You don’t want to see what’s happening at 2:30 on Monday.  You want to see the who, what, where, when, why, and how of 2:30 on Monday.  You want to push 2:30 publicly; you want to hide 2:30 privately.  2:30 wants analysis in comparison with other 2:30′s.  You want to categorize it, tag it, break it apart, and put it back together.

But it’s not just 2:30 – it’s all the information objects of our lives.

The portability of course content when encompassed in an electronic format, especially a blog, can be a hinderance to not only the content creator but also the student.  When we think about “e” versions of course materials, an argument is typically thrown into the mix in favor of the medium citing mobile access by phones and electronic access by computers and their brethren.  The issue is when the course content needs to be accessed in a physical format or electronically archived; post by post and page by page printouts or PDFs have to be made.  This is cumbersome to say the least.

Let’s take a look at situations that represent when e-format course materials need to be made physically accessible and/or archived:

• For accessibility’s sake: A student needs physical access due to learning or physical disabilities
• Learning becomes untethered: A hybrid class, once always connected online in a variety of ways, becomes disconnected due to off campus learning (study abroad, wilderness research, etc.)
• The end of class: As courses end for the semester and their content is hosted online, possibly behind a wall, it becomes inaccessible to its students, students who would prefer to take the content with them for one reason or another

Left Behind Coursework

This concern about course content is also applicable to student coursework.  As students finish off their semester, what is to happen to their course blogs?  Their writing is potential portfolio material.  Are they to print out every post and page?  Is the student able to migrate their content to another platform?  In my work with Michael Stephens and his library and information science graduate courses we’ve encountered just this concern.  Throughout the semester’s worth of work students grow with their blog posting and find at the end of their experience that their options for exporting are limited.  With this concern in mind, Michael and I developed a community site at Tame the Web where past students can migrate their course blogs and continue their discussions, research, and writing.  It is a fine option for students but some may not continue to blog.

Course content and student writing needs the option of portability beyond one blog, one platform.

Bind and Anthologize

It is with this concern in mind that I find the introduction of Anthologize to add yet another layer of possibilities in using WordPress as a learning management system (LMS).  Anthologize is a product of the One Week, One Tool project that brought together a dozen digital humanists (technologists, historians, developers, librarians, et cetera) and was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Built as a WordPress plugin, Anthologize acts as a binding for a blog’s content.  By picking and choosing bits of content throughout a site, the publisher can organize, structure, and export an Anthologized piece into one of four formats: ePub, PDF, TEI (plus HTML), and RTF.  More formats for exporting are expected in future releases.

Anthologize solves many of the concerns listed previously.  Teachers using a WordPress blog to host their content can now package, archive, and distribute their material away from WordPress in an organized manner.  Students, as well, can take their coursework, organize and bind it, and distribute it to future employers or store it away for their own safekeeping.

Screenshots

(Screenshots from the Anthologize User Guide)

More about Anthologize and One Week, One Tool

Anthologize

• About
• Download
• User Guide
• Twitter: @anthologize

One Week, One Tool

• People involved

On how instructor use of an alternative LMS may impact the traditional LMS:

By going outside the LMS to use tools that allow for more student engagement, more effective collaboration, and more active learning in general, instructors could establish new expectations for the LMS.

All custom content types have been turned into separate plugins as to allow the user to turn them on or off.  I hope to create an administrative screen to do this in the future.  I believe all shared taxonomies have been completed across the content types.  I’m currently working on setting up the custom columns for the “Books” content type so that browsing appropriate metadata is a little easier.

At the moment I’m still caught up on the integration of metaboxes, or fields, to add specific content that doesn’t use a taxonomy.  I’m also investigating reissuing the “featured image” metabox built into WordPress as a “Cover” metabox for the “Books” content type.  You can see the column is already setup for this.

You can see all of this in action by clicking on the thumbnails below.

