Terry’s Blog

I have recently been helping some colleagues in our Life Long Learning Centre to set up a discussion boards for tutors to share ideas on good teaching practice. We are using an OS product called phpBB installed and administered by our central web team. I thought the system pretty good and have now got an installation of my own to explore.

Use of discussion boards seems to be on the increase again and I wonder if this is a sort of backlash against the relative complexity and time commitment of using communications tools based on blogging functionality. As a great fan of social networking and systems like Elgg and Ning, I have spent the last few years encouraging colleagues to use these in preference to the old fashioned, heavily structures, largely text based threaded message forums. But, for some things, I have found discussion boards in our VLE and Student Portal, the Forums here in Eduspaces (once upon a time) and those available in Ning groups more effective and significantly easier to use. I am gradually forming a better idea of what systems like Elgg are good for and what is better suited to focused threaded discussion. I hope to turn this into some sort of guidelines/best practice document, probably collaboratively written in a Google doc in due course. I would be grateful for any thoughts on this and any observations on your own experience, dear Reader, of the two different systems.

Tags:   discussion boards · elgg · forums · phpBBComments Off

Today we learnt that Eduspaces will continue to be Eduspaces (not Educator Central) and is not being taken over by TIG. No offense to TIG I hope but I must say I consider this to be very good news. I joined the TIG site and had a good look around. Good stuff and interesting but with what appeared to be quite a different constituency and ethos to that of Eduspaces.

I have decided to post to my new Wordpress blog for the moment and import into Eduspaces. There are a number of reasons for this. I have set up my own domain and installed WP myself and, much to my amazements, it all works! The much talked of WP 5 minutes install was not too wide of the mark. I want to continue to learn about WP and am now using it as as a content management system for my web site too. As it is my own installation I have a great deal of freedom over which template to use and have an opportunity to learn a bit about php, css and so on. I want to be able to install and run Elgg too in due course I feel something like WP with its extensive documentation and relative simplicity is a good stepping stone along the way. The final consideration is the ease of exporting posts, comments, categories etc. compared with Elgg at the moment. Using WP to ‘host’ my posts and then feed them across to Eduspaces seems like the most flexible and secure option and I have noticed several  other Eduspaces’ bloggers doing this now - Josie and Graham for instance.

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When installing this theme the About and Archive links in the header produced missing pages messages. To fix this I had to do the following.

Create a page each  for the about and archive sections. I gave theses the titles ‘About’ and ‘Archives’.

Set the post slug to ‘about’ and ‘archive’

In the Options section of the Dashboard change the permalink from default (which creates urls with post numbers) to ‘Date and name based’.

Copy the .htaccess code generated by this choice when the ‘Update permalink structure’ button is clicked directly into an open notepad++ window and save file as .htaccess. (Notepad++ must be used rather than Notepad or a normal text editor as the file must be saved without an End of File (EOF) code).

ftp in binary transfer mode the .htaccess file to the root of the WP folders on the server.

The reason for this palaver is that the default urls of posts and pages refer to the post or page numbers in the database by default, but the links to pages in the header assume urls will be post and page names (or more precisely, their ’slugs’). The permalink structure can be changed in options but for some reason an .htaccess file is needed with appropriate code in it for browsers to understand these links and find and display the pages. On installing a WP theme there is not usually a .htaccess file so this has to be created and made writable.

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I’m toying with the idea of turning my whole site over to WP using it as a content management system. I assume this would allow me to have a site blog as a tab on the home page. I’ll investigate further. In the meantime a couple of links to resources:

Wordpress as a CMS - Content Management System

48 Unique Ways To Use WordPress

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Just received Wordpress for Dummies from Amazon (thanks Dan and Nicky!). It looks like some people make a good living out of providing WP hosting and/or themes design. There is a multi-user version of WP where everyone can customise their own blog. WP can also be used as a powerful web site content management system and the site doesn’t even have to have a blog if it is not needed. There is a lot of info in the book about customisation of themes, using and maintaining static pages and adding widgets and other components to extend a WP based environment.  Watch for dramatic changes here or possibly its total destruction. Must find out how to back this lot up.

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