Category Archives: edtech

Making the Thunderbird interface more Gmail-y

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As part of Project Reclaim, I’m gearing up to move my email off of Gmail and onto my own server. Email is, and long has been, central to my life online – it’s my main point of contact for so many personal and professional connections, and my email archives are the closest thing I’ve got to a record of my online activity. So I’m keen to make the move as smooth as I can.

For that reason, I’m handling the transition in stages. The first stage involves transitioning email client software away from the Gmail website.

Choosing a client

I’ve chosen Thunderbird as my alternative, for a couple reasons.

  1. It’s open-source.
  2. It’s highly extensible and customizable.
  3. It works across platforms. That’s important, because I’ll be migrating away from OSX.

Choosing Thunderbird is not without its sacrifices. For one thing, moving to an OS-native application, rather than an app that runs in a browser window like Gmail does, means that I’ll no longer be able to count on having a consistent UI and feature set between different devices. In some cases, this is not a huge loss. The UI for Gmail on my Android phone is really quite different from the normal web version, and it’s never bothered me very much. My biggest worry, though, is that I’ll have multiple workstations – a primary work machine and a netbook, for example – with different email setups. I’m hoping to mitigate the problem by coming up with some idiot-proof backup and syncing methods for the fairly small number of files that comprise Thunderbird’s configuration. (This’ll be necessary for other software transitions as well, like my gradual move to Vim. It’d be quite easy with Dropbox and some strategically-placed symbolic links, but I’m trying to break the Dropbox habit too 🙂 )

It’s a considerable comfort that, now that I have a smart phone (and am thus no longer reliant on public or borrowed computers for email access), the vast, vast majority of my email use is centered on a handful of devices, all of which I own. The last time I checked my email on a device other than my own was probably three years ago. Weird, now that I think of it.

The other sacrifice is related to UX. I happen to like Gmail’s interface. In particular, I’ve grown quite used to Gmail’s thoughtful keyboard shortcuts, which make it possible to do nearly navigation without touching the mouse. Coming up with a reasonable facsimile of these shortcuts in Thunderbird would be the biggest part of my configuration process.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Thunderbird has pretty good keyboard shortcuts out of the box. I didn’t feel like learning a whole new system, though, so I wanted a way to map Gmail-style shortcuts onto Thunderbird. There used to be a Thunderbird extension to do just that, called GmailUI. But the GmailUI website suggests that the extension is only compatible with Thunderbird versions 0.8-2.0 (Thunderbird’s currently in 3.1), which would explain why the extension doesn’t show up in a search on tho Mozilla repo (the “Expression Search” plugin does come up, which is a fork of a part of GmailUI that I’ll talk about in a minute – but it doesn’t do keyboard shortcuts).

So I looked for a more general method for customizing Thunderbird’s keyboard shortcuts, and found it with Keyconfig. It’s pretty straightforward to remap keystrokes using Keyconfig (Tools > Keyconfig), though it can be a bit of a pain because many of the standard Gmail shortcuts (like j and k for up/down navigation) are already in use by Thunderbird, so that changing one shortcut often means making two. You might find it helpful to borrow my configuration, which I’ve pasted below. Add these lines to your user.js config file (create if it doesn’t exist):

[code language=”javascript”]
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_killThread”, “][I][“);
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_markJunk”, “meta shift][J][“);
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_markReadByDate”, “meta shift][D][“);
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_markThreadAsRead”, “meta shift][R][“);
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_newMessage”, “meta shift][M][“);
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_newMessage2”, “meta shift][N][“);
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_nextMsg”, “][J][“);
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_previousMsg”, “][K][“);
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_reply”, “][R][“);
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_replyall”, “shift][R][“);
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_toggleMessagePane”, “][V][“);
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.xxx_key74_SwitchPaneFocus(event);”, “][D][“);
[/code]

Briefly, this does the following. First, it maps some familiar keystroke combos from Gmail to Thunderbird: j and k to up and down, and r and R to Reply and Reply To All. Second, because two-stroke codes from Gmail (like gi for Go To > Inbox) don’t seem to be supported natively by Thunderbird, I’ve mapped D to SwitchPaneFocus, which lets me get back and forth between the folders pane, the message list pane, and the single message pane, for easier navigation. As I get more comfortable with it, I might write my own extension that ports over some of the other most convenient Gmail shortcuts, but for now this covers a good 80% of what I might regularly use.

