I think the sir in this title should really be Andre Malan who recently created the Add to BDP RSS, his first plugin for WordPress. It provides functionality I have dreamed of for over a year now. In short, it is a plugin that adds a sidebar widget to a site so that people can quickly and easily add their feeds to a BDP RSS-powered aggregation page.
Why am I so excited about it? Well, we have done a fair number of aggregated course blogs that bring numerous students posts into one space. BDP RSS has proven an excellent option for its ability to parse feeds cleanly, but adding feeds to the aggregator was heretofore only something a site administrator or very brave professor could do — not to mention it is downright laborious when you have any number of classes using this option. Well, that isn’t the case anymore, yet another obstacle to progress destroyed by Brian Lamb’s student dream team.
So, in an effort to further explore how this plugin works on WPMu, I added it to the bava and would ask anyone who reads this post to add a feed to the sidebar form titled “Add RSS Feed.” It is simple, and you can see the results on the bavafeeds page.
Update: Seems like this widget is currently limited to users of a particular community of WPMu, which makes it perfect for a university playing with aggregation. It seems to be accepting feeds whether or not you are a part of this particular WPMu community, must talk to Andre. As the comments suggest, the plugin has been updated already, offering the option of allowing anyone to add a feed, just those within a specific WPMu community, or only folks who are part of that particular blog — very rad! Below is a screenshot of these widget options.
Actually, that is cool in many ways because it will cut down on any potential spam feeds, or the inevtiable question of whether “anyone” can add a feed. I like this. And as always, having the choice for both is always good.
You’re me hero, I will be testing it both here and on UMW Blogs shortly.