{"id":1250,"date":"2009-08-10T00:40:13","date_gmt":"2009-08-09T16:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/?p=1250"},"modified":"2009-08-10T00:40:13","modified_gmt":"2009-08-09T16:40:13","slug":"setting-up-a-wordpress-mu-blogging-platform-for-a-university-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/librariansmatter.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/10\/setting-up-a-wordpress-mu-blogging-platform-for-a-university-community\/","title":{"rendered":"Setting up a WordPress MU blogging platform for a university community"},"content":{"rendered":"

I set up a WordPress MU installation for all staff and students at our university campus<\/a>. 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\u00a0 blogs – experimental and active – on it at the moment.<\/p>\n

Here are some decisions we made.<\/p>\n

1. Build evaluation into the pilot.<\/em><\/strong> 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\u00a0 had not been supported, this would have been valuable data to have.<\/p>\n

2. Document decisions, responsibilities and actions using a wiki.<\/em><\/strong> This was essential, particularly when a key member of the team left the institution three months after the project started.<\/p>\n

3. Integrate with campus authentication.<\/em><\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

4. Release all blog content under a Creative Commons license<\/em> .<\/strong> I stole this idea from the blogging platform at the Harvard Law School<\/a> . We customised the WpLicense plugin from the Creative Commons foundation<\/a> . We changed it so that the default license is a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia<\/a> 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\u00a0 a traditional Copyright license too.<\/p>\n

\"MUB\"<\/a><\/p>\n

5. Legal and privacy conditions.<\/em><\/strong> Again, I stole our Blogs – Legal Terms and Conditions<\/a> and Blogs – Privacy Provisions<\/a> from the Harvard Law School’s\u00a0 blogging platform Terms, Conditions and Privacy policy <\/a>, and worked with the university’s lawyers to change them for our institution’s needs.\u00a0 We tried out the Terms of Service plugin<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

6. Offer lots of themes <\/em>.<\/strong> 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 <\/a>. This is a bunch of WPMU themes originally tested and installed at Edublogs.org<\/a> . 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.<\/p>\n

7. Be clear when the blogging platform should be used.<\/em><\/strong> The first step to setting up a blog on the platform is to\u00a0 decide Should your blog be part of Murdoch Blogs? <\/a> This is what I tell users:<\/p>\n

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\u2019t.<\/p>\n

WHEN NOT TO BLOG WITH MURDOCH BLOGS<\/h3>\n
    \n
  1. Your blog is not just work\/study related<\/li>\n
  2. You want ownership of it and to take it when you leave campus<\/li>\n
  3. You want to use the blog for \u201cpersonal branding\u201d.<\/li>\n
  4. The site is a \u201cthrow away\u201d single use collaboration and you don\u2019t mind the data being stored on a third party server<\/li>\n
  5. You want to share access with someone without a MAIS login<\/li>\n
  6. You want to customize the look and features more than the university can provide.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    WHEN TO BLOG WITH MURDOCH BLOGS<\/h3>\n
      \n
    1. You are required to use a blog as part of your job\/study<\/li>\n
    2. Your data needs to be on University servers for ethical or business reasons<\/li>\n
    3. If the intellectual property created belongs to the university<\/li>\n
    4. If it is essential to have a murdoch.edu.au web address<\/li>\n
    5. If students need to access it without using up internet QUOTA<\/li>\n
    6. If you don\u2019t have the skill or time to evaluate third party hosting options<\/li>\n
    7. You want to set it so that only someone with a MAIS login can read it<\/li>\n
    8. You want to use your MAIS login to access it<\/li>\n
    9. You want a system that *may* be able to integrate with other information systems of the University<\/li>\n
    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<\/li>\n
    11. You are concerned about Terms of Service on third party sites<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      HOSTING OPTIONS<\/h3>\n

      There are three places to host your blog:<\/p>\n

      1. On a third party \u201cget a blog\u201d service where blogs are set up and\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

      Useful sites to get a blog are:<\/p>\n