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Thanks to a tip from David Esrati (who I’m not going to link to from this post because I’m taunting spammers and don’t want to inflict collateral damage on him), I’m testing out WP-SpamFree which is a really interesting antispam plugin for WordPress. I’ve used Akismet and Mollom before, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with externally hosted antispam systems. For some reason, I’m just not completely comfortable with relying on another server for this. I’d used Spam Karma 2 with great success, but since that went defunct I abandoned it as well.

Now, WP-SpamFree seems to offer an intelligent antispam system without relying on external servers or blacklists. I’m giving it a shot. So far, it’s been pretty successful.

Let’s see how well it does. Bring it.

I spend a depressing amount of time cleaning up after Microsoft. Specifically, cleaning up the “helpful” HTML code generated by MS Word and/or Internet Exploder on Windows when people copy content from MS Word and paste it into a WYSIWYG editor in Internet Explorer. Helpful, in that it tries (and fails so spectacularly that it boggles my mind how such a “feature” was designed) and more often than not completely borks whatever website is the unsuspecting recipient of the control-V-of-death.

I’m not going to tell people not to use MS Word. It’s what people use. Trying to get them to switch to anything else would be tilting at windmills. People use Word.

I’m not going to tell people not to use Internet Explorer. I don’t use it. Nobody I work with uses it. But people do – most often, it’s people who don’t really know what a “browser” is, or that there are options, or that IE is a dangerous beast. They use IE. Fine.

But… I just found a plugin for WordPress that should at least mitigate the damage of the Word/IE duopoly.

Here’s an example. I just worked up a simple document in Word. It’s pretty fantastic. I’m proud of it. Teacher will give me an A+, for sure. It looks like this:

It’s a work of art. Now, I copy the contents of that fantastic piece of literature, and hit control-C to copy it. I switch over to Internet Explorer, and paste it into the Visual editor on a WordPress site. And it looks kinda like hell. The source code of the pasted content looks like this:

WTF? MsoNormal? margins? font-size and font-family? For the love of Xenu, why do you bork my content like this? Now, most people just see the result and say “Man, does WordPress suck. I’m not going to use THAT again.” – they don’t realize that it’s Word/IE that’s borking their content, and that it would be equally borked on any web-based content management system that offers a visual wysiwyg editor.

So, after activating the plugin, pasting the same content from my most awesome Word Document into the Visual editor of a WordPress site generates code like this:

It’s not perfect, but it’s cleaner. Some of the formatting won’t be exactly what was in the MS Word document, but that’s probably for the better. Apparently, if I used proper styles to define Headings in my document, it would convert them to h1/h2/etc… in the pasted markup. Ahhh… much better.

If you’re using WordPress with people that are using MS Word and/or Internet Explorer, get the plugin. You’ll be doing them a favour, and saving yourself some grief.

The group of WPMU rockstars at UBC’s OLT just whipped up a fantastic new plugin for administrators of a WPMU site to get a feel for the growth of the community. It generates a graph to display growth in numbers of blog posts and comments over time, and uses the Google Data Visualization API to let you interactively define data ranges to be graphed.

Here’s the growth of UCalgaryBlogs.ca graphed for the last 2 semesters:

Another fantastic job by the OLT blogging platform crew. Now, to just add users and pages, and it’ll be perfect…

I just pushed the latest version of the WP-Sentry plugin out to general use on UCalgaryBlogs.ca – any site can now enable it to have the ability to create groups and to set the audience for posts and pages. A site admin can create groups and put members of the site into any number of groups – which can also be hierarchically arranged – and then the members can decide who should be allowed to see the posts that they publish.

A workgroup could post updates that only group members can see (so a flood of group meeting notes doesn’t flood a blogsite used in a class of 300 students), or students could write posts on sensitive topics without worrying about it leaking out onto the open internet and into their permanent record.

The plugin is very well designed, and is easy to use. I’m going to be setting up a few sites using it as a means of managing information flow within large classes. One nice feature of the plugin is that it gives the ability to select multiple groups as the audience for a post, and to add individual member access, so you could invite someone in to view content without granting them full group member status. Very nice.

So far, the only suggestion that I could think to make would be some way to provide a list of groups (a group directory page) that links to a page listing content published in a given group – a group home page.

I know there are people for whom the idea of “private” blogging makes them break out in hives. But there are valid cases for providing safe places for students to publish content without worrying about public exposure, and this is a fantastic solution to that problem.

Update: It hit me, shortly after hitting “Publish” on this post, that the WP-Sentry plugin would be a perfect fit for the other plugin I’m playing with – WordPress-Wiki – which allows for wiki editing of pages and posts by members of a WordPress site, but without needing to delve into geeky MediaWiki syntax. It tracks revisions, allows diffing of changes between revisions, and generates the table of contents based on the headings in the content in the same way that MediaWiki does. All the fun of wiki, without the geeky stuff or pain.

WP-Sentry + WordPress-Wiki, when combined, would let people create private (or public, or any variant in between) wikis for workgroups, as part of their regular blog or website publishing workflow. No extra software to learn, no new syntax, no new jargon. Just an extra couple of checkboxes and widgets to twiddle when publishing a post to determine who gets to see the thing, and whether it should be wiki. Very cool stuff, and it could become a powerful tool as part of a course blogsite.

