Alex Nolan - the weblog

Just a post to test BlogDesk, an offline multiblog posting program for Windows that seems to have a lot of potential.

More after the break…

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Ok I’ve had some time to continue development of our intranet site at work, and I have to say the results have been really excellent. Wordpress United was finally released last wekend, and it’s every bit as good as it promised to be. I appreciate that it might be getting hard to track what I’m using and not using now so I’ll break it down:

• Wordpress 2.3 alpha trunk build (using SVN so it gets updated constantly).
• A post RC2 version of phpbb3. If you don’t know phpbb well, it’s not as fun to use as Wordpress, since phpbb mods are actual modifications to the code, not plugins. Therefore, I’m stuck with my current version of the code until I upgrade and reapply all the mods.
• Active Directory phpbb authentication.
• WP-United 0.51. Any time a logged in phpbb user goes to the Wordpress page, it logs them in there too. It also handles embedding the templates, cross system plugins, widgets, style sheet priority, user blogging permissions and many other things.
• NextGen Gallery. This is a fairly straightforward embedded gallery plugin for Wordpress. I really wanted to stay as lightweight as possible for this one as its initial task is simply to replicate and augment a staff photo gallery using modern technology.
• Phpbb3 Portal. The developers of this front end for phpbb3 have made a very good effort considering the constraints that the system has. You have to do a lot of hacking around to get things a) working, and b) looking good, but the results are a powerful block based portal. I particularly like a dynamic tabbed RSS block I hacked together from code at StaticFX.
• Simple Syndication. This is a phpbb3 mod which syndicates the entire bulletin board in RSS feeds on a per forum basis. It’s really powerful but I suspect it doesn’t parse bbcode tags correctly, which will cause a few issues when I try and syndicate news directly into users’ Outlook mailboxes.
• AskPeople. This is a separate project I’ve been working on, which happens to have a beautifully integrated style. We’re hoping to use this initially for performing staff surveys, but eventually for wider customer ones. It’s really cool and very easy to quickly put something powerful together.

Anyway, that’s an overview of the technologies I’ve been using. The front page of the intranet is the WP blog. Our Newsperson will blog to that and keep the masses informed. The rogues’ gallery and a bunch of other static pages exist as links from the front page. Other than that I’ve kept things very similar to how they were. The intranet content is still using ‘activemedia’ and the bulletin board is still accessed via the front page and probably will be completely ignored. However, I feel quite positive about the whole thing - the implementation has gone so well that surely there’ll now be an uptake for it….

I’ve been working for about a month now on a project to improve communication in the organisation. It came about because I was pretty badly offended at a new ‘idea’ that had been thrust upon us during some messy politics that were going on. I won’t go into that just now but the idea was to have an IT Newsletter distributed around the organisation to tell staff what’s going on. It was to be pure propaganda, with a complete absence of useful information, and I hated it.

Instead I did some very quick thinking and came up with a plan. I used some of the theories about Organisational Learning (OL) I’ve been reading about in my OU work this semester. These told me I should try to consider how best to a) facilitate the ability to impart explicit knowledge to other staff members, and b) create an environment where free discourse is understood and encouraged. High minded ideals indeed!

Initially I got interested in Wordpress Mu. Once set up, it’s pretty much as good as regular WP (although a few versions behind) and highly scalable. Unfortunately I had serious issues with implementing it on a Windows server, and of course Wordpress’s MySQL heritage makes things awkward.

Then all of a sudden phpbb3 RC1 was released. Regardless of the Wordpress situation, the forums have been in desperate need of upgrades for years now. What’s more, phpbb3 has built in LDAP support, so users can log in with their Windows passwords. So the final project has grown out of that more than anything.

The current situation is very rosy. I’ve got the new forums mirroring the functionality and content of the old ones, but by adding an RSS mod I’ve opened the way up for much freer flow of information. phpbbportal is installed as a front page Portal, which uses RSS feeds from departmental forums to publish news in a tabbed layout. Next on my list I need a photo wall type thing. I might just use the standard member list for this, and upload each user’s photo as their avatar (and limit maximum display size).

Finally wp-united gets released this month, a plugin which integrates Wordpress and phpbb completely, allowing multiple blogs. I intend to trial this out with an IT Services blog, and depending on how it goes, there could be justification for using it more widely.

I feel that although I’ve done a lot of work here, I’ve become more conservative with the project as it’s gone on. There’s a lot of sense in this - the users can barely grasp the concept of a forum, never mind a blog, so the more I can allow them to do within their current means the better.

I’ll come back to this with some updates and more general comments later, I just wanted to get this written down for now.