The Brady Bunch: Peter “erupts”

Posted on August 12, 2007 by Reverend

Does anyone remember this clip from the Brady Bunch? If so, do you remember it in the same way now?

Posted in video, YouTube | Tagged | 1 Comment

Everyday’s a WPMu day @ bava

Posted on August 12, 2007 by Reverend

Today was quite a day in WordPress Multi-User (WPMu) land for me. I am finally starting to crank out some support documentation for UMW Blogs, it should be all done by next week. I’ll post when it is relatively complete in case anyone wants some fresh documentation that they don’t have the time or inclination to produce themselves. Please steal liberally, it will actually prove effective for both WPMu and a single WP install with some minor edits.

But, more excitingly, I found two pretty cool plugins for WPMu today.

AvatarsThe first is Mohammed Suleiman Khan’s WPMu Avatar Release Pack which allows users to include avatars on comments and their about page. (He also has a plugin that allows users to add their own CSS styles to themes, but even this gets better in the next plugin I found.) The avatars seem to work right out of the box. I ran into a small error while uploading the first avatar, but this was solved by changing the maximum file size from 80KB to 50Kb in the Site Admin –>Profile Picture tab (50KB was a random number, I think you just need to change this value and save it and the error should disappear). Moreover, if you have an avatar in the WPMu environment, there is a quick hack plugin that will show your icon next to your bbPress forum posts -if your were running this application alongside WPMu. Integration on many levels!

The second is pretty sick! Are you ready DatLat? Dsader’s Userthemes! That’s right, let’s go to the video tape -or at least the description:

Adds ability for every user to move system themes to their file folder and edit their themes if you allow access to the theme editor. Managed via Site Admin. Practical uses for me as site admin: my blogs-including the home-all have different user themes so no user can choose my themes. I add all kinds of bits to my themes without harm to the original “system theme”. Userthemes do not appear in the normal list of themes, they only show when in the blog they belong to. If a particular user wants a unique/rare/premium theme, I can upload it to their blogs.dir/blog_id/themes folder and only they can ever see/edit/activate it. Warning: enabling the theme editor is a huge risk/responsibility.

userthemes

The warning here is very important and it is recommended you do not open this option open to everyone. But we have been talking about managing WPMu this past week and the idea of being able to separate out themes for specific users and copy them automatically into their respective blog.dir file so that they can modify code, styles, etc. (or so we can modify a theme file if need be without FTP) is really amazing. It opens up the possibility for creating customizable themes for particular blogging packages or setups that are derivative yet keep the original themes in tact for the rest of the community. Moreover, we don’t have to copy a million MistyLook themes into the themes directory and hack each one independently. This is an amazing from a management and flexibility standpoint, and if they could do the same for local plugins, we’d be on our way to WPMu heaven.

Posted in plugins, widgets, WordPress, wordpress multi-user | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Dance Party Mashup

Posted on August 10, 2007 by Reverend

Patrick found the Thought Bucket over a week ago and I have been addicted ever since!

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Can you dig it?

Posted on August 9, 2007 by Reverend

This Fall we’ll be rolling out the beta version of ELS Blogs that will have a new name, a new url, and a much larger congregation. We will soon be unleashing the wrath of the latest WordPress Multi-User installation upon the community at Mary Washington, and its name is UMW Blogs! As my favorite reverend from cinema would say, “Can you dig it?”

And to quote yet another NYC-based film, “I knew that ya could!”

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WPMu Dashboard Switcher

Posted on August 8, 2007 by Reverend

If you are using a recent version of WordPress Multi-User (WPMu) one of the slick new features hacked by the now dearly missed forum moderator Dr. Mike (he ruled -having also come up with a sneaky workaround for sitewide tags clouds) is the Dashboard Switcher: a dropdown menu list of all blogs associated with the respective admin. This feature is now a MU plugin that comes stock with the latest two releases (WPMu 1.2.2 & 1.2.3). This feature beautifully integrates the backend of the mutli-user environment for admins and users alike. It makes a previously disjuncted space so much more fluid and connected, allowing folks to move between several blogs they either administer or have authoring privileges for with little or no fuss.

