Tag: BuddyPress

Bebop. A BuddyPress plugin for curating personal collections of (teaching) resources

Joss Winn / / Projects

We finished our JISC-funded Bebop project today. One of the main outcomes is a BuddyPress plugin that allows a user to import content they’ve uploaded on other sites, such as Flickr, Vime, YouTube and any site with an RSS feed, into their BuddyPress activity stream. What’s especially nice, is that the user can select which content appears in their activity stream, so it effectively allows them to curate collections of shared resources as part of their profile. There’s a good reason for this, and you can read all about it over on the project blog.

BuddyPress, Bebop and building the staff directory

The Bebop plugin and documentation

p.s. this was a nice outcome of the project, too: The benefits of code review

WordPress: Beyond Blogging!!

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Fun, Presentations, Repositories, Web

These are slides to accompany an eight minute ‘Lightning Talk’ for the dev8D conference in London, 24-27th February 2010. Each slide is a link to a blog post I have written on ways to use WordPress and WordPress Multi User, that are not about blogging.

Brief notes are available from slide 12 onwards.

WordPress: Beyond Blogging!!

View more presentations from Joss Winn.

ALT-C 2009 Demo: WordPress Multi-User: BuddyPress and Beyond

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Fun, Presentations

This is just a reminder that I’ll be giving a demonstration of WordPress Multi-User and BuddyPress at the ALT Conference at 10:50-11:50 on Wednesday, 9 September in room 1.219

Here’s the blurb I submitted.

I write quite a lot on this blog about the use of WordPress and WPMU. Here’s a list of posts that may interest you. Here’s the RSS feed for that search, so you can keep updated with anything I write on the subject.

I’ll be setting up an ALT-C BuddyPress site for anyone to play around with over the course of the conference. It will be available from the 6-17th September 2009. Expect to find it at: http://learninglab.lincoln.ac.uk/altc2009

My revised ALT-C proposal

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Fun, Open Source, Software

I’ve just re-submitted this proposal for a demonstration at ALT-C 2009. It’s called WordPress Multi-User: BuddyPress and Beyond. It won’t be confirmed until June, but for the record, here it is…

‘BuddyPress’ is a new social networking layer for WordPress Multi-User blogs. It provides familiar, easy to use social networking features in addition to a high-quality and popular blogging platform. The University of Lincoln have been trialing WordPress MU since May 2008 and have been using BuddyPress since February 2009 to promote an institutional social networking community built around personalised and collaborative web publishing.

This session will demonstrate the versatility of the WordPress MU platform. We’ll look at an installation that is enhanced with BuddyPress, LDAP authentication, mobile phone support and advanced privacy controls. You’ll see how simple it is to set up site-wide RSS syndication and aggregation, enhance your blog with semantic web tools, publish mathematical formulae with LaTeX, send realtime notifications to Facebook, Twitter and IM, publish podcasts to iTunes, and embed GPX and KML mapping files. We’ll also look at how to embed WordPress content in your VLE and other institutional websites. The use of a temporary ‘ALT-C 2009 BuddyPress’ installation will be encouraged.

There will be opportunities throughout for questions and answers and participants will leave with a good understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of WordPress and the resources and skills required to provide a social networking and blogging platform in your institution.

Developing BuddyPress for education

Joss Winn / / Open Source, Software, Web

In February, I wrote a brief post about setting up BuddyPress with LDAP authentication within a university context (you’re looking at it). Four days ago, BuddyPress reached maturity by hitting version 1.0, marking a time to reflect on what I’d like to see developed for BuddyPress for use within a university context. This is an initial wish list. I’m not looking for BuddyPress to be an all singing, all dancing, social network. I don’t care about image collections and status updates (Flickr and Twitter do those jobs nicely) I would, however, like to see it being used for building group identity (projects, special interest groups, classes, courses) and portfolio/resume building. Right now, it’s pretty limited in those areas.

Privacy controls

As I mentioned previously, our social network is private, while the blogs have five levels of optional privacy controls, ranging from public and indexed by Google, to private, single-user blogs. However, privacy within the social network is currently all or nothing. It’s a hack that works but has no flexibility. The BuddyPress activity plugin is currently turned off because the privacy plugin I use, doesn’t account for the feeds that the plugin exposes. It would be nice to be able to have the site-wide social activity visible when logged in. Currently, only information about new blog posts is published site-wide. What I would like is for everything that the activity plugin logs, to have site admin options to be 1) visible to non-logged in users/public; 2) visible to logged in users; 3) visible to my groups and friends,4)  visible to my friends and 5) not visible. In addition, the feeds that are exposed of site-wide activity and member activity, could also be configurable so that 1) a site admin can choose to expose them or not; 2) if allowed, a member can choose to expose their personal feed or not; 3) a feed key could be used in place of the normal feed URI so that private member feeds could be created. Finally, groups and member profiles could optionally be made public or private. So anything following /groups/ or /members/ has an option to be visible outside the community.

