The audio for this podcast can be downloaded at http://highedweb.org/2008/presentations/sac6.mp3
[Intro Music]
Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.
Stephanie Leary: I have a cold in case you couldn’t tell so if I get a little nasally and you can’t tell what I’m saying just go woo and I will try to repeat it in a word that doesn’t include the letter “N”. Can everyone see this ok? Ok, it’s one of those funky little web slide things instead of being a PowerPoint presentation so I will jump right in. WordPress for those of you who haven’t ever used it before it was built as a blogging tool and that’s still primarily what’s it’s used for. But in recent versions they’ve been adding a lot of features to it that make it pretty workable as a sort of small scale CMS. Really easy to install and that’s one of the great things about it. And there are a lot of plug-ins so it’s really, really versatile but it does have some limitations that I kind of want to make you aware of upfront before we get like really deep into this so you can say, “OK, if I don’t meet this requirements maybe this is not for me.”
The basic installation the sort of vanilla flavor of WordPress give you one blog/website, that’s it. It’s not like movable type where you can run like 40 up one installation. It just does one. Now, there are multi-blog versions.
The official one is called “WordPress MU, Multi User”. Some people say moo turned into agriculture, I guess you could do that. It’s a lot of the plug-ins and themes they’re released for the regular WordPress will also work with MU, a lot won’t. There are some sort of quirks is to the way MU is designed and I’ll get into that maybe a little bit more later. Lyceum is sort of an offshoot that another guy wrote. He didn’t like the way WordPress MU did its table setup in the database.
He didn’t think it was efficient and so he did a completely different style on the back end. So Lyceum is a complete rewrite on the database level and I think plug-ins and themes should work but plug-ins pretty much have to be written for Lyceum in order to work and so there aren’t that many. The other kind of limitation is that it is based on PHP and MySQL so it does run better on an Apache Platform. It will run an IAS.
You’re going to need a couple of pages on the Wiki which is the WordPress Codex to kind of teach you how to do clean URLs without using mod_rewrite. And how to do a custom 404 error page because the one that sort of built in won’t quite work right. But it will work. I’ve done it on our IAS, I swear it works no matter what else you hear, it will.
And the other thing about writing it on Windows is that you need to have the SMTP plugged in if you don’t have to send the mail on that machine somewhere because that’s kind of what PHP uses by default and there are a couple of plug-ins for WordPress that use the mail function that aren’t written correctly. And so if you find that you install one and it doesn’t send mail like you think it does, kind of look through the code, and if it uses just the mail function, that’s PHPs and it’s using sent mail. There’s a wp_mail function that all the plug-in should be using because that takes advantage of SMTP of it’s there. It’s just that some plug-in writers are a little sloppy.
Do I go over anybody’s head there? That kind of got technical real fast. [Laughter] OK now, workflow and WordPress as a CMS is still really minimal so you’re not going to find a whole lot in the way of editorial approval. There is a little bit but not much so you have five basic user levels out of the box and you can increase that and change it with a plug-in that’s really popular called “Role Manager.”
If you need to add to what comes out of the box but you get subscriber which is a person who can subscribe to the RSS Feeds and comments and things. And then you get contributor and that person can put content into the back end but they can’t publish it until an editor comes along and approves it. So you have editor and then you have administrator. I think it might be a manager level in there.
I don’t use that one very often. So these are the other things you sort of get out of the box. It has a scheduled publishing feature and by that really what it just means is that if you change the date on a post it will not appear until that date if it’s in the future. That can be a little squarely for people who want to use WordPress as an events calendar and there are those people out there, there’s a plugin they do that but they have to work around to this built in feature that doesn’t allow posts to appear until that future date.
Statistics a little bit amenable in WordPress. There’s a very popular plug-in that is written by the creators of WordPress and it’s called “WP-Stats”. You can download it. It requires an API key from WordPress.com which is sort of he commercial side of WordPress so we need to unload WordPress. You’re getting a PHP MySQL package that you’re going to install on your server.
