Curricular Technology team is making the following recommendations to LIS on the platforms available for creating course sites. – Alex ChapinA number of technology tools and services are available to faculty to use in their teaching and for their courses including applications for creating course sites, blogs, collaborative spaces and presentations. What follows are recommendations that focus primarily on platforms for creating course sites over the next academic year. These recommendations take into consideration the recent decision by LIS to decommission Segue and the impact the Web Makeover project will have on available resources and technologies. Research: Support for Unicode, Diacritics and non-Latin-based character setsJuly 20th, 2009 by Alex ChapinFor updates on this research topic, see: Which of our current web applications or apps we are considering support Unicode, diacritics and non-latin based characters sets. I know Segue supports all of these. I think Moodle does as well. Not sure about MediaWiki, Google Apps, WordPress and Drupal…. Research: What is the best podcasting plugin for WordPress?July 13th, 2009 by Alex ChapinThe Audio player plugin currently installed on Midd WordPress is pretty good. I believe Adam made some modifications to it so that the audio file it uses is included in the post’s RSS enclosure tag so that RSS readers will download the audio files for that post. For example, see James Morrison’s blog for his International Political Economy course However there are probably better WordPress plugins for podcasting. Would be curious to know what’s out there and reviews. Best place to start for this sort of research is WordPress Plugin Directory Research: WordPress Plugin for Displaying Google DocsJuly 13th, 2009 by Alex ChapinWouldn’t it be great if Google Docs could be displayed in a blog or other content management system. That way, a bunch of people could collaborate on a text which could be displayed on a blog for others to comment upon. The comments on the blog could help inform the editing of the text. Is there a WordPress plugin for displaying Google Docs? If so how well does it work? Is it well supported. Wordpress Plugin Added for Embedding SWFsJune 4th, 2009 by Ian McBrideWe struggle constantly to maintain the balance between usable and secure web technology. We need to make it easy for people to use these tools to show off the neat content they’ve developed, but all too often doing so outright would open up a hole for someone to show off the really neat malware they’ve developed. This was the case with the request this week to allow the embedding of SWF files (Adobe Flash scripts) in blog posts for use in a Reunion blog. By default, Wordpress MU strips out all object and embed tags, which are used to include SWF files. This is really good, since those tags can be used to include all sorts of other content as well, like arbitrary JavaScript execution through an iframe. Since the same filter is used to check posts, pages and comments, this can really get out of hand fast if you just remove the filter completely or allow those tags through the filter. We talked it over and came up with two possible suggestions: 1. Write a custom template for this blog’s theme that would allow the SWF files to be included by adding their URLs to post meta data tags. 2. Write a custom plugin that creates the embed code based on a string in the post that is parsed through a callback function. This is what we’re already doing for MiddMedia, for example. I chose the latter, which was Adam Franco’s suggestion. This offers us the ability to re-use this functionality if we want to allow it on other blogs in the future without having to add the code to the themes those blogs use. All of our Wordpress users can now enable the “SWF Includer” plugin. However, to prevent just anyone on campus from including whatever embed code they like, this plugin is locked down to allow only SWFs from trusted URLs. Presently, the only allowed URL is that of our Communications department’s web directory. We can add to the list as other legitimate uses present themselves. The syntax for the SWF Includer is as follows: Middlebury Theme for WordpressDecember 15th, 2008 by Ian McBrideYou might notice a new design if you visit my blog today. I’ve added a new theme to our WordPress installation that users can apply to give their blog the Middlebury College look-and-feel. Well, a version of it at least. This is the design approved by College Communications for use in applications where the full design would be impractical to apply and/or where the content is not necessarily the voice of the school’s administration. WordPress meets both of these criteria. The design is straight forward and simplistic, but it gives more flexibility in terms of page width than any of the other templates currently available to our users. This is helpful for bloggers who want to add wide content to their blogs, like big images or videos. Most of the other WordPress themes we’ve installed limit the user to less than 400 pixels of width for their content. This design also gives the viewer the opportunity to switch to a fixed-width view if they so desire (see the links in the top right corner of this blog). If you want to apply this to your blog, log in at http://chisel.middlebury.edu/wordpress/wp-admin, click on the Design tag in the top-left under your blog’s name, scroll down until you see “Middlebury” in the list and click on it’s name. You should be all set. Check your blog to make sure that everything is in order. If something’s not in order, please send me an email letting me know. Working on this has given me some of the basic knowledge that I’ll need as I work on my next project: designing a template for the New England Review so they can transfer their site content into WordPress. Using the cforms plugin for WordpressSeptember 23rd, 2008 by Ian McBrideA couple weeks ago, Joe Antonioli and Brett Wilhelm helped us out by installing a plugin for the blogging server here called “cforms”. This plugin lets people create general data collection forms which can be made available through their blog. It has a very friendly user interface and offers more form-related features than our custom coded PHP forms ever did. I’ve received a number of questions about how to set this up, how to get started using this. I’ve created a Basic Guide to Setting up cforms on the LIS Wiki that I’ll keep adding content to as I continue to meet with people and find out what questions they have about using this plugin. If you have questions about using cforms, you can contact me directly and I’ll work with you or your department, office, or organization to get setup and get using this. |