Group activity

Currently, groups don’t publish very much information and you can’t aggregate information from elsewhere into a group profile. I submitted a ‘wishlist’ ticket to BuddyPress for group activity feeds, requesting that feeds for when a new group member joins and changes to the group wire. It would also be nice to be able to aggregate content from other sites via RSS into the group ‘news’ field, or a new lifestream-like field so group photos or videos or whatever, could be sucked in. It was possible to do this via a Yahoo! Pipe which combined various feeds which could then be put through feed2js and dropped into the ‘News’ field. However, embedded javascript is now intentionally blocked 🙁 I guess I could find a work-around.

Member profiles

For both teachers and students, the profile pages could be effective resumes. Currently, the site-admin can build basic grouped fields and there’s a choice of field types, too. I’d like members to be able to build their own fields and for there to be pre-built field types to choose from. It’s possible for the site admin to pre-build fields and probably easy enough for me to pre-build specific fields to design a resume (the examples given of language, country and state are just .csv lists). However, currently, if I provide three ‘Employment’ fields, a member can’t add a fourth ‘Employment’ field, nor can they select dates to correspond to when that employment was. I’m pretty sure I could create the fields, but it’s beyond me to allow a member to build their own profile pages from a selection of pre-built fields.

Finally, in addition to my request for members to be able to make their profiles public, I’d like the member profile to be marked up with hResume markup and exportable in a variety of styled formats: xhtml+css, xml, pdf, txt, doc and rtf.

The entire member profile should use microformat markup where possible. Currently, the profile can export a simple, personal hCard but could also use hCard for company and school addresses, hCalendar for dates, and rel=”tag” for creating a set of tagged skills. LinkedIn partially implements this, by the way.

So, privacy controls, group feeds and a resume builder. Not too much to ask is it? I’d probably be able to pay for the resume builder if anyone is interested…

BuddyPress: A university’s social network

Joss Winn / / Web

To cut to the chase, this post is about using WordPress MU and BuddyPress with enterprise authentication (LDAP) to create an internal/private social network while leaving the blogs, by default, public.

Since May 2008, I’ve been running WordPress MU on the Learning Lab, a Linux server I maintain at the University of Lincoln, for experimenting, trialling and evaluating software that may enhance and support research, teaching and learning. It’s a great job 😉

Of all the software we’ve looked at over the last few months, ‘WordPress Multi-User’, has clearly shown the most potential for use by staff and students at the university. It’s a mature, well maintained, very popular open source blogging platform. In fact, it’s more than that. It’s a web content management system that runs 5 million blogs on wordpress.com and 280,000 blogs on edublogs.org. While evaluating WPMU on the Learning Lab, 65 blogs were registered by 123 users. I didn’t advertise the service at all during this period, preferring to work with individuals on specific projects and get their (informal) feedback. The feedback has been positive. People initially need support but once they’re set up and running, they only tended to contact me when they wanted to push WordPress to do more for them through plugins and custom themes.

During this period, I’ve been watching and doing my best to help with the progress made on BuddyPress, a set of plugins for WordPress MU, developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. It’s been interesting trying to get everything to work together at times but over the last few weeks it’s all come together.

BuddyPress Profile

Automattic also develop open source forum software which integrates with Buddypress, too. Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington pioneered the integration of all three products and I’ve had it working here at the University of Lincoln quite nicely. However, bbPress is still beta software and I’d like to be able to offer privacy options on forums, too, which is currently unsupported (there are some plugins, but they’re not mature enough for our use yet). So currently, we’re running WordPressMU, BuddyPress, an LDAP plugin for WPMU and a privacy plugin that’s commonly used on WPMU installations. It works really well.

I’ve documented some of the set up on our wiki. It’s not been difficult. For the time-being, while BuddyPress matures, I’ve chosen to stick with the default home and members themes, changing just the logo. Forums are, as mentioned above, turned off for now. I wonder if we’ll ever turn them on as the ‘Wire’ (similar to the Facebook Wall) is available and people are used to using services like Twitter and the Facebook Wall to communicate these days. We’ll see what demand there is for forums.