WordPress.com is the hosted version or you can go and sign up for a free account. Try it out you get your own blog with the themes that they have chosen that you can install. It’s really kind of locked down and it’s meant for the casual blogger who doesn’t want to install anything on their own server. It’s a really great place to go to test this kind of stuff, or to test the software and see if you like it but they also have API keys once you sign up for an account there and that will help you both run both the statistics and a Kismet which is the sort of top of the line spam guard plugin for WordPress. And that’s going to be really important because WordPress blog get a lot of spam.
[Laughter]
I use to say ‘movable type was sort of the worst for spamming because it was more popular but these days WordPress has gotten really popular. And I have a fairly low traffic blog and I think a Kismet says it costs 60,000 spam comments on my blog, it’s like ridiculous. The other thing I was going to mention about WordPress that is a little different from other blog systems that you may have tried like movable type maybe or text patterns that the themes in WordPress are a little different and there’s a handout in your handouts book that will go into a little bit more detail with that and so I’ll talk about that in a bit. I’m sorry I’m going to try not to cough and sneeze right into the microphone to blow up your eardrums. So aside from those sorts of minor limitations WordPress is pretty powerful.
I’ve used it to run a lot of different kinds of sites. Really with the addition of plugins and themes you can do almost anything with it. Themes really are just PHP shells that sort of have some WordPress content pulled into it and so if you’re familiar with PHP and you’re comfortable sort of moving cut around, you can build your own anything in WordPress. Just kind of using it as the database back end and using these sorts of tags that are customized to do specific queries on things.
If you don’t like those tags and the query that they run, you can write your own query and get extra step out of the database. What’s really cool for me is that feeds are generated for just about everything so you have your blog posts, you have comments within the posts, you have categories each of those categories is going to have a feed. Each author that is setup in the system will have a feed for their own posts.
Trying to think what else. Tags, it has categories as well as tags both you can get it I think a feed for each tag. It just generates feeds virtually for anything. Every category, every archive, it will have a feed so you just append those strings to the URL and you’ll find a feed for whatever you’re looking at usually and installation is super, super easy.
I used to actually do it here and I’m not going to because I want to spend sometime on other things but when they call it a five minute installation they’re being generous. If you know what you’re doing and you have already on your hands your database name and username and password and that kind of stuff, and you’re comfortable moving PHP files up to a server and sort of running an installation thing. I’ve got to the point where I can do it in about 30 seconds and I’ve done a lot of these. I would say 2 minutes stops. Any questions so far over at the back? OK.
So the installation, I just put up here a few common problems if you try to install WordPress and maybe failed. This may have been what happened. I see a lot of people in the forums repeating these questions over and over and over. So if you install it and none of your links work, I can almost guarantee you that you didn’t upload the Htaccess File that came with it because it’s a hidden file on both Windows and Mac so it doesn’t always get uploaded in your FTP thing a very easy way to fix that I’ll show you in a bit.
You probably also might run into permissions problems especially if you have some sort of mask on your server so just run through those and make sure that the permissions are set according to what’s in the installation instructions. Your PHP installation on your server might be a little quirky with some of the settings. So again run through the installation instructions and make sure that everything that is required is something that you have setup. And this one trips me up all the time because I use Dreamweaver a lot and I have it setup for I think UNIX style line breaks.
And when I upload it to a Windows server, an installation with WordPress, the whole thing just blew up and I have to go back in Dreamweaver and change my line break type in the preferences, weird problem. So those are pretty common and then problems with upgrading, really when you get an upgrade package from WordPress it’s just a whole new set of files and I usually just synchronize that ones that changed. Sometimes my FTP client gets a little confused and doesn’t entirely upload the WP-Includes Folder which is where all the magic happens in WordPress. So if you have upgraded and something suddenly looks really wacky that’s often what happened is your Includes File got screwed up, or your theme, or plugin author didn’t upgrade their stuff to match the upgrade of WordPress and now everything is broken.
So that’s a common problem. I could have gotten back up a little bit. I could have gotten like way ahead of myself here. I want to go in and show you WordPress for those of you who haven’t seen it.
OK, this is the dashboard this is the latest version of WordPress. It gives you some things that you might commonly want to do like right now and on this one it’s not going to show me incoming links or recent comments because I don’t have any. This is just a demo installation, it’s on this machine. It’s not actually on a web server anywhere. It will give you most popular, newest, and recently updated plugins from the official plugin repository.
