StigmergicWeb

I’m preparing to migrate the EdTech Posse website from Drupal to Wordpress. I’m too lazy to hack SQL, so I’m going to do this the quick and dirty way. I’ve downloaded a copy of our current RSS feed, and I’ll import that into a shiny, fresh installation of WordPress. This should be fairly easy.

Or the whole thing could blow up in my face. Oh well, there’s nothing like a fresh start! ;^)

In either case, I’m hoping to make the migration tomorrow today (Aug. 31). Cross your fingers.

Its a peaceful day in the middle of my Easter break. My family has left me alone to take care of the 1001 projects that I need to get done, along with some house work. Is there a better time to update Wordpress to version 2.0.2 and play around with some new plugins? I think not - all that other stuff can wait for a couple of hours. So - this will either work brilliantly, or fail tragically. Stay tuned for details.

UPDATE - if you can read this, everything so far is good, and the update to WordPress 2.0.2 worked. Now to start playing around with some new plugins!

Earlier this week I wrote about building a school website one blog at a time, and some thoughts on the merits of not building a monolithic site, but as a series of small inter-related pieces. I’m happy to report that things have already started to move in that direction. You can see the main school page for North Battleford Comprehensive High School, and right in the middle of it is a set of links with the title NBCHS Happenings. (See screenshot below) (Dang - the screenshot got automagically reduced when I uploaded it. Someone must know how to get the full size image up there - D’Arcy, any ideas? Yay - D’Arcy knew what to do! See comments for details.)

The NBCHS Happenings links are actually all harvested, using feed2js, from the NBCHS Happenings blog. We had done something like this before using a Blogger powered blog to generate the feed. The improvement in this system is that the entire system resides on our own server. Its also going to be very easy to put new dynamic content via RSS feeds from our blogs on the main web page, or any other page that we’d like. Of course, this doesn’t preclude anyone from choosing to use a different tool - wordpress.com, for example - as long as it generates an RSS feed from its content.

The next step - some really good discussions with the teacher librarian (Hi Donna!) and others to start defining what information belongs on the front page of the website and what information can be enfolded elsewhere in the website. Then we figure out how that information gets entered, sorted and displayed where we want it. But at least we have step one taken care of! Not bad for one week worth of effort, which included other distractions such as teaching! ;^D

I’ve had some ideas in the past about using some sort of CMS to run a school web site, but after my recent post about building a school website out of a colony of blogs I’ve been encouraged to consider scaling that project up.

The feedback and ideas that were left by Stephen, James and Christopher were very helpful. My original stated goal was to have a variety of wordpress blogs being used by various staff, students and groups around the school. If a teacher wanted a web site, they could build one themselves or I could set them up with a blog. If a creative writing class wanted a public online writing space, I could set them up with a blog (or a set of blogs). If a team or a club or anyone in the school wanted some way to put stuff online, I could (OK - all together on the chorus please) set them up with a blog. It should be noted that I have a pretty generous view of human nature, and would assume, perhaps naively, that all these sites would not be used for malicious behaviour such as online harassment of others. Whenever I’ve worked with students in a way that involved communicating online, I’ve found that this is generally the case.

Christopher made the terrific suggestion that I could use a more fully featured CMS such as Drupal to power the site. I love Drupal - I think it is such an incredible application, and loaded with functionality. But I’m going to try things a different way, at least for now, for a couple of reasons. First, I think Drupal is too much for what I want to do, and when I show other staff and students how to post and edit material, they will be overwhelmed with information. Well - I think some of the staff would; the students would probably show me some features I didn’t know about. The main reason for going with WordPress instead of Drupal is a much more pragmatic one - its the tool I know best. It also fits with my affinity for a small-technologies-loosely-joined approach to building a learning environment.

I also want to thank Stephen for his suggestion about RSS aggregation in PHP using MagpieRSS (I had forgotten about that) and James for his offer of help with WordPress MultiUser (I still might get ahold of you for that!). The three of you got me thinking about different ways a multiple author web site might be put together. The main issue that I’m trying to work out is whether it is better to have a site in which everyone contributes to one centralized CMS, or if I can let everyone work on their own site (maybe a WP blog, but it could be anything else that squeezes out some kind of RSS or Atom feed) and glue the whole thing together. I’m favouring the latter plan because it gives any potential contributor a choice of content creation tools.

I’m also favouring the latter plan because I’ve shown the prototype of the announcements site to some colleagues, including the school principal, and they’ve encouraged me to use what I’ve done so far to revise the main school web site, and the tools at hand are always the easiest ones to work with!

