Blogs @ William and Mary

So here’s this powerful framework, but we have scanty documentation. I realize that Wordpress is highly documented online, but I’m also aware from my installation experience that a lot of what’s available is disorganized, fragmentary, and scattered. Anyone who catches the Wordpress bug will have the motivation to put forth the effort find out more but I have a hunch that providing a little local documentation will lower the threshold for catching it.

With that in mind, I’ve started–in a pretty rudimentary way at the moment–a set of Guide pages for our local installation. All that’s up so far is an edit of a document I wrote to welcome users to our old Wordpress setup. Documentation is, sadly, often an effort that takes place in the cracks of one’s roles and responsibilities–mine is no exception–but if I can gather a modicum of time (that most precious commodity), I’m hoping to grow it into a decent set of user guides.

We’re getting there!

A couple days ago my boss commented that he’s getting a much different vibe out of me working on this project than he got when I was largely concerned with a pilot program involving tablet PCs running Vista; I retorted that there’s a big difference when all you have to do is follow the directions and stuff works (as opposed to following the directions and stuff doesn’t work anyway…).

The main focus of starting this project is to establish 1) some research bloggers and 2) a “mother blog” focused on undergraduate research at William and Mary that would aggregate posts from our research bloggers and have a public tagging capability so interested readers could help categorize postings. We’re using feedwordpress for aggregation via RSS (the author of which kindly and thoroughly explained to me aspects of its operation); TagThis fits the bill perfectly for audience tagging, and even supports tag-use thresholds and other functions more robust than I’d imagined when I thought about what we’d need to accomplish that.

I got Defensio installed to control comment spam (though I can’t say how well it works yet–so far we’re under the spam radar, though I’m sure that will change any time). The developer was quick to address a dashboard bug that arose since I’ve disabled the Plugins management tab in the dashboard in favor of using Plugin Commander.

I don’t want to sound too fanboyish, but it’s as if WPMU is the Big Rock Candy Mountain of CMS/Blogging systems: whenever I want something, I just reach out and it’s there–and it works! And if it doesn’t, there’s an interested, active base of users and authors who are willing to help. From an admin point of view, there’s not much more gratifying than that.