I had scratched my head and tried a whole range of plugins for wordpress-mu to try and achieve this however nothing quite did what I needed. The closest was the Role Manager plugin however it didn’t work with wordpress-mu… and after I had spent a quantity of time trying to get it working I realised that roles were assigned to users on a per-blog basis rather than globally. It’s a shame as a roles and capabilities based solution had sounded reasonably elegant.

Today I work up with the resolve that I should just take matters into my own hands and make a small plugin of my own design to force wordpress-mu into doing what I wanted. Well actually I started with a direct hack on the source and then thought better of it and wrote a plugin instead! It manipulates the main wordpress query (as found in “query.php”) force-bypassing the user capability check.

I also gave the plugin the option of showing private posts in un-authenticated outgoing news feeds – for the sake of sanity this is limited to post titles and urls. To do this you have to append ?showprivate=true to the feed url.

It even has a rough administrative interface allowing the private feeds and posts to be turned on and off.

Download the source code

Set up physical server(s)

Install and configure LDAP directory
Needs to cover
CETIS staff: name, contact details, IM ids, general blurb, photoRegistered members of cetis community…Install and configure Blog software
Integrate with LDAPSolve private/public/group issuesDevelop standard categories for groups etc and tags forDevelop WordPress ThemeFigure out the “golden rules”Get people blogging

Main cetis site
Develop CETIS Front-page aggregation of blogs + other sources (eg focus)
Develop generic CETIS stylesheet for front-page
Re-do primary static content (about etc)
Link to old community sites in zope (to migrate later)

Install and configure Wiki software
Integrate with LDAP etcDevelop mediawiki themeDevelop CETIS communitiesGet co-ordinators using it and adding contentI saw an interesting and helpful looking blog entry about setting up LDAP on Mediawiki

Is there more intranet functionality to specify?
eg Task lists?
Time management?
Project management?

CETIS Blogs (WordPress-µ)
Individual (and group) blogs for all cetis staff members
Also includes general contact info for public use, staff profiles etc
Items may be public or internal-only or private
Items can be associated with the relevant Community and/or Team
Items may be elevated to front page status.

CETIS Communities (MediaWiki)
A big wiki for the SIGS – covering specs
Can be contributed to by sig participants

CETIS Events (Custom PHP??)
Events/calendaring – single click sign-up for registered users!
Covers Public Cetis events, registration
Private CETIS calendaring
Aggregated events from elsewhere

CETIS Intranet
Internal groupware – work planning, project management
TEAM views of what is going on – team blogs
Private wikis? (MediaWiki)
Staff management
Events/calendaring (again)
Control centre for it all…

Other requrements
Common authentication!

???E-Framework???

??? HOSTED STACKS FOR PROJECTS ???
A blog, a wiki, a tracker, a subversion
TRAC and Subversion and WordPress?
Or they do it themselves

??? PROJECT DIRECTORY ???
Based on my database??
Tracks all the projects and aggregates their blogs
can be contributed to by members
Tracks standards used
Full-on doap support

Implications for old sites

CETIS
Move to new structure
Deal with old content – zope.cetis.org.uk
redirections and THIS IS OLD messages

ELF
mostly archived
Framework moved into big e-framework
PROJECTS and so forth moved into hosted stacks
and/or project/software/standards directory

elearning Focus
Move to wordpress/wiki
old articles to be moved

Technorati Tags: Developing Websites

The first day of the all-cetis meeting saw us split into three groups covering “content” “People and systems” and “programme support”

Our group – “programme support” – identified and discussed a range of issues around supporting JISC, the Projects and the wider community – and the overlaps therein.

Tracking projects was seen as a difficult problem whether refmodels or toolkits or whatever. The primary responsibility should really be with JISC – as they have no project management system or information available to the world. There are around 160 projects in the e-learning space and dealing with this is just impossible without some decent infrastructure.