It will give you development blog news and then it gives you this sort of WordPress Planet down here which most people don’t find very useful but for developers it’s great because there’s constantly post about new plugins, new themes, new tricks with WordPress and you’ll see here the 2.7 wire frames that’s the next version so you kind of get previews of what’s coming which is great when you’re freelancing and working with clients that are using WordPress, or even if you’re using WordPress in your office and you have users that you’ve trained to put in content this way. It’s great to know ahead of time what’s going to change so that they don’t freak out when the screen that they use all the time which is this one suddenly looks different. This one that suddenly looked different in 2.5 and it’s going to look suddenly different again in 2.7. They changed quite a bit but really it’s pretty simple once you get used to it.
You got your title, you got your post. Down below there you got tags and below that are categories so you can have sort of Meta data. Over here you’ll see, you got publish immediately. If you hit edit and change the date, you can backdate things or you can future date things if you want to schedule the publishing so that’s how you do that. Oh, I’m sorry I haven’t moved the categories over here, I’ve got a plugin because I don’t like having them down here.
It’s like they’re below the fold I always forget to do my categories those are plugin that moves back where they used to be, I like that so I put it in. You can keep this post private which is kind of a strange feature. It keeps it private just for you the author. It doesn’t keep it private to all of the users in the blog or make it password protected or anything like that. It’s like you have a diary it’s very strange but you do have somewhere down in here some settings that you can use to password protect a particular post.
There we go. And if you don’t want to allow comments on a particular post you can turn those off. You can also change those settings for the entire blog as the default. So if you’re setting up news releases, press releases for your office and your administration is not Web 2.0 and doesn’t want comments on the stuff that they’re publishing, you can just go into the settings and say, “No comments are allowed on the blog.”
And that will solve the problem too. I have used WordPress to run press release sites. I’ve used it to run little internets lots of different things. So let me show you a couple of the settings. You’ve got your title and you’ve got your tag line which is displayed in most themes but of course you can turn that off of you don’t want it. The address for this is just my little local development site that you would – Oh, I’m sorry I can’t move that way.
You would put your URL there and I’ll talk a little bit about those two fields there. And the reason they’re different is because in other systems such as movable type and text pattern it was possible very easily to install the software in one place and have visitors go somewhere else to actually get the pages and a lot of people wanted that functionality in WordPress. They didn’t want the installation to be in the same public place so WordPress gets around that by rewriting the URLs in the fly with Mod Rewrite and up here in IAS you’ll need the ISAPI Rewrite filter to do that. But really it’s just sort of faking the feature the movable type has so hat’s why there’s two fields instead of one. Now, you have an email address for an administrator who will get a notification every time something weird happens, a new user is created, something needs approval.
Down here you just sort of choose how your dates and times are going to be displayed. Those are sort of the basic settings and since I’ve already talked about the URLs a little bit, let me know go down to their permalinks. This is kind of where you choose how your posts are going to be named. This is sort of a clean URL’s feature.
You’ve got some options in there that are sort of predetermined and you can choose from any of those, or you can go to this linked page right here which goes to the codex, the WordPress Wiki and that will give you all of the possible tags that you can string together to do your own custom structure. And when I say tags what I mean is when I choose date and time, you see it fills in those little hash tags. You can get a whole list of them over at the Wiki and choose your own URL structure and set it up that way. Once you have done that, if your Htaccess file is writable, by this user you can hit save changes and then it’ll go.
Otherwise it will say, “If your file was writable we could save this for you.” But instead you’re going to have to copy this and put it in the file and it will actually give you the text to copy in Htaccess. Any questions about this stuff so far? Kind of run on through the back end and show you the management screen. So once you’ve written a post it’s going to kind of show up over here.
We’ve got all of our posts in all of our categories and these categories will make more sense in a minute when you see the homepage again. And from here, this is a plugin right now but it’s going to be included in 2.7. If I double click a random space in here I can edit all of the Meta data without actually having to go into the page. It’s just really handy. So if I want to change the published status on all of those like my boss is just coming to say, “We’ve got to take all that stuff off the website right now.”
