For a year now I’ve been running the McKay School of Education’s OCW pilot on WPMU. However, I’ve never blogged exactly how I’ve got it setup or how we’re using it.
Last summer, in preparation for the pilot, I set up WPMU 2.7 with the following plugins installed across the site:
– PageMash – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pagemash/
Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.– Search Everything – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-everything/
This plugin increases the ability of the default WP search (including pages, tags, etc.).– tags4page – http://www.michelem.org/wordpress-plugin-tags4page/
This plugin allows you to tag pages (posts can already be tagged).– WPLicense – http://wiki.creativecommons.org/WpLicense
WpLicense is a plugin for WordPress which allows users to select a Creative Commons license for their blog and content.– WP Pages Only – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pages-only/
This plugin simply changes the default “Write” and “Manage” links in admin to go to pages instead of posts.
Just these few plugins make WPMU quite usable as a no-frills OCW platform. Obviously, this setup lacks the full functionality of something like eduCommons, but you can also migrate from version to version in seconds with a single Subversion command, and we know that this platform scales to tens of millions of pageviews per day (e.g., wordpress.com).
IPT 287 does a number of other interesting things with other plugins, like syndicating all student work into the OCW site using FeedWordPress. Charles also utilized the blog functionality of WPMU to do live announcements, etc., on the site – actually teaching his course off the OCW site. This is another part of the beauty of WPMU – per course functionality.
It’s summer again, which means it’s time for open.byu.edu’s WPMU install to get an upgrade to 2.8 and for me to look for additional plugins and bits of functionality that any self-respecting OCW platform should have. We’ll also be growing the scope of our pilot this year (after doing only two courses last year). I’ve already started chatting with the good Reverend about some of the additional functionality we’re going to need as our pilot expands in scope… But I’d love your thoughts, too. What do you think as WPMU as an OCW platform? What functionality is WPMU with above plugins missing that it desperately needs? Are there existing plugins that provide that functionality?