Dashboard Switcher

Given this, you can imagine my dismay yesterday and today when I realized a few blogs weren’t showing up with this feature. Working with a professor this afternoon, I noticed her blog did not offer her that feature. DRATS! So to test it further I signed up with a fake user and created another blog and, lo and behold, this one had it. What’s going on? Well, thanks to the WPMu forum, I can refer you to the answers:

1) The DashBoard switcher doesn’t work in Safari
2) The Dashboard Switcher breaks if you include an apostrophe in the blog title, i.e., “Jim’s Groovy Blog” will disable this feature.

There my be more conditions, but the apostrophe proved to be the culprit this afternoon. For more details on these issues try this search on the WPMU forums.

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All Points Bulletin: have you seen this fake?

Posted on August 8, 2007 by Reverend

Have you seen this man or woman?

Spiderman and Cotton Mather

There is a faker in our midst! Not too long ago a fraud emerged on Twitter, and his or her name is the FakeReverendJim. At first I was mildly flattered and entertained by the propagation of false gods. But that has all changed. The FakeReverendJim has verbally confronted me today, and I am now channeling the spirit of the tubes to unmask this blasphemer!!!

Looks like drastic measures are in order, I am gonna have to get serious now, and take a page out of Kurt Russell’s book in the 1982 version of The Thing and bust out my blow torch and start separating the haters from the elaters! I’ll start here at DTLT and work my way around the planet -let the bloodletting begin!

Below you will find a chronicle of the FakeReverendJim’s offenses against the real deal Holyfield!

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UbuWeb: the videos

Posted on August 7, 2007 by Reverend

From their site:

UbuWeb: The YouTube of the Avant-Garde: UbuWeb has converted all of its rare and out-of-print film & video holdings to on-demand streaming formats à la YouTube, which means that you can view everything right in your browser without platform-specific software or insanely huge downloads. We offer over 300 films & videos from artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Vito Acconci, Pipilotti Rist, Jean Genet, The Cinema of Transgression, Richard Foreman, Terayama Shuji, Paul McCarthy Jack Smith, Carolee Schneeman, John Lennon and hundreds more — of course all free of charge. Presented in conjunction with our partners at Greylodge.

Here is the link to their video index.

Check out the Queer artiste Jack Smith‘s Flaming Creatures (1963) and the old gold nut Samuel Beckett’s Film (1965).

Posted in film, films, video, YouTube | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

WordPress and some questions about Blogland Security

Posted on August 7, 2007 by Reverend

I just read Mario’s post on Digizen discussing IT Damager’s post about the constant security updates at WordPress. Now I know I am a fanboy and all, but the long list of security-related updates that IT Damager references in his post is certainly a concern (and even a fanboy needs to throw a curve ball once in a while). Ironically, Patrick brought up the security fix to me the other day and I kind of shrugged it off, while taking a snipe at Drupal, oh- how sharper than a serpents tooth is a fanboy’s ingratitude! Sorry Patrick!

We are on the verge of a pretty awesome multi-user environment that promises to open up some really interesting possibilities for faculty, students and administration alike. Nonetheless, when I read a post that notes “that every single update to WordPress over the last 2 years has been security related” -I have to pause for a moment and wonder if the WordPress community doesn’t need to start working together a bit more closely to understand this serious recurring issue. I guess its time for me to get off the carousel of denial and look a bit more closely at some of these issues.

At Northern Voice last February, Chris Lott noted that the WordPress code was a bit ugly (my quote, not his), and Lloyd Budd was both eager and quick to suggest otherwise. But when the tale of the tape comes out with a less than impressive record of security exploits, I think one might begin to wonder if Chris has a point. Now that won’t stop me from pushing on with my favorite web-based publishing platform, as well as continuing to experiment with all its excessive goodness. However, that post did give me a bit of pause in regards to thinking about running an “enterprise” application like WordPress when the security issues often require administrator privileges. Within a WPMu environment every blog comes with an admin user that can potentially hi-jack the entire site using these WordPress exploits.

So, to echo the Damager, “I am not sure what it will take to get the WordPress team to write secure code, but I think the community should do nothing short of demand it.”

