The Smooth Elephant

The countdown to Faculty Academy 4.0 is ticking along. Recognizing that we wanted to document, document, document this event, we took a page from Penn State’s Teaching & Learning with Technology Symposium and set up our own conference blog. (Thanks to D’Arcy Norman for pointing out the Penn State example in the first place.)

In addition to the blog, we’re also posting additional conference information and resources (program, speaker bios, etc.). We’ve taken the plunge and left registration open on the site until the conference is over, so any attendee can sign up and add posts and content to the site.

We’re using WordPress as the engine, and I’ve spent the last few days tweaking the install and adding some critical plugins. It’s been a real education for me–learning how to trick out WordPress is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

One goal we had was to do some Flickr integration into the blog, so that conference attendees who upload photos to Flickr with the official conference tag can easily view those photos on the site and add them to posts.  Two great plugins by tan tan noodles have basically done the trick.  The flickr photo album plugin adds a “Photos” tab to the new upload box on the post page in WP 2.x. Since the plugin requires a user account to set it up and we’re interested in displaying photos not from one user but from all users using a particular tag, I had to trick the plugin a little. Basically, I created an empty Flickr account and used that to setup the plugin; then when users go to post, while they see no photos by default, they can easily change the options in the Photos tab to display those images tagged by any Flickr user with “facultyacademy2006.”

We’re using the Flickr DHTML Badge to display an animated block of facultyacademy2005- and facultyacademy2006-tagged photos in the blog sidebar. Interestingly, this plugin asks for a username, but we discovered if you leave it blank and just put in the tags you’re looking for, it works just the way we need.

We also decided that for this blog we wanted to deprecate WordPress categories, and instead encourage users to generate tags for posts. Ultimate Tag Warrior did the trick.  This is an amazingly powerful plugin. It requires a fair amount of under-the-hood work to capitalize on the more advanced features (displaying Tag Clouds, on-the-fly tag editing from the blog view, etc.), but, if you’re brave enough, it’s worth it.

Most of the rest of the work I’ve been doing has been tweaking the actual WP install. This kind of work makes me nervous since it sets us up for potential disaster if we ever have to upgrade the site, but I decided the changes I wanted to make were worth the risk. Most of these have to do with recognizing that we’re opening the blog up to any conference attendee to post–so an awareness of usability needs to be there that I wouldn’t necessarily have on my own blog.  One example: Since we’re going with tags instead of categories, I wanted to remove any reference to categories that authors might see (to avoid confusion). On my own blog, this wouldn’t be a concern since I’d just learn to ignore the categories option. But, we want people to be able to post to the blog with a minimal amount of confusion and the least amount of one-on-one support.  So, I edited the post editor to comment out the “Categories” box.

Like I said, all of this has been a great education in customizing WordPress, and I have some pretty serious ideas about how this could be relevant to what we’re doing with blogging for teaching and learning. . .