“OK, I can just go in and change all of those back to unpublished and they’ll disappear from the website.” Problem solved. This is called “Manageable.” It was a winner in the WordPress Plugins Competition that they had in July and it will be included in 2.7 by default.
So I didn’t talk about post and pages much did I? You actually have both and this is kind of where WordPress gets into the CMS area. It’s used to just have posts and you would do the blog posts and that was great. But everybody said, “Well, I want to page that talk about me, not just a post.” The WordPress developers went in and, “OK, fine,” and they’ve created this page functionality which works exactly like posts except there are no categories, no tags, no date, and no feeds per pages.
So you have all of the other same fields you can publish, unpublished. You can actually accept comments and track box on pages which is kind of cool. If you wanted to do a sort of Quick-And-Dirty Guestbook for a site that happened to be in WordPress you could set up a page call it guestbook and turn on comments, done. So I’ve got a lot of posts in here.
Let me show you there’s the few pages that we have, only a couple, and you can see that they’ve got their little comment things too. Let me show you this one because it’s a little strange. It’s got this bizarre bracket thing in the content field. [Laughter] Just view this page and show you what’s happening here.
There is a sort of short tag structure for plug-ins that they can use to replace little brackets like that with a whole chunk of HTML. So what this plugin it’s a contact form with spam filtering through Kismet which is great. And back on the management side on the plugin page, we create your form and you say, “I need these three fields so I needed it to be emailed to this person.”
And it will say, “OK, that’s contact form number one. Here’s your code. Paste that into a page or post.” “OK, copy that.” Paste it into a page, and this is what comes out very easy, very handy, very solid.
Audience 1: Does that require a sign-in or login by the person trying to fill that?
Stephanie Leary: No. This is public. I need to repeat the question, “Does that require a login or a sign in by the person trying to fill it out?” No, it does not. It’s open to the public.
You can change those settings actually on comments and things if you want to allow comments only by people who are signed in and have sort of a closed ecosystem, you can do that. It’s very easy. Let me see if there’s anything else I want to talk about back here, not really. I’ll talk about design a little bit.
So under the design tab it will show you all of the themes that you have installed and I only have three here right now. You could have a bazillion and it will create pages for you so that there are a little bit more manageable. It has a built in theme editor if you want to make quick change you can do that. It will just show you the theme files starting with the CSS file and you can run through those. Those themes have this weird little thing called “Widgets” which are little predefined bits of PHP that you drag and drop into your sidebars or whatever areas are defined in your theme.
So this particular theme is a two column theme. I’ve got my main content and I’ve got my sidebar which here is sidebar one. So presumably in a sidebar I would want my search box and maybe some archives if this is were a blogs and things like that. Here I’ve got my search box.
I’ve got an Excerpt of a particular post which is a plugin I wrote for a client on my freelance stuff, it’s available you can download it. And there are some text widgets where you can just enter any text HTML that you want. PHP is not allowed unless you get another plugin to enable that but you can do HTML all day long so I’ve actually got a form that I just dump into this text widget and we will see on the homepage how this turned out. So most themes that you get on the WordPress website are for blogs and they’ll have the most recent post first going down and we’ll have the archives and stuff but this is a different kind of site.
This is a good partner website that I built in WordPress and I’m going to make this particular package available for you guys to download. It’s actually up there now. The URL is on the handout for this presentation. It’s a little different. You’ll notice it’s not a blog.
[Laughter]
I wanted to really talk about WordPress as a CMS and so up here, I don’t know if you guys can read it in the back, we’ve got this little sort of gray feature box. On the left we’ve got a list of courses that this department teaches. Over here we’ve got the two most recent posts in the news category and here we’ve got the two most recent posts in the jobs category and that’s all setup in the theme. Over here, here’s where our widgets come into play so we had our search box which went up there for some reason but look at the theme and figure out why that happened.
We’ve got our featured course Excerpt and we’ve got our form that I just punched into that text field. So what I have done here? OK, I’ve created some categories for my posts so maybe I want our departmental secretary to be able to go in and post announcements, great! I tell her, “Go to post, go to the right page, choose the news category write what you have to say. Hit publish, you’re done.”
