MySoreHead

After deciding to dismiss Learning Management Systems for decentralized but complimentary webservices and tools, the problem of aggregation arises. Out of the box WordPressMU doesn't aggregate posts from multiple blogs so alternatives need to be found.

One solution is to use a feed reader such as the open source web based Gregarius, which we used to aggregate posts with some success. Gregarius will read subscribed blogs feeds and organise them by categories and tags. It also has themes and plugins which allows some customization. However, Gregarius requires the refresh button to be pushed in order to update. Gregarius doesn't allow multiple users (although that is in its timeline) so multiple installations would be required to aggregate different content for different purposes, for example, whole content and  different class content, without complicated and rigid use of categories and/or tags.

Many in the WordPressMU community advocate using a separate single WordPress install running a autoblog plugin, which uses the site-wide feed from WordPressMU and republishes the content in the another blog. The separate WordPress blog can be installed in a sub-folder and thus appear to be integrated. This solution however has a number of limitations. First that it relies on the feeds and therefore is not necessarily up to date and second that it only aggregates all content. It can't be used to aggregate groups, such as classes or sections without cumbersome use of categories and/or tags.

Our Solution
To solve the aggregation issue we have developed plugins and group specific themes that allows blogs to join group blogs where their posts are doubled posted. WordPress does plugins and themes very very well, although particularly if you're running WordPressMU you need to be careful that you're plugins are well written so not to cause performance problems.

Group Blogs
We have designated specific blogs as group blogs, these include the root blog of which every blog is a member, class blogs and section blogs. Rather than the user being a member of a blog, the blog is a member of the group blog. What that means is that every post made on a member blog is cross posted to each of the group blogs it is a member of. Category information is cross posted as well, comments are disabled on the group blog and the permalink points to the original blog post. An admin page lets the site admin, designate blogs as group blogs and assign other blogs as members. There is an option to set groups as public or private although this is not yet implemented. Students and teachers can use the group blogs for scanning and reading posts and the group category clouds and calendars give a snap shot of school activity and learning.

Each group blog uses a modified group theme which are stored in a separate groups themes directory which includes the user's avatar next to the post, and points comments to the original user's blog.

Special Categories
Special Categories can be used for aggregating subject or topic data on the group blogs. For example, a class (or section) may be currently learning about "Inventors and Inventions." Students and teachers use an agreed upon tag to identify blog posts, photos, videos and bookmarks so that they can be aggregated using a WordPress category page on the group blog. Widgets are used to pull content from Scuttle and photos from lumil using the same tag. Some static content can also be included. Currently this requires creating a specific page in the theme using the category id (which is beyond most teachers) but plugins such as category page plugin show how this could be achieved using plugins. I imagine a plugin that lets widgets be set per category via the admin presentation section so that the sidebar widgets can be arranged differently on the Inventors and Inventions category page as opposed to the main page on the group blog. As well as sidebar widgets maybe the whole category page could be arranged with widgets.

In this way each group blog category page could be customized if desired. Special events may not have any bookmarks but they would have blog posts and photos. While Secrets of the Sea, would have blog posts, web page bookmarks, photos and videos.

Sorry the code for this is not yet released, I'm hoping to get it out before the melbourne wordcamp.