The other big shortcut missing from Thunderbird is y, which is the Archive command in Gmail. For that purpose, I installed Nostalgy, which allows you to move messages with keyboard shortcuts. I don’t think I’ve set this up in 100% the right way, but here’s how I’ve approximated Gmail’s y using Nostalgy. First, at Tools > Nostalgy > Keys, I’ve set ‘Save message’ to ‘shift Y’ and ‘Save as suggested’ to ‘Y’. ‘Save as suggested’ seems to work on a session basis; it suggests the folders that you’ve used since the last time you started Thunderbird. Thus, every time I start Thunderbird, the first time I want to archive a message, I use the more verbose shift-Y. A dialog at the bottom of the window suggests places where I might put the message; I select Gmail’s All Mail folder. Then, the next time I want to archive a message, I can use y by itself to go to the suggested (i.e. the last-used) location. Since I just throw all of my email into All Mail – no complex tagging or organization – this is all I need.

Bonus! Offline Access and New Email Throttling

Moving to a non-web-based email client is not all bad. For one thing, moving to a local application means that my email – archives and all – are available offline. I know that Google Gears and some of the new HTML5 goodies mitigate the issue somewhat with respect to Gmail, but offline access for a webapp is always going to be something of a hack.

On a related note, one thing that I have always hated about using Gmail is how it weaves together the process of checking for new email and accessing old email. I like to check for new mail at specified intervals only (once every few hours); anything more than that is extremely distracting. In Gmail, this meant closing the browser tab. Yet, fairly frequently, I find that I need to access an older email from my archive in order to do a specific task. In Gmail, this meant checking my new email as well. Now that I’ve moved to Thunderbird, I can access my archive without checking for new mail – the way it ought to be!

Setting it up this way was not straightforward. There are a few things you’ve got to do:

  1. In Tools > Account Settings > Server Settings, configure the ‘Check for new messages at startup’ and ‘Check for new messages every x minutes’ however you’d like. I have them both disabled, so that email can only be checked manually.
  2. Here’s the tricky part: Gmail, in its futuristic wisdom, uses a special protocol called IDLE to push new email to remote clients – bypassing the settings from step (1). (This took me half a day to figure out.) Disable this feature at Tools > Account Settings > Server Settings > Advanced > ‘Use IDLE command if the server supports it’.

I’m planning to spend a few weeks improving and getting used to this setup before starting the migration to self-hosted email.

Project Reclaim

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Update: I have begun aggregating these posts at projectreclaim.net.

Lately I have been feeling increasingly uneasy about the state of my digital affairs. I am a leader on a number of open source software projects that pride themselves on, among other things, their ability to enable users to “own their own data”. Moreover, I am trained as a philosopher, and have spent a pretty fair amount of time reading and thinking carefully about the nature of data and our relationships with it. If anyone is in a position to develop and advocate for good models of digital independence, I am.

Yet, when I look around my digital world, I see instance after instance where I am, to a greater or lesser extent, completely reliant on the good will of commercial entities and their propietary systems. To wit:

  • My Twitter account is a big part of my online identity
  • The last five years of my private correspondence, personal and professional, is in Gmail
  • I use Dropbox for syncing documents between devices (like my blog_sandbox.txt file, where I’m writing this post!)
  • I use Picasa Web Albums to back up and share photos
  • I have a Mozy account to back up the rest of my important files
  • Until recently, I had an iPhone. I still use a Mac
  • I use Remember The Milk for task management
  • I store source code for all my projects in Github

Some of these are products; some are services. Some are free; some of them I pay for. And – for sure – some of the companies behind the products and services listed above are more evil than others. So I don’t want to pretend that my reliance on each of them is equally bad. But each item on this list plays a crucial role in my digital life, and each one of them operates in a way that is beyond my control, both literally (I can’t modify the source code) and more figuratively (questions about ownership, exportability, transportability are icky).

I’m planning to extricate myself.