Following a thread through some blog posts this morning – I started at The Reverend’s post about Martha’s documentation of her hacking on WPMU, including a description of a WordPress plugin I hadn’t heard of before – Flutter.

Damn. The Rev’s gonna love this.

One of the things I LOVE about Drupal is the fantastic CCK plugin that lets me create compound structured content types without hacking the database or writing code. Things like Events. Profiles. Pretty much anything that can be stored as database records.

Flutter appears to do most of what I use CCK for. It’s a bit of a hack on top of WordPress’s custom fields design, but whatever. I really don’t care how it works under the hood. It works. And it’s really nice. You can create any number of custom content types, groups that can contain any number of fields – and the fields can be simple text strings, long text chunks, images, audio, dates… Very cool.

So far, the only thing I’ve found really missing from what I use in CCK is the idea of linking nodes (or posts or pages – I haven’t seen a way to select a page or post as a field in another – but that’s not fatal – tags and categories can make up for some of that).

I’ll be playing with Flutter over the next few weeks. I think this might go a LONG way to implementing some of the things I’ve been thinking about wrt WordPress as a course blogging and publishing platform – WITHOUT HAVING TO WRITE CODE.

I love that. Thanks to Martha and Jim for the heads up on Flutter!

Update: doh. Looks like Flutter does some unpleasant things to the main Write Post interface as well – it was wrapping this post to a set width, making it look ickyier than usual. hrm…

yeah. definitely not quite ready for prime time. but still, something worth keeping a close eye on. this could really make some interesting things possible with wordpress…

Update 2: the evil russian spammers seem to REALLY like this post, so I’ve closed comments. Sorry. stupid russian spammers…

I got word back from Akismet that using it on UCalgaryBlogs.ca to protect all of the blogs hosted there falls under the free license, despite the wording on their website that suggests it’s an enterprise use. This means I’m now able to protect all blogs on the service with Akismet, without requiring a Captcha challenge.

The current version of the Akismet plugin for WordPress installs just fine in the mu-plugins directory, meaning each blog automatically gets protected, without any configuration or setup. The Akismet key can be hardcoded into the plugin file, and when that is done, all configuration interface magically disappears from the wp-admin interface. Easy peasy.

All that was required by Akismet was that I provide a link from each blog to Akismet.com to give credit for the spam protection. I wrote up a VERY simple mu-plugin to automatically insert the text and link in the footer of each blog on UCalgaryBlogs.ca.

I’m curious to see how well Akismet functions on some of the topics of conversation – some post colonial courses commonly use language that trips up word filters pretty readily…

I’d missed the news, but the latest version of the Akismet plugin for WordPress includes some tasty stats. As with all things statistical, there’s a few ways to read the numbers, and there are some anomalies (ferinstance, it claims I had a few days of over 1000 ham i.e., valid comments per day and that’s just plain wrong) but the spam stats feel roughly right. They’re not dramatically different from what I was seeing under Mollom, except nobody gets inflicted with Captcha using Akismet.

WordPress has supported Gravatars for awhile, which is great, but if you’re rolling out a site for a bunch of students to hammer on, it’s not ideal to have to send them to a third party service to set up photos. It’s awkward, and confusing, for new users to have to go somewhere else to add a photo to their profile. And profile photos can be very useful, especially at the beginning of a semester when everyone is just getting to know everyone else in a class, to put a face to a name.

So, for UCalgaryBlogs.ca, I just installed the handy User Photo plugin. Now, any site can enable this, and the users of that site will be able to add photos to their profiles, like this:

The plugin can be configured with custom sizes for the full-size and thumb versions of the avatar, and the avatar image can be deleted and/or replaced at any time.

It’s not completely trivial to enable – because the themes need to be User Photo aware. That’s pretty easy to add, though. For the cutline theme we’re using on a project, I edited a handful of files to add the code, and it works great. On index.php, and single.php, just add this wherever you want the blog author’s photo to be displayed on the post (I put it in the section displaying the post meta information):

<?php if (function_exists('userphoto_the_author_thumbnail')) {  userphoto_the_author_thumbnail();}?>

Wrapping the thumbnail display code in a function_exists conditional means it will degrade nicely if the plugin is unavailable. Always a good thing to degrade instead of borking.

That results in this display when viewing the post:

Now, if you also want to show avatars on the comments, just edit comments.php to add this code (I put it in the comment meta info section):

<?php if (function_exists('userphoto_comment_author_thumbnail')) { userphoto_comment_author_thumbnail();}?>

And that will look like this when displayed on the blog:

If a user hasn’t added an avatar, it won’t display any image. But if they do have one, they’ll get the properly sized version of their avatar image displayed automatically. Easy peasy. It’s a bit awkward having to edit the themes, but it’s not difficult. The hard part will be remembering to re-apply the edits if the themes get updated (hence this post…)

It’s been bugging me for awhile that comments have been quote-escaped for some time now. I did a quick Google search, and it looks like the WP-OpenID plugin is the culprit. I’ve disabled it, and it looks like the problem has gone away. I’ll test more later…

I was trying to be clever today, and installed the eAccelerator plugin for WordPress, as my CanadianWebHosting.com server offers eAccelerator built in. Thought it’d be handy to speed things up. Worked GREAT. At first. Then faceplant. Fail. 500 Internal Server Error. No more eAccelerator plugin on my blog…

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