My revised mental plan, then, is to put the school website together using WordPress. Legacy content can be linked from the main page, which will also be used to display school news, events, deadlines and similar information. As individuals or groups in the school want to get involved in adding content, they can be added as a contributor to the site, or given their own blogging space if they want to create content but not necessarily add it to the main school page. Such content can be linked to from the main page, or aggregated together somewhere on the “core” school site.

I’m going to try getting some more work done on the preview of the site tomorrow. So far, the core is looking good, and I’m just going to assume that there will be some way to route the feeds into the blog once that becomes a necessity. And if there isn’t an existing solution, the school division has a very talented PHP nerd on the technical staff! :^)

I’ve just posted at my work blog about a project to create a new school announcements system that will be powered by WordPress. I wanted to put some notes up here about how it works, and hopefully get some feedback. I also have some ideas about how this could grow - again, feedback would be great. (This does not mean that I’ve recanted my earlier posts/podcasts about how schools could make great use of Drupal - I just like to have lots of tools available.)

Here’s what we do for our announcements now:

• Announcements are given to a secretary who types them up, photocopies them for all staff and a few extra student copies.
• The announcements are read to all classes in period 1 of the school day.
• The word processor file is e-mailed from the secretary to the library technician.
• The library technician copies the announcements and pastes them into a post in Blogger. Other announcements also get posted in the Blogger account.
• The Blogger account publishes the school announcement blog to our own server.
• Using some feed2JS mojo (thanks, Alan), the atom feed from our blogger-powered announcements blog end up on the front page of our school web site

Here’s the great irony in this whole, elaborate fandando - every teacher in every classroom of our school has a computer terminal on his or her desk. It is entirely possible, from a technical standpoint, for each staff member to enter their own events/announcements onto some sort of content management system (including, I will admit, a Blogger powered blog). The teacher librarian at the school has struggled valiantly trying to get teachers to add their own announcements, with only some recent success. It is also possible,right now, for every staff member to go online to read the announcements to their class. Instead, however, we waste vast quantities of paper for ROTA (read-once-throw-away) announcements.

But, the system has failed us this past week. For reasons that I cannot, and do not, care to understand, Blogger can no longer publish the announcements site to our web server. Here’s what I’m using to replace/revamp this system:

• A WordPress powered blog for the announcements and events. The blog will reside entirely on our own server, so outside services failing can’t cripple our site.
• Use feed2js to place the blog content on the school main page.
• Start showing staff and students how to use an aggregator like bloglines to stay in touch with what’s going on at the school!

To do this, I’ve set up a WordPress install with some basic themes and plugins, including:

• K2 theme for wordpress - it just rocks!
• Adhesive plugin - to keep events at the top of the events list so they don’t fall off the main page
• EventsCalendar3 plugin - might be used to create a page of upcoming events for a week/month

If this catches on, and I think it just might, then other staff and students may also want to set up their own blog. Its easy enough to set up a default wordpress install directory with all the desired plugins and themes. The 5 minute install is great, but it would be even nicer to have a script to create a new blog based on a default wordpress directory. I’m not going to explore WPMU - I’ve had problems getting it set up on the school server.

Once we get a bunch of classes and groups with active blogs, we can start to put some of their content on the school front page. This could be done with feed2js, but there are a few plugins (BDP RSS Aggregator and FeedWordPress are two that I’m aware of) that might be able to redirect the RSS content into a single wordpress blog.

Anyone up for some discussion about this?

Further thought: I had a great big well duh! moment last night as I was heading off to bed. I could probably use MyGlu to mix a bunch of feeds together on the front page! Sad to say, though, that my perl hacking skills have atrophied from lack of use, and I’m a little more proficient in PHP. Maybe I’ll try to find a way to integrate MyGlu into a PHP page.

UPDATE - I’ll post some more details later, but I just wanted to let anyone who is interested know that the school page for North Battleford Comprehensive High School now has a listing of events and announcements that is put there by Alan’s uber-cool feed2js thingy which processes the RSS feed generated by the school events and announcements blog. Its not much, but its a start and a proof of concept to show others. There are some discussions that need to happen before the front page can be revised, but I think this is a nice model for how to shift the school website, including the way information gets added and updated, at a gradual pace.

I’d also like to thank all the commenters for some terrific suggestions and ideas. These are very much in my mind as I’m planning the next step.

A great way to get developers to release an upgrade is for me to install it.

I just downloaded and installed this and … the site looks just the same! I don’t even see any difference on the administration side of things. But nothing seems broken, so I think I’ll keep it ;^) K2 at Binary Bonsai