I know, I know. I’m way behind in Site of the Week. But! My buddy Kevin did a review of Edublog’s *new* look.
I’m still swamped - even more so, plus spring is truly here in Canada. Did I mention I like in the country next to a lake? (And I’m still looking for guest posts.)
After a bit of a wait, macgruder from the forums has released Montyspam. It seems really easy to use and uncomplicated in the backend. Better yet, it was developed specifically for MU *first*.
If you’ve been looking for some way to manage comment spam on your system, this could be the way to go.
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Barry over at clearskys has given us a sneak peek at Staypress, a “a collection of plugins that will turn a standard vanilla installation
of WordPress or WordPress MU into a property management and bookings
system.”
He’s done a load of work, such as removing menu items users won’t need, and turning the system on it’s head, bringing the backend admin to the *front* of the site.
More so than seeing it in action, I can’t wait to read the code to see how he did it. 
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WordPress MU sets some serious limits on users in the system, even going so far as to not allow (by default) common styles to post content. Things like iframes and embeds are understandably not allowed in an open setup.
But there are cases where you may be setting up a system in a closed environment and have had issues with editing the kses.php file, which would have to be re-edited with every upgrade.
Today I found this plugin, Unfiltered MU. I haven’t had a chance to test it yet, but it works in either the mu-plugin folder or the regular plugin folder.
I would strongly caution you to not use this on a public and/or open registration site. It leaves the entire system open to hacking. But for those of you in special circumstances it should do the trick nicely.
(No word yet on whether it allows target=”top” to allow links to open in a new window. )
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Donncha has let us all know that there’s been another release candiate, post here. We’re all hoping that if things go well, an official new version will come out on Friday.
Now, since I’ve been real quiet here because I’m swamped with life, work and a pinched nerve in my arm, I thought I’d put out a call for some authors. Typing one-handed is hard.
Even if you’re just interested in a guest post, that’d be great - not just for me or you, but for the community as a whole. Documentation is scanty at best, so this is a great way to show off your knowledge & share a bit. Even if you just want to review a WPMU-based site (good or bad) or write about what special things you’ve done on your own WPMU site.
Also, with the recent Google page rank changes, this blog jumped up to a PR 6 last tiem I checked, so a little link love back to your regular site (linked in the post you’ll write for here) will be pretty sweet.
Leave me a comment or drop me an email if you’re interested.
Just in time to play with for the weekend, Donncha has released WPMU 1.5 rc1. You can read his notes here and grab the zip from trac here.
Please be aware this is a release cadidate, not a full release. 
Either use it on a test server, or backup everything twice before live deployment.
As always, note anything that goes wonky in the forums, and we can all work together to find bugs.
I really need to write a “How to upgrade” post, don’t I?
Often as an MU admin, we see a theme we like, or a user wants to use, but it’s not widgetized. Rest easy, as widgetizing a theme is quite easy once you know how. I promise it takes longer to read through the instructions than it does to actually do it.
I was really pleased to see this post from Theme Lab explain the process of widgetizing a theme in heaps of detail, including making widget areas in places other than the sidebar. My mind is churning at the possiblities.
To be fair, there’s been only a handful of themes I can think of that were difficult if not impossible to widgetize because of sidebar structure (one had TABLES, seriously). Most of the time, it’s a snap. If it’s not, I drop the theme or recode the sidebar. 
While we’re on the subject of themes, has anyone got Probama working on a WPMU install? I’ve tried it on two servers and neither place would recognize that it even existed.
Found a whole site dedicated to listing wpmu-based sites with open registration. http://wpmuhosts.com/
You can even add to it.
I’ve set up a test install of WordpressMU with BuddyPress added and nothing else. It uses r1219 for MU (from Friday) and r18 for BuddyPress (today’s version).
You can find it at http://testdrivewpmu.com and feel free to sign up and check it out from a user’s perspective. The more people to test it, the more bugs can be squashed, and the more clear we can be in documentation.
As this is only a test site, it can disappear or break at any time. No information will be saved or gathered for nefarious purposes. At some point, I’ll set it up to reinstall itself every so often.
The other thing I’ll mention right off is that I know profile picture uploads aren’t working, but that *could* be an issue on my end, as I’m having image-related issues on my server.