Project Reclaim

In order to make it sound a bit fancier, I’m giving my project a name: Project Reclaim. ‘Reclaim’ because it’s a manifestation of my desire to fight the inertia that leads us to give up control over our computing experiences, my desire to reclaim control and ownership. ‘Project’ because this will be hard, and ongoing. And why give it a name at all? I’m hoping that, by being public about it – putting my experiences in a series of blog posts and tweets under a common tag – that I’ll be able to hold myself accountable, and hopefully guide others who are hoping to reclaim their lives a bit as well.

In short, Project Reclaim is the process of weaning oneself off of digital platforms that are closed source and/or under the control of others.

Methodology

How will Project Reclaim actually work?

  1. Assess the situation I’ll first need a way of figuring out which systems and platforms are worth moving away from, what their replacements should be, and in what order I should effect the transition. I’ve got a few rules of thumb.
    • Open source is better than closed source. I write open-source software for a living. I believe that, on balance, it makes better software. And I believe that using software where one has access to the source code is a necessary component of maximizing one’s digital autonomy. Thus: if the third-party system I’m currently using is also a benefactor of open-source communities (like, say, wordpress.com), it makes it less urgent to move away. And, when selecting replacements, select open source if at all possible.
    • Paying is better than getting something for free This might seem like a contrast to the previous rule, but I don’t think it is. When you use a free service, somebody’s paying the bills. Usually that means targeted advertising – think Facebook and Gmail. Paying service fees, on the other hand, and agreeing to the contract that comes with it, generally has the effect of making the relationship more transparent. Of course, this is far from absolute, but it seems reasonable in a broad sense. Plus, I like to support developers and services that are truly valuable.
    • Go for the low-hanging fruit In cases like email, there are well-established, straightforward (though not necessarily easy…ugh) ways of fending for yourself. No need to invent the wheel. On the other hand, some of the areas where alternatives are less obvious – social networking-type data springs to mind – also happen to be areas where I have some expertise and leverage. So, in those cases, it might be worth innovating.
    • Get the important stuff first My email history is more important to me than my Twitter history; the convenience of Github is more valuable to me than the convenience of Dropbox. Plan the Reclaim accordingly.
    • Get the vulnerable stuff first Recent statements by Twitter have made me think that the way I interact with the services is more subject to change in the upcoming months than, say, the way I interact with Gmail. That’s frightening. The more profit-hungry the company is – and, thus, the more disinclined to have the customer’s freedoms in mind – the more urgent it is to pull yourself out.

    Clearly, some of these considerations are at odds with each other. But they give a rough framework for deciding whether, when, and how to carry out the mission of Project Reclaim.

  2. Make the switch Here’s where the action happens: I do what I need to do to move myself to the replacement.
  3. Write about it This weekend I spent an afternoon on the problem of Twitter, and I ran into a ton of technical problems that remain unresolved. I imagine that there will be similar hurdles for each part of the project. I’m hoping that, by writing about the problems (and, where they exist, the solutions) I can help other people to take some of the same steps themselves, or even to spur someone really smart to come up with better solutions than the ones that currently exist.

What I expect from myself

My goal, ultimately, is to move away from third-party, closed-source services and platforms altogether. It might take some time. So I’ll make some interim goals: by the end of 2011, I’m hoping to have my email moved, my microblogging federated, my own backup system on my own server space, and my computer running an open-source OS.

Even if I manage to meet this goal, there’s a very real sense in which Project Reclaim will necessarily be an exercise in futility. I’ll always have to buy server space, and who’s to say that Amazon or Slicehost won’t go berserk tomorrow? I’ll always have to connect to the internet, which leaves me perpetually at the mercy of the ISPs, who are IMO more evil than all of the other service providers put together. It’s a depressing state of affairs: the kind of autonomy I want might be impossible given the way that the economy works. I take some solace in the fact that philosophers have spilled much ink over the problem of free will without coming up with a clear formulation of exactly what kind of autonomy would be worth arguing for. At least I’m not alone in my delusion.

That said, it’s a fight that I feel I have a responsibility to fight. If I’m going to continue to argue for the use and development of open source software, I have to start putting my money where my mouth is. And so, to me, Project Reclaim is less about my being a paragon of virtue, and more about my wanting to sleep a bit better at night.