This is very easy for her to do. She’s going to paste something from some email our boss sent. She’s going to go in and she’s going to hit publish and it’s going to pop up here in the news section. Now we’ve got student worker jobs that are available.
She says, “Well, I need to publish that on our web page.” Well okay, it goes into an HR system elsewhere in the university but we need to put it on our page too. So I create another category I do the same thing. This time instead of choosing the news category, they’re going to choose the jobs category and it’s going to show up in a different spot on our homepage.
She goes, “Great! This is very easy.” We’ve got courses that we teach and we want to have a list of courses that we can search and we want to have maybe a feed for all of our courses so I create another category for courses and each course gets a post. And we talk about what that course does. Now, if you wanted to, I didn’t do this but you could create users for everybody in your department and have professors actually log in and write about their classes.
You could even have comments about their classes if you wanted to. I left the comments open on this one. And so if you wanted to get a very easy list of all of the classes that a particular professor is teaching, you could just set up something that calls up all of the posts by that user in the courses category. There you go.
Let’s going to talk about the newsletter sign up. This is kind of a thing I found at a cool little article on how to set up a newsletter in WordPress for free that emails out to a number of people. OK, let me go back to this side. No, I didn’t set it up. I’m sorry, what I would normally do in this situation is create a fifth category called “Newsletter,” and then I would go to my theme page make sure that it isn’t setup to appear on any of those areas. So I post a newsletter, it’s going into limbo.
It doesn’t actually show up on the page but over here what I’ve done then it would go into FeedBurner and I would find the feed URL for that category by just going to the category page and the pending/feed like I said. And it would create a FeedBurner account on that feed URL and then grab FeedBurner’s little email signup form. Since a lot of people don’t quite crock RSS I have a lot of professors who are like, “I need an email or it’s not going to happen.”
“OK, I’ll get you an email.” Grab FeedBurner’s little form this is a free feature that FeedBurner offers. They sign up and every time I post something to that feed they got an email. So if I create a newsletter category that doesn’t show up on the website but sends an email to everybody who signed up, I’ve got a newsletter feature that I didn’t really have to do much work for. [Laughter] Any questions so far?
OK, one more thing I want to show you on here, this is another plugin called “Profiler”, oops, wrong page. And this is not the greatest I think if I were doing this for real I would probably rewrite this a little bit to pull up some different fields because it’s not showing the full name. It’s showing the WordPress username but this is a real quick and dirty way to get a contact list of everybody who’s signed in or everybody who has a user account in WordPress.
It’s another little plug in that gives you one of those little bracket tags that you stick into a page and that’s it. So the way this theme is setup, this is actually a stock WordPress theme that I made very, very minimal changes to, it’s called “Mimbo.” There’s a whole subcategory of WordPress themes known as “Magazine Themes” and these are setup for sites that aren’t blogs. They are magazines.
They are businesses. They are college departments and what they do is they have these little sorts of blogs where categories are going to show up and some of them have features like on the ‘Welcome to the department area’. If I have a custom field in there with an image, there will be a little image showing up so they have some things setup to do that for you.
So, I’m going to talk a little bit about moving your installation. This is kind of something that people get tripped up on and this is going to come in handy if you want to actually download that package and use it for your own work. Theoretically, this is the way that you don’t have to do it anymore but I find it you still kind of do. So what you would do is go into PHP MyAdmin or MySQL through the command line whatever you prefer and create a dump of the SQL from your old database.
And then you import it into the new one but you’re not quite done yet. Because you have those two URL fields and they’re not going to be right anymore presumably you’re moving from one side to another. And you can’t really get into the Admin section to fix it so you’re have to go in to the database itself and find the two fields in the table which is called the “WP Options” and change them there before you try to load up the Admin Interface. Then you’ll copy your themes and your plugin files because those don’t come into the database, they’re just files on the server.
Copy them up. Create your new config file to go to your new database and your new location. And then load up the admin interface it should work. You should be able to login and if you go to settings and permalinks and hit save it will regenerate that Htaccess file for you for all your new permalinks, your new clean URLs based on your new URL base. Is that makes sense? Everybody is nodding, okay.