There has been a push from jisc for reference models to be owned by the community – via the sigs. There are major issues with this as the sigs are effectively self-organising communities and may or may not be interested or in the same head-space as the original authors. On a practical level, this extends some of the discussion at the meeting in birmingham – how to transfer the information in the reference models and sustain them with community involvement – technically they are all very different – eg FREMA on php-symantic thing – COVARM on Tomcat – XCRI on ELF site etc.

Creating capacity – new projects really need a big leg-up to get on a par with other players (in terms of technical, framework, x-project and organisational knowledge). We proposed that we set up a two day induction course covering at least:

e-frameworkproject management skillssupport resources & community spacesDocumentation and UMLThere was a lot of general discussion of the SIGs and how they could or should be structured. What they are doing at the moment, how to foster sustainable, useful communities and how to support them through the co-ordinators and various online resources. The other process that was discussed was how the progsupport team liase with the sigs – either us feeding them info or them contributing to elfocus etc.
Websites – tools for community building is a perennial isssue….

There was a proposal for an e-learning Mash-up – Giving practitioners a chance to see and imagine the potential for joined-up-learning through webservices, nice interfaces etc.

The JISC/CETIS relationship is getting yet-more complex in terms of where the boundaries are and how we are seen by projects
Are we evil or are we nice?
Are we going to clobber them over the head if they don’t deliver?
Are people going to perceive us as “just about jisc stuff” and we won’t get non-jisc projects coming to our events?

Second Day
Oleg talked about the service, funding and the general growth of CETIS… And outlined the new team structure and that the new teams (eg comms, management etc) will all do one scheduled conference call per month. Each team will include a convener (who gets everyone there, sets agenda, takes some notes for the group blog) and a manager to take any issues forward to the management team.

Group X
On the question of whether the team approach is workable, we had a good look at the team matrix as proposed and made amendments.
some teams which are too similarStategy & Standards and Comms & Supportand some lacking in overlapComms & Community
Prog-support & Community
This is seen as very important keeping the projects in touch with the sigsThere is the general issue of Clive and our engagement with FE

So what are the teams actually supposed to do?

The comms team has been charged with organising the conferences and that this should be shared the community and strategy teams. Also use of external event organisers should be non-negotiable.

Co-ordination with JISC and making sure the different teams know what is required from the JISC end – the information will trickle around the teams. Directives (eg report writing) come from JISC via the management team and more grass-roots information about projects – bubble up from the community/sigs. This is of particular relevance for the support team – and will have implications for how projects get funded.

Conveners role
Setting the agendamaking sure that taking notes happensmaking sure scheduling is sensible, that everyone can attend, FrequencyOnce a month sounds about right

Platform for calls
Proposal (sam&scott) to use Skype and the hosted multi-user service
Getting credits paid for centrally
Gives us the flexibility to have free break-out discussion
Rowin suggested that we use Breeze – which she gets on with quite well – but it is expensive

What support do the groups need?
They good channels of communication to management group.
Tools – blogs etc – important that this can be private.

JISC prog-managers will need to engage with our teams on occasions
There are also the issues that JISC don’t have sensible groupware infrastructure

Blogs
Some concern from Christina about use and adoption
Oleg – it’s mandatory – we must all write our blogs but they are about communication and not “looking busy” and will be enforced by Doctor – x
In terms of the blogs, any public views will need a bit of care in terms of sensitivity.
We are now going to be seen as more jisc-ish and must be mindful of speaking for them.

Paul: Reporting
The admin team is Paul, Julie and Oleg
The service has a formal reporting requirement which should mean less reporting than previously. The negotiation of what is expected from jisc needs some care. It can either be too much of a burden for cetis staff or result in jisc being completely disconnected from us. We will have an advisory group to report to the ctte for us.

Front Page

Community (SIG) page

The Sig sites are served by a “CETIS Communities” wiki – shared between the sigs so for example discussion of a given spec will be all in one place. Provided by mediawiki.

Personal Blog

The missing piece of this at the moment is an events handling system. Ideally this would be integrated with the user-registration for one-click sign-up to meetings – how nifty would that be!