Do I think that everyone should do this? People should prefer open solutions to closed ones, all things being equal. But generally, all things are not equal. Most people don’t have the time to write their own software, to run their own servers. For those people, decisions about their digital life are (rightly, I think) made more on the basis of aesthetics and convenience than lofty concepts like Autonomy and Ownership. But there are a few considerations that are perhaps relevant for the kinds of people who read my blog:

  • Open source developers who tout the importance of data ownership and other such freedoms have a special responsibility to model best behavior in these areas.
  • Academics, more than anyone, should be sensitive to the dangers of leaving the crucial pieces of one’s online self in the hands of corporate entities. That’s true for personal artifacts like email, but perhaps doubly so for scholarly work that ought to be part of a public trust.
  • Educators, like open source developers, should model best practices, encouraging students to take control over their digital identities.

So, while I wouldn’t belabor the point for the average Joe, I do think that people who consider themselves members of one of these groups – as most people reading my blog probably do – that they should think carefully about their relationship with the tools and services that enable their digital existence.

To freedom!

New BuddyPress plugin: BuddyPress Docs

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BuddyPress Docs edit screen

BuddyPress Docs edit screen

Today I am releasing the first public beta of a significant new BuddyPress plugin: BuddyPress Docs. BuddyPress Docs is a collaborative, front-end, rich-text, document editing tool for BuddyPress groups (individual user Docs are an upcoming feature). Read much more about the plugin’s features.

This plugin has been developed for the CUNY Academic Commons (though it won’t be live there for a few weeks). Today’s release is a pre-stable beta – it should run fine, but there are bound to be bugs, and you probably won’t want to run it on a production site quite yet.

You can follow the plugin’s development at http://github.com/boonebgorges/buddypress-docs.

Group Announcements tab in BuddyPress

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Cross-posted at the CUNY Academic Commons Development blog

I had a request or two to explain how I built the Group Announcements feature on the CUNY Academic Commons. Here goes.

Brief background: When the Commons was upgraded to BuddyPress 1.2, we got the benefit of interactive activity streams everywhere, including groups. This caused some confusion, however, as users were uncertain where conversation best fit into the Commons’s architecture: in the Forums (where it had been traditionally), or in the activity stream. In some communities this kind of fracturing might be okay or even welcome, but in ours it was confusing. At the same time, we wanted a way for group admins and mods to send important notices to the members of their groups. By taking the group activity updates and repurposing it as a Group Announcements section, I was able to kill two birds with one stone: providing an announcement space for mods, while focusing extended discussion in the forums.

You can download the CAC Group Announcements plugin here.

I’m not putting this in the repo at the moment because I don’t want to build a proper admin UI and support it 🙂 For that reason, here is a primer on how the plugin works – if you want to customize or maintain it, you’re on your own, buster.

  1. The CAC_Group_Announcements class is an instance of the BuddyPress Group Extension API. It is responsible for creating the Announcements tab markup and adding it to the nav. You’ll notice that the majority of the markup is created by including bp-default’s activity-loop.php and post-form.php templates. You could customize this more if you wanted.
  2. bp_is_group_announcements() is a little template tag that can be used to test whether you’re looking at a group announcements page. This is needed for the activity filter, in step 3.
  3. cac_set_announcement_filter() adds a filter to the bp_has_activities query string when you are looking at an announcements page, so that it only displays activity items of the type activity_update. In other words, when you are looking at the regular activity stream for the group, you see all of the associated group activity items (new members, forum posts, etc) but when you’re on the announcements page you only see activity updates (which, remember, have been repurposed as announcements).

As I look at the code, I see that there are things I would definitely change if I were going to make this into a distributed plugin. If you want to make those changes, be my guest. You’re welcome to help each other in the comment section, but I won’t be formally supporting this, as it is a very basic hack that should happen at the theme level anyway. Good luck!

Extending Anthologize: Part 2

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In my last post, I gave a brief overview of what happens when you click the Export Project button in Anthologize, with an eye toward demonstrating the role that third party plugins (written by people Just Like You!) can play in extending the software. In this post, I’ll flesh out some of those details.