In theory, there’s this new import/export feature in WordPress but it has a lot of limitations and it’s kind of buggy. It’s really meant for people who are maybe moving from WordPress.com to their own hosted version of WordPress. It doesn’t export everything. It only does posts and pages.
So if you have some fields that you’ve setup like maybe you’re using Excerpts or something those aren’t going to be included in the export and discovered this the hard way. Users are not exported. So when you import into the new blog, if there’s a user that doesn’t match, you’ll be asked which user in the new blog tool to assign those posts to it won’t create a user for them. And like I said your plugins and themes are not included because they’re files, they’re not actually a part of a database, but your settings which are part of the database are also not included in that export so this is kind of broken.
Really not my favorite way to try to move a site, I’ve done it, I really don’t recommend it. Go back to this homepage and I’m starting to run out of time so does anybody have any questions? Have I talked about the way you’d like to use WordPress? Let me start with you?
Audience 2: Are your provisionary slides available?
Stephanie Leary: Yes. The URL is on the handout for this particular workshop which is SAC6 as I recall. Yes.
Audience 3: Just a question. We are doing a MU installation. We have to figure out all the in and outs yet.
Stephanie Leary: MU is different. Yeah.
Audience 3: Here’s the question I have. A lot of what you’re doing it here yes you made a little notion of it that yes the job their in HR somewhere else and you’re right. That’s just about how this everywhere. And if that is a way for you to pinpoint and target saying you’re pretty much if you have the contact desk profiler or you got somewhere else that’s also duplicated. It seems that your answer it in administration nightmare if you’re doing this for multiple sites and do you address that or it’s just one of those this is the quick and dirty and if I do it, we’ll do it this way.
Stephanie Leary: This is quick and dirty.
Audience 3: Is there a way that you could connect that you’re like the new and events happening very interesting that you just sent out a little piece that goes into another web page?
Stephanie Leary: Oh yeah. Absolutely if the other web page has some capability to take in an RSS Feed and display it, you’re going to get a feed for like I said each of these categories.
Audience 3: That sounds like really cool way to cheat as far as the interfaces is look best it’s a really nice…
Stephanie Leary: Yeah.
Audience 3: Back and forth assuming the time in.
Stephanie Leary: Absolutely.
Audience 3: I don’t have to program it anymore.
Stephanie Leary: And in fact there are in that plug-ins for both MU and for WordPress that you could in theory hook up to your active directory if you have one or to whatever database or users that you have. I haven’t tried it. OK, we’ve got about five more minutes any other questions? Anybody trying with this? Go ahead.
Audience 4: What about other Web 2.0 technologies on discussions and forums?
Stephanie Leary: It is possible to sort of hack together, I’m sorry – he said what about other Web 2.0 technologies such as discussion, forums, and stuff like that. You can kind of hack together a forum using WordPress by really manipulating the theme but there’s also a WordPress friendly forum system called “bbPress” and it could share a user database with WordPress. There’s kind of a hacky way to do that. I would probably recommend going down that road rather than trying to hack together something here to make this into a form because it’s really not.
It has comments but it really doesn’t work all that well and there are other forum applications that also have a lot of WordPress integration. I know “Vanilla” can be hacked together to run off the same user database. I’m thinking of another one, “PunBB,” it could run off the same database as well although Pun is not great about keeping you informed of the changes as it offers upgrades and so you may install the PunBB upgrade and then realize you’ve just totaled your integration with WordPress. Yes.
Audience 5: I’m using WordPress in my blog. I have comments on spam. Is there a plugin for validation of...
Stephanie Leary: A CAPTCHA? Yes, there are multiple ones. Go to wordpress.org and hit extend. There’s a plugin directory and just search for CAPTCHA. Yeah, CAPTCHA, did I get that right? That’s it. [Laughter] Anybody else? I didn’t really show the image uploading features of this. It is kind of possible to do an image gallery in here but I wanted to mention that Zenphoto is an image gallery that has really great integration with WordPress and several plugins that make it useful.