Six years of higher education has come and gone and all of my materials still sit dormant, waiting anxiously for retrieval and review.  Throughout my bachelors and masters degrees I threw away little.  Storage boxes rest stacked in a closet with past essays, midterms, and other seemingly academic ephemera.  The same existence is duplicated on my MacBook Pro, though, more carefully organized by degree and class.

Most of my peers, I’m assuming, discarded the syllabi and deleted the accumulated PDFs right after graduation.  Either the pack rat in me was exercising its profound powers or I subconsciously knew that these materials would be of worth someday, I don’t know.  Now I look at these materials not as stockpiled refuse, but as a treasure trove of research sources.

PDF articles and citations in the fields of knowledge management, information architecture, information taxonomies and classification, online reference services, philosophy of library and information science, and so much more are ready for use.  But this is no measly manila folder.  This stock will take some serious organization and content management.  Because of these needs, I’ve turned my energy and aims in the next month or so to build a full-fledged research knowledge base using WordPress.

Content Management, Full Steam Ahead

There is true power in these sources.  If organized in such a way that their access is simple and accurately classified, I could potentially cut hours off of researching a given topic.  Not to mention how quickly the stockpile will grow when my Ph.D. courses begin.  But that potential will be all but diminished if I fail to truly grasp my content management needs.

With the 3.0 version of WordPress making its debut and along with it custom content types and taxonomies, I knew I had a potential system to use.  I had considered Drupal and its content creation kit, blocks, and views powerhouse modules – and I was very tempted to make the switch.  But these overlapping goals encouraged me to stay on track with WordPress:

1. As a co-author of a guide on WordPress, I need to really understand the potential and pitfalls of these 3.0 features to accurately write about them in the publication.
2. I am on a mission to get a grasp of PHP, a language that required when creating custom content types and taxonomies in 3.0.

I started this project not by digging into WordPress right away, but by sketching out the requirements of my content.  I had to ask myself a broad set of questions:

• What resources am I considering for content types (i.e. blogs, blog posts, or both? what about journal articles? websites? books?)?
• When looking at a specific content type, what metadata is important for access and retrieval (title, author, ISSN/ISBN, subject, permalink, etc.)
• Can pieces of metadata work as a tag or category-based taxonomy and if so:
  • Is that metadata tag or category worthy?
  • Does that metadata work in many content types (i.e. can it work in both a website and book content type)?
• Are there taxonomies not associated with metadata of the resource (i.e. the resource is associated with a certain class or degree)?

To be honest, I have never deeply considered content management questions of this magnitude with such a high level of reflection.  Sure, I have on whims thought about taxonomies and metadata, but never has a content management situation required such preloaded consideration.  As an aside, if I were to teach a digital libraries or web development course for librarians I would create a major assignment out of this.  Too many times – and I see this every time I visit a library website – content management is overlooked and undervalued; this is ironic considering content is information, and librarians are information professionals.  But I digress.

The Technical Side of Things

With an idea of the information architecture required of this knowledge base project, I began researching the technical elements WordPress will require me to understand.  There are four technical components involved:

1. Custom content types
   As of now, WordPress uses these as obvious content types: posts, pages, media, and links.
2. Custom taxonomies
   Tags and categories are a part of the posts content types.  Custom taxonomies allow you to rename and repurpose them.
3. Metaboxes
   Metaboxes in WordPress are the additional pieces of information outside of the content editor like the excerpt, trackback, and custom fields.
4. Custom columns
   When looking at posts and pages at a glance, columns are broken down into items like title, author, categories, tags, and date published.  When new content types are created and important pieces of metadata are applied via metaboxes, the need for custom panels to more quickly browse data is increased.

I worked tirelessly today to grasp all four with roughly a %75 success rate.  Custom content types and taxonomies were fairly straightforward and simple enough to create.  Metaboxes required a higher level of PHP knowledge and some reverse-engineering from online tutorials due to inefficient documentation at the WordPress Codex.  Custom columns is what broke me.  Documentation was nearly non-existent at WordPress and tutorials weren’t detailed enough for my PHP level. Overall, for a day’s worth of technical work, it was a successful first attempt.