(cross-posted to buddypress dev list)
If you were curious about MU and what it’s like, or curious about BuddyPress, this would be the place to try it out.
When I first saw Beau and Ray’s site, mybabyourbaby.com, I was impressed two ways: first, as a parent and second as an MU admin.
From a user perspective, it’s different from pretty much all parent/baby sites out there that I have seen, and I have four children. That’s what they did well first off: provide the user with something different AND a way to connect familes together. The site takes a blog and completely turns it on its edge, calling it a scrapbook or just book and featuring photos, videos and then posts about the baby in your life.
There’s the clean slick design on the main pages, with the bare minimum - but important - menu items in handy locations. I was impressed to see that the color scheme didn’t have a hint of pink or blue. When you get to the signup page, there’s a whole pile of information collected and you can even add additional users to the blog when you create it. Even the activation email is restyled and customized.
The backend is completely overhauled and integrated with the design of the main site. I hardly recognized a thing. It’s been stripped down and reoganized specifically for their audience. They’ve even provided their own custom themes for users. The main focus is on the sharing of pictures, with the added bonus of telling the story to go along with it. Even the baby has their own profile. I like how the page headings say “The Life of *babyname*” and make it a celebration of sharing all about the baby.
Nostalgia time:
You know when I first had children, we had to write things down on paper in baby books. By the time I had baby number three, she was 6 months old before I even bought a baby book for her (on clearance too). But baby #4 was a big surpise after an eight-year gap, and by then I was blogging my own life, so hers has been documented all along. I really wish I had known about a site like this. My baby boy, kid #1, is 20 and married so maybe I can use it for future grandchildren.
To get deeper into the technical aspects, I asked Beau if he wouldn’t mind answering a few questions, despite my legendary typos and his travelling. We talked about how long it took to create (about 6 months) and how much time is spent on the site on a daily basis (a couple hors a day at least), and the good stuff: custom work and challenges.
What was the biggest challenge in getting it running?
Beau: Because of the approach that we took, we had *heaps* of additional development required to replicate/create a customized “admin panel” for our users. That has taken a lot of work, and required me to really get to know WPMU on a level that has at times been painful . Our custom posting/uploading process has also taken a lot of work, but I think it’s worth it.
Got any inside goodies or tidbits?
Beau: We’re working on a couple new themes right now, and are hoping to release our first external integration for providing extra functionality to users (that’s all I’ll give you for now :P).
Now I’m intrigued. Any tips for fellow MU admins?
Beau: Don’t be afraid to use plugins. There are *thousands* of plugins out there, so go and explore and see what you can find. If there’s something that is licensed in a way that makes it OK for you to use, then go for it. If there’s no license, email the author and find out (get an email to keep on file for your record). Also don’t be afraid to get an existing plugin and hack it to pieces if it’s remotely related to what you want to do. Often just looking into plugins will help you find some additional hooks/filters that you didn’t know about that can be handy.
I’m also looking to put together a bit of a general dashboard because I know we want to see some key metrics like how many people are registering each day, the number of posts they’re posting, people per “blog”, etc etc. So if I ever get around to making that remotely “nice”, maybe that will be available as a plugin as well!
I have a feeling if I said you had custom plugins you’re planning on releasing, you’d get hassled a lot.
Beau: Feel free to mention that I’m wanting to release plugins. People bugging me will give me a bit more motivation to get it out there And if anyone wants to sponsor the release of a specific portion of functionality as a plugin then that’s possible as well. I already have one under development/polishing in this manner. As a rough idea, here are a couple of the plugins I’m hoping to get out:
- “Slick Comments” (the completely AJAX-powered, nested comments that we use, with avatars where available)
- “WPMU Invitations” (allowing users to send out email invitations to an email address, and then when the recipient signs up, they are automatically added to the blog of the inviter, with the role they specified)
- “Avatar Manager” (simple system for uploading an image and then cropping 2 versions for use within your templates/profiles etc — this is being sponsored now)
- “Beau’s Blog Meta” (ability to store blog–user meta data in a table which is much more efficient for “global” queries
There are a couple other possibilities, but I need to see how much sense it makes to cut them out as stand-alone plugins.
***
Well, I for one can’t wait to see what else Beau and Ray can bring to the community. Well done guys. I bet your moms are proud.
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