OpenLearn WordPress Plugins

Just before the summer break, I managed to Patrick McAndrew to use some of his OpenLearn cash to get a WordPress-MU plugin built that would allow anyone to republish OpenLearn materials across a set of WordPress Multi-User blogs. A second WordPress plugin was commissioned that would allow any learners happening by the blogs would subscribe to those courses using “Daily feeds”, that would deliver course material to them on a daily basis.

The plugins were coded by Greg Gaughan at Isotoma, and tested by Jim and D’Arcy, among others… (I haven’t acted on your feedback yet – sorry, guys…:-( For all manner of reasons, I didn’t post the plugins (partly because I wanted to do another pass on usability/pick up on feedback, but mainly because I wanted set up a demo site first… but I still haven’t done that… so here’s a link to the plugins anyway in case anyone fancies having a play over the next few weeks: OpenLearn WordPress Plugins.

I’ll keep coming back to this post – and the download page – to add in documentation and some of the thoughts and discussions we had about how to evolve the WPMU plugin workflow/UI etc, as well as the daily feeds widget functionality.

In the meantime, here’s the minimal info I gave the original testers:

The story is:
– one ‘openlearn republisher’ plugin, that will take the URL of an RSS feed describing OpenLearn courses (e.g. on the Modern Languages page, the RSS: Modern Languages feed)) , and suck those courses into WPMU, one WPMU blog per course, via the full content RSS feed for each course.

– one “daily feeds” widget; this can be added to any WP blog and should provide a ‘daily’ feed of the content from that blog, that sends e.g. one item per day to the subscriber from the day they subscribe. The idea here is if a WP blog is used as a content publishing sys for ‘static’, unchanging content (e.g. a course, or a book, where each chapter is a post, or a fixed length podcast series), users can still get it delivered in a paced/one-per-day fashion. This widget should work okay…

Here’s another link the page where you can find the downloads: OpenLearn WordPress Plugins. Enjoy – all comments welcome. Please post a link back here if you set up any blogs using either of these two plugins.