The work I completed was not anything I could directly apply to the knowledge base.  I didn’t create any content types nor any taxonomies that are ready for data entry, but I did firm up a framework for recreating the four technical items.  This should save me some serious time in the future.

I’ll continue work on the framework before moving to the next stages, which are roughly:

1. Content type , taxonomy, metabox creation
2. Custom column tweaking
3. Content entry
4. Templating to access content on the front-end
5. Search optimization via built-in searching or a plugin
6. And, if I obtain the level of skill, create custom “Press This” bookmarklets for each content type

Resources

Custom Content Types and Taxonomies:

• http://cogdogblog.com/2010/05/28/setting-up-custom-contenttypes/
• http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/wordpress/rock-solid-wordpress-3-0-themes-using-custom-post-types/
• Codex:
  • http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_post_type
  • http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_taxonomy

Metaboxes:

• http://cogdogblog.com/2010/06/06/put-on-your-hazmat-suits/
• http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/wordpress/rock-solid-wordpress-3-0-themes-using-custom-post-types/
• http://blog.genuineinteractive.com/post/adding-custom-field-gui-to-custom-post-types-wordpress-3.aspx
• http://www.code-styling.de/english/how-to-use-wordpress-metaboxes-at-own-plugins
• Codex:
  • http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_meta_box

Columns:

• http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/wordpress/rock-solid-wordpress-3-0-themes-using-custom-post-types/
• http://shibashake.com/wordpress-theme/add-admin-columns-in-wordpress
• Codex:
  • http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_filter
  • http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_action
  • http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference

Sidebars in WordPress are pretty static: You set the widgets for the sidebar and that’s that. But what if you wanted different sidebars for different pages – or even different posts? Well, that’d take a bit of trickery with templates or conditional PHP. Shiba’s Widgets does all the hard work for you.

New features include, and I quote:

Updated for WordPress 3.0. Plugin will now work on 2.9 and 3.0.

Copy widget sets.

Assign widget sets for front-page, search, file not found (404), all posts, all pages, etc.

Retrieve and delete lost widgets.

Tag and Category widget information is now stored in a metadata table. It no longer shows up in the description section.

Propagate text widget changes.

The Multi-Column Widget and Style Widget now use standard WordPress core options to store their results.

See more – including all screenshots – at Shiba’s post here: http://bit.ly/customwidgets11
Download the update for the plugin here: http://bit.ly/customwidgets11dl

Custom Widgets - 3.0 Compatible

Custom Widgets - Copy Widget Sets

Custom Widgets - Widget Options Menu

Custom Widgets - Change Text in all Text Widgets

Please note that some screenshots illustrating certain BuddyPress features, BuddyPress-enabled sites, and BuddyPress and WordPress plugins were removed because they relied heavily on transitions. To see this presentation in its full glory, please download the Quicktime manual advance movie version (60.9 MB in size).

The reason being is that this could make logical sense to the content creator and slim down the amount of sidebar headings.

I’d like to share the recent efforts of me and my colleagues at the PBC (a regional library services agency) in creating a renewed, dynamic library catalog/blog for the public libraries in the province of Antwerp (Belgium).

The end result is a WordPress blog that integrates seamlessly with the library catalog. Catalog searches can be made from within the blog and blog-posts can redirect you to specific library items inside the catalog, which is a pretty cool feature. (have a look at our beta-test: http://isis.pbcantwerpen.be ; only available in Dutch and still subject to change)

There are two key components to this project.  The first being the centralization of all of this region’s library websites with WordPress.  About 40 library sites will be hosted this way.  The second point being the solid meshing of two systems, in this case WordPress and AquaBrowser as the OPAC.

My co-author and I of our upcoming Library Technology Report on WordPress for Libraries will be highlighting library systems that have taken the WordPress approach to hosting library websites and, now, I can’t see a reason why not to provide a little international flavor to the text with this fine Belgium example.