Step 1: Anthologize, meet my format

Anthologize has what I like to think of as two internal APIs: the WordPress-facing API, and the theming API. The first step is to let Anthologize know that your format exists, which you’ll do by using the key function in the WP-facing API: anthologize_register_format(). (Check out how the WPAPI functions work in the source.) You should call anthologize_register_format() in a function hooked to anthologize_init, which ensures that it won’t fire before Anthologize is ready for it. Here’s a simple example:
[code language=”php”]
function register_my_anthologize_format() {
$name = ‘example_format’;
$label = ‘My Anthologize Format’;
$loader_file = dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/base.php’;

anthologize_register_format( $name, $label, $loader_file );
}
add_action( ‘anthologize_init’, ‘register_my_anthologize_format’ );
[/code]

anthologize_register_format_option() takes three arguments. The first is the name that Anthologize will use internally as a unique key for your format. The second is the name that users will see on the Export screen radio button and elsewhere in the interface. (It’s a good idea to set a textdomain for your strings so that they can be translated – eg $label = __( 'My Anthologize Format', 'my-anthologize-plugin' );.) The third argument is the absolute server path of your main translator file, the file that will be loaded at export time.

You can read a more in-depth example, embedded in a loader class, in this bare-bones plugin that I built for testing purposes. And the definitive examples, of course, can be found in the way that Anthologize registers its native export formats (yum, we love eating our own dog food!).

What does this give you? First, it makes your format available as a format option on the second screen of the export process:



Second, it gives your format a Publishing Options page. Since we haven’t registered any options yet, we get the bare minimum, the shortcode toggle that all formats get:



Third – and this is the big thing – anthologize_register_format() tells Anthologize that, if the user has selected your format on the export screens, the TEI document containing the project data will be handed off to the translator file whose path you specified when you registered the format. That’s where the format translation itself happens.

Step 2: Gimme some options

One of the big thoughts behind the Anthologize plugin architecture is to model WordPress’s design philosophy, which is to provide relatively few options in the core product but to allow for arbitrarily extended functionality by plugins. That’s the purpose behind anthologize_register_format_option(), the second pillar of Anthologize’s WP-facing API. anthologize_register_format_option() gives a framework for plugins to register any kind of option associated with their custom format, provides all the integrated markup for presenting those options to users, and passes along the user’s choices to the Anthologize TEI document used for format translation.

Format options can also be loaded at anthologize_init, though you should be careful to load them after the format itself. I’ll do that by using an add_action priority:
[code language=”php”]
function register_my_anthologize_format_options() {
$website_name = ‘website’;
$website_label = ‘Website’;
$website_type = ‘textbox’;

anthologize_register_format_option( ‘example_format’, $website_name, $website_label, $website_type );
}
add_action( ‘anthologize_init’, ‘register_my_anthologize_format_options’, 15 );
[/code]
(Note that the first argument is the unique $name of the format I intend to associate the option with.) This registers a plain textbox with the label ‘Website’:



You can also register checkboxes, if you need a Boolean:
[code language=”php”]
$option_name = ‘include_dedication’;
$option_label = ‘Include Dedication?’;
$option_type = ‘checkbox’;

anthologize_register_format_option( ‘example_format’, $option_name, $option_label, $option_type );
[/code]


Or you can register dropdowns:
[code language=”php”]
$fontface_format_name = ‘example_format’;
$fontface_option_name = ‘font-face’;
$fontface_label = ‘Font Face’;
$fontface_type = ‘dropdown’;
$fontface_values = array(
‘courier’ => ‘Courier’,
‘georgia’ => ‘Georgia’,
‘garamond’ => ‘Garamond’
);
$fontface_default = ‘georgia’;

anthologize_register_format_option( $fontface_format_name, $fontface_option_name, $fontface_label, $fontface_type, $fontface_values, $fontface_default );
[/code]
This kind of option highlights some of the other possible arguments that anthologize_register_format_option() will take: an array of possible values, and a default selected value:


All the options you provide, and in particular the options selected by the user at export time, are handed to your main translator file at the very end of the Anthologize export process.

So that’s how you get your format and its options registered on the WordPress side of things. Stay tuned for a discussion of how translators might be built.

Are you a potential plugin developer with ideas about how this API might evolve to better suit your purposes? Hop onto the dev list.

Lessons from the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit

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A few quick thoughts about the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, which I attended last weekend.

Google Summer of Code is a program, run by Google, which encourages open source development by paying college students to undertake summer coding projects with various open source projects. I co-mentored two projects for WordPress, and was one of the lucky few from among WP’s fifteenish mentors to get a trip to the Googleplex in Mountain View.