Posted in WordPress, wordpress multi-user | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

MistyLook theme for bbPress

Posted on August 4, 2007 by Reverend

MistyLook bbpress

Well, out of necessity more than skill I hacked Refueled’s bbPress theme port of Superbold by gorotron. The theme was really nicely done, and the CSS was clean (at least before I got my mitts on it), so I took a stab at re-skinning it a bit to look more like Sadish’s MistyLook theme while keeping a lot of Refueled’s design choices for his bbPress theme. I am not a CSS guru by any means, but the visual effect is enough for my purposes at UMW Blogs. If others find it useful and have some suggestions feel free to leave a comment.

I changed the width and height of the header image (800px x 125px); kept the hot tags sidebar on the left -out of ineptitude mind you; and tried to change as many of the font and styles to the MistyLook “way” as possible given my readily apparent limitations. So, if you are interested in MistyLook and don’t mind cleaning up some amateur CSS mistakes, have at it. Enjoy!

MistyLook theme for bbPress ver.01

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WPMu & bbPress integration

Posted on August 3, 2007 by Reverend

Well, I slightly dreaded the WordPress Multi-User and bbPress user integration I did today -but in the end it was a complete lay-up. I guess my tough luck with sitewide category tags in WPMU (I will accomplish this!!!) had me feeling a bit vulnerable today. OK, but enough about the King, here is the play-by-play for integrating user authentication for bbPress and WPMu:

Environment: I am working with WPMu 1.2.3 (using dynamic subdomains) and bbPress 0.8.2.1 (all installed on a LAMP server with PHP 5 )

Download bbPress here.

Unzip, upload and configure the database settings. I used a separate database for bbPress, the folks on the forums suggest it can just as easily be integrated into the WPMu datasbase, but I was a little uncertain of that so I opted out (if anyone who has details about the nature of the option it would be appreciated).

Image of config.php file for bbPressMost of the work happens right in the config.php file so I am going to include an image (click for the large version) below annotating and highlighting the changes I made (color coded in magenta) and code I added (color coded in green) to the bbPress config file. I think this is all correct, and I hope it helps. So click on the image for a much closer look at my settings.

Two more thing before show time, however:

  1. You are probably going to have to create an .htaccess file in the directory if you want permalinks or slugs. You can get a good sense of how to do this here (it worked for me with the OptionViews like a champ -I love our new hosting 🙂 ).
  2. Important!! Before installing bbPress and creating a username and whatnot, be sure that you don;t use the same username you have in the WPMu. For example, if your username is admin for WPMu, try to avoid using admin for bbPress as well because when the user authentication connections to the WPMu information, it will overwrite anything in the bbPress database.

    P.S. -If you already did this, don’t worry, just put the following line of code $bb->new_keymaster = 'admin'; // (with admin being the overwritten username) in the config.php file for bbPress and try go to –> your_forum_domain/wp-admin/install.php

At this point, I think it is safe to say you can install bbPress and have users signed-in on the WPMu site just mosey on over to forums and post a topic!

One caveat in my testing thus far, you may want to take the login/password fields off of the theme for bbpress. reason being is that users can authenticate on to both bbPress and WPMu from the bbpress login, yet they have to return to bbPress to logout. In other words, if they log into bbPress and read the forums, post, etc. then head over to their blog, they will ultimately have to return to bbPress to logout, causing some confusion. Best bet is to just put a general login and password field on the homepage.

Some fun features of bbPress:

*RSS feeds for all topic (huge!)
*You can include images and code
*You can have both private and public forums
*You can integrate latest forums topics into WPMu homepage
*tags, tags, tags
*avatars
*theme-easy (looks like I may have a shot at a MistyLook them for bbpress)
*the plugins are starting to roll in

I have no idea if the forum part of UMW Blogs will getting any use, but it turned out to be quick and easy enough that I’m not too concerned. Additionally, if you have folks who like the forums and want to continue using them for classes, create private one on the blog/wiki/forum environment and give it a span. I think the fact it has RSS for every topic, post, etc. is nice -and it looks much better the phpBB road kill.

Good luck with it!

Posted in WordPress, wordpress multi-user | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments