16 Time-Saving WordPress Multisite Plugins for Managing Your Network |
- 16 Time-Saving WordPress Multisite Plugins for Managing Your Network
- How to Automatically Remove Links from WordPress Images
- Major Changes in the Use of WordPress in Education
- WordPress Plugin Developers – Showcase Your Wares!
- Be Ready For Offline
- WordPress 3.4 Out Next Week
- Daily Tip: Get the Responsive Design Bookmarklet for Website Design Testing
| 16 Time-Saving WordPress Multisite Plugins for Managing Your Network Posted: 07 Jun 2012 10:00 AM PDT Managing a very active multisite network can be fairly intense and time-consuming. Between answering user support emails and troubleshooting network issues, you also have to keep the core and all the plugins updated and in working order. Here are 16 plugins just released this year that will save you tons of time in managing your WordPress multisite network. Grab a cup of coffee and install all of your new favorites. Class Blogs
Download PluginAP Gravatars
Download PluginApproval Workflow
Download PluginNetwork Shared Media
Download PluginMultisite TOS
Download PluginSubsite Theme Activator
Download PluginMU Manage Comments Plugin
Download PluginAkismet Wedge for MU Plugin
Download PluginBBG Record Blog Roles Changes
Download PluginBlog Copier
Download PluginDead Blogs
Download PluginMultisite Robots.txt Manager
Download PluginTuKod MultiSite Site Names
Download PluginWP Changes Tracker
Download PluginMove to SubsiteThis new plugin lets you move posts in a category and/or a page hierarchy to a subsite, while Download PluginNetwork Plugin Auditor
Download PluginRelated posts:
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| How to Automatically Remove Links from WordPress Images Posted: 07 Jun 2012 09:00 AM PDT
If you happen to be one that doesn't, then there's a quick and simple fix to this issue. You can place the following code (found at stackexchange) in your functions.php file. (Appearance > Editor > Theme Functions – functions.php) add_filter( 'the_content', 'attachment_image_link_remove_filter' ); function attachment_image_link_remove_filter( $content ) { $content = preg_replace( array('{<a(.*?)(wp-att|wp-content\/uploads)[^>]*><img}', '{ wp-image-[0-9]*" /></a>}'), array('<img','" />'), $content ); return $content; } And that's it. If you would like to make your own simple plugin for this task, you can learn how to do that here. Photo: Broken Chain from BigStock Related posts:
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| Major Changes in the Use of WordPress in Education Posted: 07 Jun 2012 08:43 AM PDT I was first introduced to the world of WordPress in 2008 when I was looking for a good way to build a website for a math course I was teaching. My school offered an archaic website solution and, though I don’t remember why, I first tried out both Drupal and Joomla.
Today, I have the best job in the world in that I get to work with educators around the world using WordPress over on Edublogs. We host well over a million blogs for education, and we also do expert hosting of private Multisite networks for hundreds of schools and universities with what we call Edublogs Campus. How WordPress Is UsedTraditionally, we’ve seen three main ways that WordPress is being leveraged by educators and students: Class BlogsExactly like what I originally wanted to do. A web presence to share daily info with students (and parents). Here are a couple of examples: Example #1 | Example #2 Professional BlogsSee Larry Ferlazzo’s blog for what I mean here. Practicing educators share tips, ideas, and resources with others in the field. Blogs (along with twitter) have facilitated powerful connections for many. See how to build a Personal Learning Network for more. Student BlogsHere’s a list of 30 excellent student blogs from many different locations and age groups. Students often blog as part of class requirements – improving writing, critical thinking, and technology skills. What major changes are happening?You’ll notice that the three most common uses of WordPress have historically all been for blogging. But, just as we see a parallel shift outside of education with the increased use of WordPress as a powerful CMS, we’re also finding more and more creative ways of classroom and school use. For example: School WebsitesIn just the past few months, we’ve migrated over several schools’ entire websites to our WordPress Multisite hosting environment. Administrators love the ease of use for posting new content, and the technical teams like that we manage all hosting and support for often much cheaper than what can be done locally ;) ePortfoliosMany schools and universities are adding student (and even staff) portfolio requirements. Electronic portfolios built in WordPress can travel with their owners wherever they may end up and are a fantastic way of keeping archives of work, thoughts, and sharing videos and other media. Perhaps the best resource out there for implementing ePortfolios is from Dr. Helen Barrett, which can be found here. News PublicationsFor the same reasons that print media is on the decline in the real world, many student-ran newspapers are going fully online. We host tons of student publications. Moderation tools are popular so that editors or school officials can approve all content before it is live. CollaborationUsing themes like P2 and advanced privacy settings, many are turning to WordPress to create private collaborative spaces for professional development, project planning, and more. We know of one major university that does all of its budget planning right on a blog! What’s next?There are tons of other ways we see WordPress in action in the education space on a daily basis. BuddyPress is growing in popularity and there are quite a few handy education related plugins in the repository. If you’re interested in keeping up with more, we regularly post blogging tips and news for educators over on TheEdublogger.com. Do you have any WordPress in education resources or examples to share? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below! Credit: Image School Bus by BigStock Related posts:
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| WordPress Plugin Developers – Showcase Your Wares! Posted: 07 Jun 2012 07:00 AM PDT
I also happen to be a big fan of irony, which is why I like the rather clumsily-named WPORG Repo Plugins…plugin. The idea of a plugin developer using a plugin to showcase their plugins amuses me. But then perhaps I am easily amused. That shouldn’t however detract from the fact that this plugin will actually be rather useful for plenty of developers – and for WordPress fans in general. Its functionality is simple enough – it will return a list of any particular developer’s plugins (as listed on WordPress.org) in a widget. So rather than manually listing your plugins, it takes care of it dynamically, as such:  Dodgy tartan-style background optional. You can list plugins from any developer, so this potentially holds value to anyone interested in WordPress plugins. Listing your favorite’s developers plugin is made easy. What makes WPORG Repo Plugins even handier is that you can customize exactly what information is displayed via shortcodes: It would be nice to see further functionality, such as the ability to sort plugins by number of downloads and/or ratings, and the ability to list plugins via a shortcode with posts and pages. A version for theme developers would be good too. Download WPORG Repo Plugins here. Creative Commons image courtesy of christian.senger Related posts:
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| Posted: 07 Jun 2012 07:00 AM PDT The worst just happened, my internet went down. As in down for hours, not minutes, and no reprieve in sight. This points to obvious holes in my workflow towards some clients at Odd Alice, necessary holes in all but one cases, but holes nonetheless. You see I prefer to develop on a live server. For most sites that's not a problem, you won't destroy things with your code if you're careful and keep your development install separate from the public one. Some projects are unsuited for this, possibly because faulty code could kill the server or something, I don't know, I'm just saying it so that you'll be cautious. All that aside, developing on a live server when the internet is down is pretty hard. That's why I keep local copies, as up to date as I can be bothered to. Ideally all these should be in svn or git, making them always up to date, but we're transitioning now so all that stuff isn't setup for the optimal workflow. Man, do I regret that now, writing this column on my iPhone at a very quiet office. The lesson is this: Be ready for offline so that you won't lose any work time. Got it? Good. Then I can get back to work, because I've already learned this lesson the hard way, despite whatever I wrote above. I just took this opportunity to procrastinate a bit, and tell you a story I wish I had heard before. Now if only I could publish this column… Photo by photosteve101 (CC) Related posts:
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| Posted: 06 Jun 2012 09:56 PM PDT RC2 for WordPress 3.4 is out and in the wild. According to Nacin, we should expect a release early next week – perhaps Tuesday. By all accounts the latest release of our favorite semantic personal publishing software shoudl include:
There’s a bunch of links here to items that various folk have written up. So, hold onto your horses y’all and enjoy the 3.4 goodness, all in time for your summer (or, for me, winter) holidays. Related posts:
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| Daily Tip: Get the Responsive Design Bookmarklet for Website Design Testing Posted: 06 Jun 2012 02:27 PM PDT If you need to do some quick responsive design testing, check out the Responsive Design Bookmarklet. It’s a quick tool that you can use from your desktop to test any website’s responsiveness. Add the Responsive Design Bookmarklet to your bookmarks so that you can click on it from any website. You’ll get a toolbar at the top with buttons for different screen resolutions. Here are some extra cool feature of the bookmarklet:
To install the Responsive Design Bookmarklet, simply drag the button in the middle of the page to your bookmarks toolbar. Visit any web page and then click on your bookmarklet to launch it. Related posts:
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Class Blogs is a plugin that simplifies the process of blogging as a class by making it easier to find, organize and analyze the work created by students. It comes with teacher admin pages, student admin pages, themes and tons of widgets to show recent student posts and comments.