The final set up is really quite sweet. A member of the university goes to https://dev.lincoln.ac.uk for the first time and logs in with their usual credentials. The first time they login, they are signed up. That’s it. No sign up page needed. It’s as if they were already a member of the social network, which, being members of the university, they are of course. From there, they see the BuddyPress home pages, can join groups, change their profiles and, when they’re ready, create or join a blog.

I’ve finally finished setting it up for general use today. The few people that know about it and have already joined, instantly see the benefits of having the social networking layer on top of the blogs. I’m excited to see how this works out over time. It’s not something we’re going to launch in a big way just yet (it’s only me supporting it at the moment), but I’m guessing that it will spread quite quickly through word-of-mouth.

The university web team are supportive and are sending staff and whole departments my way when they want a web site. The IT support team have been trained to use WordPress, should they get enquiries their way. We’ve got a few projects that have been waiting patiently for the new home of the blogs and a number of the Learning Lab blog users are migrating across already. The potential for supporting personalised and group online learning is now better than it’s ever been and the social networking element only helps bring peers together for collaboration and discussion.

Many thanks to Jim Groom and D’Arcy Norman who have been working on WordPressMU at their universities in ways which I hope we can emulate and contribute to here at the University of Lincoln.

ALT-C 2008: A different approach.

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Open Source, Software, Web

Today, I took a different approach to the conference and relaxed. I usually take the approach of trying to attend as many sessions as possible and absorb and report back on as much as I can.  However, I’ve found that this approach quickly leaves me exhausted and somewhat removed from the rest of the conference as it allows little time for reflection.

So, my third day in Leeds was a much more enjoyable and stimulating one as I attended sessions, picking up on one or two things that were being presented and following threads and tangents that I found online and from talking with people.  One term that I’ve heard mentioned a few times is ‘lifestream’, that is, an aggregation of online activity into a timeline that can be shared with others. You can see my lifestream by going to this page. You’ll see that following a conversation I had at F-ALT08, I looked again at OpenID and setup my own personal website as an OpenID server, learning a great deal at the same time.

You can also see that I joined identi.ca, an open source microblogging site like Twitter, and found details on setting up Laconica, the software behind identi.ca, on my own server and potentially, the Learning Lab. My experience using Twitter at the conference has really demonstrated the value of microblogging within a defined community as a way of rapidly communicating one-to-many messages and engaging in large asynchronous conversations.

In the morning Digital Divide Slam session, we formed small groups and with two people I’d met previously at the fringe events, created a ‘performance’ that reflected on a form of digital divide. We chose ‘gender’, and produced this (prize winning) video which is now on YouTube.

During the second keynote, I drifted off and began to think about e-portfolios and aggregating our online social activity into a profile/portfolio that is controlled by the individual and is dynamically updated. I’d heard about the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML), and spent time considering whether this could be used or adapted for aggregating a portfolio of work and experience. APML is primarily aimed at individuals’ relationship with advertisers and at a later F-ALT session was able to discuss the suitability of APML or an APML-like standard for aggregating a portfolio of work. Consequently, I’m developing an interest in this area and in other online relationships that can be made between people (see this link, too) and the data that we generate through purposeful and serendipitous online activity.

Having listened to quite a lot of discussion about web2.0 applications over the last few days, I’m even more pleased with the decision to use WordPress as a platform for blogging, web publishing and collaboration in the Learning Lab. With WordPress, we’re able to evaluate many of the latest social web technologies and standards through their plugin system.  This flexible plugin and theming system has led to the development of an entire social networking platform based on WordPress, called BuddyPress, and because it’s basically WordPress with some specific plugins and clever use of a theme, it can use any of the available WordPress plugins to connect to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and other popular web 2 services.  I’m looking forward to watching BuddyPress develop.

In the evening, we attended the conference dinner at Headingley Cricket Club. It was a great location, with good food and excellent service and while sitting next to one of my digital slam partners, he showed me JoikuSpot, an application that turns a mobile phone into a wifi router. There on our dinner table, he ran Joiku on a 3G Nokia phone and provided wifi access to his iPod Touch. What a great way to share high speed network access among friends, while meeting at a cafe or park to discuss work or study.

I was impressed. The Learning Landscape had extended to the cricket ground.