Setting up a Wordpress MU blogging platform for a university community

I set up a WordPress MU installation for all staff and students at our university campus. It should have taken the team working on it about 3 months to finish the customization but it took about 18 months…and isn’t quite yet finished… We have had three classes use it over the last three semesters and have over 150  blogs – experimental and active – on it at the moment.

Here are some decisions we made.

1. Build evaluation into the pilot. I surveyed users in the pilot before they started blogging about what their expectations were, what would make their blog successful to them, the customisations they wanted and how they would like support. The platform went to production from pilot without me doing the follow-up study, but if the project  had not been supported, this would have been valuable data to have.

2. Document decisions, responsibilities and actions using a wiki. This was essential, particularly when a key member of the team left the institution three months after the project started.

3. Integrate with campus authentication. We wrote a plugin so that users log in via the university’s idiosyncratic authentication system. This is good for the users, but not so great underneath. It involved writing a script to do a nightly load of users into the WordPress MU system (so all people with university IDs also have a record on the WordPress MU system). The unique key for users in WordPress MU is the user email, whereas it is an ID number in our authentication system, and not everyone has an email address…so it is a little hard to data match.

4. Release all blog content under a Creative Commons license . I stole this idea from the blogging platform at the Harvard Law School . We customised the WpLicense plugin from the Creative Commons foundation . We changed it so that the default license is a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia license…which involved a lot of poking about and was not as simple as it sounds. We also changed it so that one could add  a traditional Copyright license too.

5. Legal and privacy conditions. Again, I stole our Blogs – Legal Terms and Conditions and Blogs – Privacy Provisions from the Harvard Law School’s  blogging platform Terms, Conditions and Privacy policy , and worked with the university’s lawyers to change them for our institution’s needs.  We tried out the Terms of Service plugin that is only available on WPMU Dev Premium, but it didn’t do what we wanted so we had to write our own. This means that users have to agree to the Terms of Service at the time they create their blog.

6. Offer lots of themes . The beauty of WordPress is how versatile it is, so lots of themes to create different types of websites is essential. This also allows our community to learn about how to customise their digital presence. This was made easier by downloading the Farms 100 big ones theme pack . This is a bunch of WPMU themes originally tested and installed at Edublogs.org . We wrote our own custom plugin to add the same footer to every blog. (more in the plugins section below ). We also created six different “university branded” themes that were approved by our Public Relations department.

7. Be clear when the blogging platform should be used. The first step to setting up a blog on the platform is to  decide Should your blog be part of Murdoch Blogs? This is what I tell users:

It is not always sensible to host you blog on Murdoch Blogs. Sometimes it is essential that you do host it here. Below is an outline of when it makes sense and when it doesn’t.

WHEN NOT TO BLOG WITH MURDOCH BLOGS

1. Your blog is not just work/study related
2. You want ownership of it and to take it when you leave campus
3. You want to use the blog for “personal branding”.
4. The site is a “throw away” single use collaboration and you don’t mind the data being stored on a third party server
5. You want to share access with someone without a MAIS login
6. You want to customize the look and features more than the university can provide.

WHEN TO BLOG WITH MURDOCH BLOGS

1. You are required to use a blog as part of your job/study
2. Your data needs to be on University servers for ethical or business reasons
3. If the intellectual property created belongs to the university
4. If it is essential to have a murdoch.edu.au web address
5. If students need to access it without using up internet QUOTA
6. If you don’t have the skill or time to evaluate third party hosting options
7. You want to set it so that only someone with a MAIS login can read it
8. You want to use your MAIS login to access it
9. You want a system that *may* be able to integrate with other information systems of the University
10. The blog is not based on a specific Course Unit and the very basic blog facility of the Learning Management System is not sufficient
11. You are concerned about Terms of Service on third party sites

HOSTING OPTIONS

There are three places to host your blog:

1. On a third party “get a blog” service where blogs are set up and  maintained on a web site. These are good for the beginner blogger. You can make quite a few changes to the look and functions of the blog, but generally these more limited than if you hosted the blog yourself.

Useful sites to get a blog are:

• blogger
• wordpress.com
• edublogs.org

2. Buy web hosting and control your own installation. This is useful if you want to control all your data and customise your blog intricately. Many hosting services cost around $100 a year and have “one click” installations for blogs. You do have to have some technical knowledge.

3. Have your blog hosted by the University as part of Murdoch University blogs.

8. Choose minimum number of plugins . No matter how careful you are, plugins can break during upgrades or conflict with each other.

With WordPress MU, there are two levels of plugins.  Plugins in the MU-plugins directory are switched on for all blogs and cannot be switched off. Plugins in the plugins directory can be switched on by the administrator of each blog.

Here are the plugins that we ended up using:

Installation wide – in MU-plugins directory

1. In-house authentication integration plugin
2. In-house footer plugin – puts at the bottom of each blog
   1. Links to Akismet and “Blog with WordPress” – a condition of being granted an Akismet license
   2. Links to Legal Terms and Conditions and Privacy conditions
   3. Links to the root blog, dashboard and login to the system – for easy navigation
3. Creative Commons plugin – puts a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia license in the blog footer by default and allows user to select a different license if required
4. Privacy Options – adds three extra options to the Settings > Privacy options . Extra options are
   1. All users on the blogging platform
   2. Registered subscribers to the blog
   3. Only admins
5. Ada Active Blogs – lets you add a widget to the sidebar showing the blogs with the most posts
6. Ada New Blogs – lets you add a widget to the sidebar showing the most recently added blogs on the installation
7. Ada Updated Blogs - lets you add a widget to the sidebar showing the blogs with the most recent posts
8. Akismet - spam protection. Needed to get a wordpress.com API key and also email wordpress.com in the way specified to get permission to use it in the institution as a non-profit.
9. Anarchy media player – detects links to media like audio files and embeds a player in posts
10. Allow Embedded Videos – allows users to embed YouTube, Flickr and Google videos
11. List-All – Creates a list of all the blogs on the installation
12. WYSIWYG print - creates a neater, tidier printout of a page for *most* themes.
13. Default Theme – allows the installation administrator to set a specific theme as the default for all new blogs

Administrators can switch on for individual blogs – plugins directory

1. Add RSS – allows you to manually add an RSS feed (eg. a Twitter feed)  that can be autodetected by Firefox or other web browsers
2. FireStats – comprehensive statistics package that includes a widget for popular posts. Will only count statistics for posts created after the plugin in enabled
3. Photo Dropper – adds a box to the bottom of page/post editor that allows you to search for a term and then automatically embed and attribute a Creative Commons licensed Flickr image on that topic.
4. Sociable – adds links to popular social bookmarking sites
5. Subscribe To Comments – lets users subscribe to further comments on any single post
6. WordPress Video Plugin – a filter to allow embed of media from many different sites by using a specified code in the guidance
7. Spam Karma 2 – spam blocker that is no longer supported, but adds a little more protection
8. Unfiltered MU – this is a better alternative than WordPress Video Plugin or Allow Embedded Videos . It allows the administrator to let users embed javascript in posts

The following extra plugins in the plugins directory were requested by a user. I probably wouldn’t have included them otherwise. One of them slows down how quickly the individual blog loads, but I haven’t had a chance to isolate which

1. Authors Widget – allows one to add a widget that lists authors
2. Page Blocks – allows widgets to be added to the right or left , top or bottom of a page
3. Snap Shots™ Plugin for WordPress.org – allows users to preview a screenshot of a link. It has advertising links as part of the window, some that link to our competitors
4. Subscribe2 – emails new posts to specified address
5. TinyMCE Advanced – expands the functionality of the visual editor for writing pages and posts