The Wharton Magazine Blog has won an award! We’re the 2011 CASE II Accolades Award Bronze Award winner for the Blogs category (awards will be posted by the end of the year).
Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category
Go Live: Wharton Blog Network
By Paul Bagosy - September 20th, 2010This site actually went live around a month ago, but I’m just getting around to the write-up. I’m not sure what took me so long, considering I now have something to show to the public that has the Wharton name on it!
The Wharton Magazine site itself is running RedDot CMS, but the blog segment has been running on WordPress for around two years. In its previous incarnation, it was a point of contact for the editorial staff. This concept was expanded to include relevant non-magazine article updates from faculty and alumni.
In the initial concept phase, I suggested the possibility of using WordPress MU to create a new blog for each user and then having the main blog page aggregate the posts. Within a few days of that proposal, WordPress 3.0 was released, and after a review of the features, I decided that the robust multi-user setup was actually too much bang for the buck and scaled back my proposal to a simpler WordPress installation with multiple contributing users.
Most of the functionality comes straight from the proverbial box. I developed a simple plugin for the sidebar in order to display the editor’s most recent post in a styled box. There is also a custom work-around to allow a specific author’s most recent posts and user profile to be two separate pages. User profile pages is one of the things that I wish WordPress did a bit better, but the solution I came up with is fairly simple to use but not very intuitive, so I wouldn’t recommend it as a good solution.
Going forward, I’d love to spend some time playing with the Contributors section on the sidebar. As it stands, it’s simply a text widget that I’ve hard coded. I’d like to expand that into an automated widget that the administrator (which at the moment is me) can control from the back end.
New WordPress Widgets
By Paul Bagosy - July 25th, 2010Having been kicking around the exciting world of installing and customizing WordPress, I felt it was high time I launched myself into the even more exciting world of developing for WordPress. And here’s what I’ve come up with:
Both of these are widgets that do basically the same thing, so I’ll describe them together here.
In developing the new Wharton Magazine blog, we needed a widget to display the Editor’s most recent post. I poked around for a bit, and realized that there really wasn’t a plugin to handle this, so the need for one was obvious. After getting the basics down, I decided that it actually had more applications than just a single post, and started adding features.
So, the end result is two widgets. Enter a title, select the user/category you want to display, enter the number of posts to display, and select if you want to display a link to the user/category and the time and date. Not complicated to use and does just what it says it does.
Before I release it to the WordPress Plugins Codex, I’d like to see if anyone wants a shot at debugging or can offer any tips or suggestions. Files are at the links above, and thanks in advance!
WordPress 3.0
By Paul Bagosy - June 30th, 2010I’m getting really drawn into WordPress and all its wonderful functionality, especially with the release of 3.0. I retooled the back end of this site to run on WordPress MU a few months ago, because I run a few separate blogs and am in the process of expanding that for family members.
I was happy to see that WordPress merged the base and MU codebases into one, fully-functional software package. The upgrade wasn’t as smooth as I’d have liked it, but I guess they figure that if you’ve managed to install and maintain MU, you shouldn’t have a problem editing PHP and .htaccess files on your own (as opposed to automating what boils down to three lines of code). Stupid me misread one of the steps and wound up with no images displaying sitewide for 24 hours, and wondering if I was going to have to re-import all of them. Once I figured out my mistake, though, the problem seemed pretty trivial. Other than that, installing and upgrading are remarkably simple.
WordPress has been getting better and better for the end user and administrator since I began using it about two years ago, and now that I’ve begun really getting into the heart of it, I’m really glad that the development has gone toward all of those things that I wish it did. It’s like they’re reading my mind!
So, on the horizon are three projects that I’d love to tackle. One is a freelance job that I’m hoping pans out, because it’s a site that I’d love to do. The second is here at Wharton, which again, I’d love to do. The third is a complete revamp of PennridgeAlumni.com, a site that I’ve been studiously avoiding for far, far too long. Redoing it entirely in WordPress now seems like a possibility, and I’m already working on a development version of that. Let’s see how far I get…