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Category Archives: edtech

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

New BuddyPress plugin: BP External Activity

25-May-10

On the CUNY Academic Commons we have a MediaWiki installation running parallel to our WordPress/BuddyPress installation. In the past I had hacked together an inelegant and constantly breaking solution for importing wiki edit notifications into the BP activity stream. I’ve just written a small plugin called BP External Activity which solves the problem by using [...]

BuddyPress plugins running on the CUNY Academic Commons

25-May-10

Cross-posted on the CUNY Academic Commons dev blog A few people have asked recently for a list of the plugins installed on the CUNY Academic Commons. In the spirit of Joe’s post, here I thought I’d make it public. I’m going to limit myself to the BuddyPress plugins here, for the sake of simplicity. (I’d [...]

A distributed, multi-client courseware

23-May-10

At yesterday’s THATCamp I attended a session, facilitated by Steve Ramsay, entitled “All Courseware Sucks”. You can read the blog post that served as the inspiration for the session at the THATCamp blog. Steve started the session by framing the issue in a way that ended up being quite helpful: he had us list the [...]

The meat of Facebook

16-May-10

danah boyd wrote a blog post arguing that Facebook ought to be regulated like a utility. What exactly it means to be a utility, and why utilities ought to be regulated in general, is not the main focus of her piece, and she adds in an addendum that the issue is not so much that [...]

New BuddyPress plugin: BuddyPress Group Email Subscription

12-May-10

I’m quite happy to announce the release of a more-or-less stable (we hope!) version of BuddyPress Group Email Subscription, a BuddyPress plugin that allows for fine-grained, user-controllable email subscription to group content in BuddyPress. This plugin is different from some of my others in that it was truly a group endeavor. The base of the [...]

Setting up a WordPress/BuddyPress development environment on OS X

10-May-10

A local development environment is a collection of software and files on your local computer that replicates a server environment. There’s a number of reasons why doing web development in a local environment and then pushing it to a remove server is a good idea: Convenience: You don’t need an internet connection Speed: Because you’re [...]

New BuddyPress plugin: BP System Report

07-May-10

Well well, what do we have here but another MIND BOGGLING BuddyPress plugin? This one is called BP System Report, and it allows admins to take periodic snapshots of some interesting data in their BP installation. Check out the plugin page for more information and to download BP System Report.