So right now in the right screen in 2.6 you have these four ad media buttons. That’s going to be consolidated in 2.7 so that you only have one but that’s images, videos, music, and all other files like PDF, Word whatever.
Audience 6: PowerPoint?
Stephanie Leary: No, this is actually part of the WordPress default installation but if you have users with accessibility issues on your campus who would be the people using this interface, I need to let you know that is Flash and I don’t know how accessible it is. So you choose your file we’re going to say that one and it will try to glean some Meta data out of that. It’s probably not going to find a whole lot but then let’s you change the title of the caption, the description. It’s going to give you the link to the location where it uploaded that and then you can insert that link into your post or you can just save all changes and go back up here to the gallery.
And so you had 16 files here if you insert – let me close this and if you do that, I don’t know if you can read that in the back, it’s just the word gallery and it should be in square brackets. That will give you, if it’s photos, a list just a gallery of all your photos. If it’s other kinds of files it will try to list them and that’s a quick and dirty way to do a photo gallery.
There’s an option that I need to tell you about in my last couple of minutes here if you do that, you’re going to want to go to settings miscellaneous because out of the box this is wrong. This one right here, crop thumbnails to exact dimensions. What’s that going to do is like find the middle 150 pixels square of your photo and use that as your thumbnail.
So if you want the whole photo to be shrunk as your thumbnail, you need o uncheck this box. That’s a weird one that kind of catches people up and then it will like not just sometimes it will squeeze your photo into that 150, it’s a little weird and I don’t know why that one is on there by default. I’ve kind of complained about that in the developer areas of WordPress.
The other great thing about WordPress is that it’s open source and if you don’t like something, you can go file a ticket and say, “I think this should be some other way.” And the developers are pretty good about listening to that. There are some mailing lists that are open. You can join if you really want to get into WordPress and you could just get into the discussion about the features that are being developed for the next version and say, “You know guys I don’t think you’re going quite the right direction on this here’s why.” And if you can be articulate in voicing your opinions still pretty much listen to most of the time.
Maybe I say, “No, we’ve already done the coding on that it’s going to be on 2.7 no matter what you do. It only you do first and then you…
Audience 7: I want to ask the date in 2.7.
Stephanie Leary: Next month.
Audience 7: Next month.
Stephanie Leary: Yeah. I’m come out about that because I knew I was doing this presentation this month and they were like, “Yeah, yeah early November.” So this is going to look a little different.
Audience 8: Are there things other than the codecs you recommend to users but not developers to help or…
Stephanie Leary: Yes, there is a website, I forgot the URL but if you Google for WordPress screencasts there’s a whole website full of Screencasts that are really aimed toward non-technical users kind of teaching them how to use this as a CMS. And up here somebody had a question.
Audience 9: I had a question but basically you’re showing it to us at that way of being sort of like a poorman’s CMS
Stephanie Leary: CMS? Right.
Audience 9: What is the primary use of CMS?
Stephanie Leary: Blogging
Audience 9: For blogging.
Stephanie Leary: Yeah, just a single blog and really those pages so that you can have an ‘About Me’ page for the author and maybe a page for some other stuff.
Audience 10: For the whole university not the WordPress.
Stephanie Leary: No, I really wouldn’t.
Audience 10: So you think that their status single and single installation for each separate user? By University?
Stephanie Leary: Oh, you know for blogging?
Audience 10: Yeah.
Stephanie Leary: MU would be the way to go.
Audience 10: That’s way to go.
Stephanie Leary: Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn’t recommend using WordPress for a site anything larger than a department I really wouldn’t. I know some people have done it but it’s just not quite that robust. Any other questions? I think we’re out of time.
Audience 11: A couple of minutes for a question.
Stephanie Leary: A couple of minutes? I’ll be around the whole UAD Squad is going to dinner at the Japanese Place, it’s on the handout and your stuff so you can find me there, or I hang out in the UAD room come ask me questions. I’m happy to talk about WordPress anytime. I just heard from a guy today who attended this talk last year and is ruling out his WordPress site tomorrow, or later this week or next week or something like that. So I was very excited to hear that this was useful for him and he’s actually using it. So thank you.
[Applause]
Announcer: For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml
[End of Music]