The Summit was organized as an unconference. On Saturday, attendees proposed session topics on a big scheduling board, and indicated their interest in other suggested sessions with stickers. This being a supremely geeky conference, I didn’t understand about half of the session titles.

A few takeaways, in no particular order:

  • Process matters. A lot. Probably 2/3 of the sessions I attended were devoted to project workflow: version control, code review, various kinds of testing. Probably some of the focus on process is due to the fact that it constitutes common ground between even those individuals whose software projects are quite different from each other. But I think it also speaks to the importance of workflow that really works, especially in the decidedly non-top-down world of open-source development communities.
  • WordPress seems pretty far behind the curve in terms of development infrastructure. Take version control: WordPress is the only project I heard about all weekend that still uses (or is not in the process of moving away from) centralized version control like Subversion. Git seemed like the most popular platform (there was a whole session on migrating massive project repos from SVN to Git, which was probably my favorite session of the weekend). I came away with lots of ideas for how the WP and BuddyPress development processes might be improved (and, more importantly, why it might be worthwhile to pursue these ideas), which I’ll be working on in the upcoming weeks and months.
  • More generally, I came away realizing that WordPress devs (and probably other kinds of devs, but this is what I know!) have a lot to learn from the way that similar software development projects are run. I was part of some extremely interesting conversations with core developers from Drupal and TYPO3 and was really, really impressed with the way the way that their development workflow informs and enables better software. Some WordPress fans have a tendency (sometimes joking, sometimes not) to disparage other projects like this, an attitude that can prevent us from learning a lot from each other. That’s a real shame, and it’s something I’d like to rail against.

I met some great people and learned a lot at the Summit. Many thanks to Google for footing the bill, to WordPress for selecting me to go, and to Stas and Francesco for their cool GSoC projects!

New BuddyPress plugin: BP Lotsa Feeds

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I’ve been working on a project recently with Kevin Prentiss and the other fine folks at Red Rover. Kevin is a big believer in the power of feeds, and I’m a big believer in the power of BuddyPress’s activity component, and together we realized that BuddyPress’s RSS support for its rich activity content is a bit lacking.

This new plugin, BP Lotsa Feeds, is meant to address the issue. It activates RSS feeds for just about everything in BuddyPress, from an individual member’s sitewide comments, to new group memberships for specific groups, to individual forum topics.

Read more about the plugin on its home page, and follow its development on Github. Thanks to Red Rover for sponsoring a cool plugin.

New WordPress plugin: Simple Import Users

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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 accounts, which it simply ignored instead of adding as new users to the site in question. So they asked me to modify the plugin for their purposes.

The result is a near-complete rewrite, released today under the name Simple Import Users. Instead of entering all sorts of information about username, password, display names, etc, Simple Import Users accepts only a single argument: email address. That makes it simple enough for anyone to use. Insert a list of email addresses into Simple Import Users, and it checks each email address in the following way:

  • If a WP user is *not* found with the email address in question, SIU creates a new user with that address. The username is automatically generated from the part of the email address before the @-sign, which means that this plugin will probably work best for those setups where you can guarantee unique email prefixes (like schools). Passwords are randomly generated.
  • Then the new user (or the existing user, if one was found) is added to the blog.
  • The user is then sent a customized welcome email. All users get a message saying that they’ve been added to the blog, with information on how to access the dashboard. In the case of new users, it contains their login info as well.
  • If you’re running BuddyPress, the email to new users also contains a message encouraging users to fill out their BP profiles, with a link to the Edit Profile page.

The plugin has no settings, and is intended for this very specific purpose. But if you’ve got a setup like Blogs@Baruch, it could save you a lot of time and effort.

Get the Simple Import Users here.

Import From Ning now imports Ning content into BuddyPress

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[IMPORTANT: I am no longer supporting this plugin. You may contact me for a list of consultants who may be interested in providing Ning import support.]

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 released its Ning Network Archiver, which (finally) allowed network admins an easy way to take their content with them. On the heels of this release by Ning, today I am releasing version 2.0 of Import From Ning, which imports the content from a Ning Network Archive.

Read more about the updated plugin here. And to those Ningsters who are coming over to WordPress and BuddyPress: good on ya!