AP Gravatars is a simple plugin that adds a user’s gravatar to his profile page. If the user does not have a gravatar account, the plugin will display a link to create one. It’s multisite-compatible so that you can use it across your network.
This plugin creates a workflow approval process within WordPress. If a user doesn’t have permission to publish a post, an email is sent to one of the approvers when a post is submitted to be published. It also works within multisite so that sub-sites can take advantage of the approval workflow as well.
Network Shared Media is a very useful plugin that lets you access media across the network through a new tab in the media library. This can be very convenient if you find yourself posting to multiple blogs or simply want to make a set of images or documents available to other users.
This plugin adds a Terms of Service agreement field on the multisite signup form, similar to the wordpress.com TOS field. It also supports localization so you can add your language file.
This plugin is designed for use in multisite networks where the same theme is used across all sites. After you have network enabled a new theme, you’ll get a new option to “Subsite Activate” the theme, which will apply it to every subsite on your network. This is very useful if you have lots of sites and don’t want to manually change each site’s active theme.
This plugin provides a wedge between multisite and Akismet by globalizing the Akismet API key so it can be used across blogs. Multisite network blogs can then use the Akismet API key without having to configure each blog or edit any PHP files.
This plugin records all changes in user blog roles (wp_x_capabalities usermeta) across an entire WordPress installation. It can be a lifesaver to have installed if you find yourself having to troubleshoot mysterious role changes within your multisite network.
Blog Copier is a very handy plugin for multisite network admins. It enables you to copy a blog, including all its widgets, template settings and more. You can elect to copy or not copy the files. GUIDs and URLs in post contents are automatically migrated for you so you don’t have to manually change anything!
The Dead Blogs plugin lets you filter blogs, based on specific criteria in order to sort out which blogs are dead. You can locate the blogs by when they were last updated, number of posts, number of pages, or whether or not the blog uses the default theme.
Multisite Robots.txt Manager lets you manage all Network Websites robots.txt files directly within the Network Admin. Each Website within the network is able to have a unique robots.txt file. You can also instantly add Sitemaps URLs to all network websites and mass update the entire Network or individual site.
TuKod MultiSite Site Names overrides the normal restrictions that WordPress places on site names. This plugin gives you expanded site name choices in the multisite sign-up process. It enables you to use dashes (-), dots(.), tildes (~), underscores (_), capitals (A-Z) and even change the minimum length. 
WP Changes Tracker is a very useful plugin that logs changes made to your WordPress structure: core, network, plugins and options. In the near future it will also log changes to themes. These logs are only available to the network admin when used in multisite.
implementing seamless redirects. You can actually move content to another site on your WordPress network with a single click.
This is a plugin that nearly every WordPress multisite installation can benefit from. It adds columns to your network admin to show which sites are using each plugin and theme. It will help you know which plugins and themes are in use and which can be safely removed without affecting your subsites.
Sarah Gooding on Google+
All I wanted was a quick and easy way to post notes, videos, and assignments for my students – and provide parents and students an easy way to subscribe to new posts by email.
As you will already know if you’re a regular reader of my posts here on WPMU, I’ve rarely got a bad thing to say about free WordPress plugin developers. If it weren’t for these selfless folk, 
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