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New WordPress plugin: Simple Import Users

26-Aug-10

My palz Mikhail and Luke over at Blogs@Baruch needed an easier way to add users to sites in the WordPress network. They’d been using DDImportUsers, which worked, but was finicky: DDIU required you to specify too much information, its formatting was tough for instructors to understand, and, most importantly, it didn’t deal well with existing [...]

Enabling Popularity Contest for WordPress networkwide use

19-Aug-10

Alex King’s Popularity Contest is a pretty cool way to collect data about which posts on a WordPress site the most popular. The data collected is more sophisticated and customizable than simple analytics, because it distinguishes between page views and things like trackbacks, comments, and other kinds of hits. The plugin supports WordPress Multisite in [...]

Anthologize 0.4-alpha is released

10-Aug-10

The Anthologize team has been hard at work over the last week, fixing bugs behind some of the most commonly reported problems, and adding features to make Anthologizing easier and more fun. We’ve just tagged version 0.4-alpha in the WordPress repository. Visit your WordPress Dashboard’s Plugins page to upgrade. Read more about the changes in [...]

Hiding WordPress custom post type menu items without disabling edit access

05-Aug-10

WordPress 3.0′s custom post types are really cool, opening up a whole new world of use cases for WordPress. We used custom post types extensively when developing Anthologize. But there are still some rough spots. For instance, the ‘show_ui’ parameter of register_post_type() is a little bit too coarse-grained for our purposes. For Anthologize, we wanted [...]

Introducing Anthologize, a new WordPress plugin

03-Aug-10

The moment has arrived! The product of One Week | One Tool, a one week digital humanities tool barn raising hosted by CHNM and sponsored by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, is Anthologize. Anthologize is a WordPress plugin that lets you collect and curate content, organize and edit it into a form that works [...]

Unexpected leadership: preliminary thoughts on One Week | One Tool

31-Jul-10

One Week | One Tool just finished, and it proved to be among the most challenging and most rewarding weeks of my professional life. I have a feeling that I’ll need a few go-rounds to really decompress – if for no other reason than that the tool we produced isn’t being announced until Tuesday, so [...]

Import From Ning now imports Ning content into BuddyPress

23-Jul-10

Back when Ning announced that it’d be cutting off previously free accounts, I took a weekend and developed Import From Ning, a plugin that helped users pull their Ning user and profile data into a WordPress or BuddyPress installation. It was my own little BuddyPress-fanboyish way of helping all those Ningsters. Several weeks ago, Ning [...]

Honeymoon barbecue, part 2: the East

25-Jun-10

This post is the second of a two-part series about the barbecue my new wife and I ate on our honeymoon. For more explanation and more porky pix, see part 1: “The West”. JUNE 14: Hudson’s Smokehouse, Columbia, SC We’d just finished a stint in Eastern Tennessee, where we’d enjoyed some bodacious relaxation but no [...]

Making Userthemes work on WordPress 3.0

23-Jun-10

Some friends of mine (Joe Ugoretz and Jim Groom) were chatting on Twitter yesterday about how Userthemes, the WPMU/MS plugin they rely on to allow user customizations of copied system themes, had broken with WordPress 3.0. I decided to take a look at it. After digging a little, I found the immediate cause, as well [...]

Honeymoon barbecue, part 1: the West

20-Jun-10

I got married a few weeks ago: Afterwards I went on a honeymoon with my lovely bride through the southeastern US. Unlike a North Carolina vacation we took a few years ago, the focus of this trip was not barbecue. That said, we still had quite a few good barbecue meals. (I mean, it’d be [...]