OSCON 2009: Building a Corporate Blog Portal using WordPress MU (WPMU)

Building a
Corporate Blog
Portal using
WordPress MU
Dan York
Director of Conversations, Voxeo
blogs.voxeo.com

twitter.com/voxeo
twitter.com/danyork
dyork@voxeo.com

Intro

  Global leader in open standards voice
application hosting
  Founded in 1999
  Focus on making telephony development
simple and accessible for web developers
– and open without vendor lock-in
  Over 45,000 developers – over 80,000
  Director of Conversations, applications
Voxeo
  Free developer accounts and downloads
  www.danyork.com
  Developers should never pay!
  twitter.com/danyork   evolution.voxeo.com

  linkedin.com/in/danyork   www.tropo.com
  www.imified.com

OSCON 2009: Building a Corporate Blog Portal using Worpress MU - Dan York - blogs.voxeo.com - Copyright 2009 Dan York

FREE

Cheaper

Control

Flexibility


?

WHY?

Um… ‘cuz we
need a blog "
site?


My Reasons
1.  Tell Our Story In Our Own Words
2.  Educate, Encourage, Engage Community
3.  Marketing/Search – “Feed The Beast”
4.  Industry Soapbox
5.  Platform To Respond


Tell Our Story In Our Words


Educate, Encourage, Engage


Marketing 2009

Search
Conversations


Industry Soapbox


Response Platform


$

WHO?

Who?
  CxOs?
  Marketing?
  Product Managers?
  Developers?
  Support?
  Sales?
  The “Blogger”


Can they write?


Can they keep
writing?


Does their head
explode with
ideas?


It is easy to start
a blog."
It is far harder to
maintain a blog.

Tip: Find the
current bloggers.


WHAT?

What stories will
you tell?


Our Stories
  Voxeo Talks
  Announcements, photos, glimpse inside the company

  Voxeo Developer’s Corner
  Tips, tricks and tutorials about developing on our platform

  Voxeo Labs
  CTO Lab
  A view into the activities of our Labs teams

  The Tropo Blog
  Insight into Tropo.com, our open source cloud telephony service

  Speaking of Standards
  Voxeo’s views on industry standards

  Behind the Blog
  Telling the story of using WordPress MU for a corporate blog portal

  Emerging Tech Talk
  A video podcast about emerging technology topics


Tip: Start Small


WHERE?

  Your premise?

  ISP?

  Hosting service?

  Cloud computing platform?


HOW?

Corporate Blog Portal Guidelines
  http://www.thenewpr.com/
  User Interface Suggestions
  List of Available Weblogs
  Aggregation of Blog Entries on a Main Page
  RSS Feed for all Blogs
  Search Across All Blogs
  Images
  Tag Cloud

  Technology Suggestions
  Design Integration with Main Website
  Support for Users Authoring in Multiple Blogs
  Private Blogs
  Statistics
  Integration with Social Services

WordPress MU
  http://mu.wordpress.org


Scalable!


How will you use WPMU?
  External corporate blog portal?

  External community site?

  Internal blog portal?


Good News For A Corp Site
  Many security issues not relevant
  You know the people who will be blogging
  You can restrict who is blogging
  You can restrict access to admin interfaces

  You can constrain (or not) design choices

  You can present unified “face” externally

  Your users may already have WordPress experience

  There are tons of consultants

Bad News For A Corp Site
  Will need some design and configuration

  Blog portal components require assembly

  Does require some tech savvy
  How do you feel about editing PHP files?


Policy Decisions
  Who will you let have admin access to the blog site?
  Only employees? partners? anyone?

  Who will be able to create new blogs?
  Anyone? Or only the “site administrators”?
  Who gets to pick the URLs? the blog names?

  Who can add users to a blog site?
  Blog admins? Or only site admins?

  What design “themes” will you let blog admins choose?
  Only one (or more) “corporate” themes? Or from a collection?

  Will you have a stated distribution license for your content?
  Creative Commons?

Domain Decisions
  Which style of blog site?
  Subfolders:
  http://blogs.voxeo.com/voxeotalks/
  http://blogs.voxeo.com/behindtheblog/

  Subdomains:
  http://voxeotalks.example.com/

  http://behindtheblog.example.com/

  What will the main domain you are using be?

  Will you allow “domain mapping” of custom domains?

  Choose wisely, as URLs should never change once used.

INSTALLATION


Requirements
  PHP version 4.3 or greater
  MySQL version 4.0 or greater
  Web server (Apache or Litespeed recommended)

  (yes, that’s it)

  (And a server: Linux, Mac, Windows, whatever)


Installation Process
  http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WPMU
  http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

1.  Download WPMU
  http://mu.wordpress.org/download/
2.  Create a database in MySQL and associated user
account
3.  Copy the WPMU files into the web server directory
4.  In your browser, open that web URL and follow the
instructions
5.  (And probably a number of other small steps)

GETTING
STARTED


Logging In
  Follow the link:

  Bookmark URLs:
  http://blogs.example.com/<blogname>/wp-login.php
  http://blogs.example.com/<blogname>/wp-admin.php


Dashboard


Creating a Post


BLOG
CONFIGURATION


General Settings


Writing Settings


Discussion Settings


Privacy Settings


SITE
CONFIGURATION


Site Admin


Site Admin - Blogs


Site Admin - Users


Site Admin - Themes


Site Options


DESIGN


Themes

Theme

Posts
Images
(MySQL)
(Disk)


Using a Theme


Tip: Find Your
“Rick”

(i.e. ﬁnd a CSS guru or
hire a designer)

A WordPress Theme
404.php links.php
archive.php page.php
archives.php post-footer.php
attachment.php rtl.css
comments.php screenshot.jpg
comments-popup.php screenshot.png
favicon.ico searchform.php
footer.php search.php
functions.php sidebar1.php
header.php sidebar2.php
image.php sidebar.php
images single.php
index.php style.css


Theme example: sidebars


Theme: sidebar1.php, pg1
div class=sidebar id=sidebar1
div class=sidebarcontent
ul
lih2Subscribe/h2
ul
lia href=?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?img src=?php
bloginfo('template_directory'); ?/images/rss.png” alt=RSS / RSS Feed/a
lia href=http://feeds.voxeo.com/AllVoxeoBlogsimg
src=?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?/images/rss.png
alt=RSS / RSS Feed - All Blogs/a
lia href=http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?
feedId=numberamp;loc=en_USSubscribe via Email/a
lia href=http://twitter.com/voxeoFollow us on Twitter/a
lia href=http://friendfeed.com/voxeoFollow us on Friendfeed/a
lia href=http://www.voxeo.com/facebookBecome a fan on Facebook/a
/ul
/li

?php wp_list_pages('title_li=h2Pages/h2' ); ?

lih2Archives/h2
ul
?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?
/ul
/li


Theme: sidebar1.php, pg2
?php wp_list_categories('show_count=1title_li=h2Categories/h2'); ?

?php /* If this is the frontpage*/if( is_home()||is_page()||true ) { ?
?php wp_list_bookmarks(); ?

lih2Actions/h2
ul
?php wp_register(); ?
li?php wp_loginout(); ?/li
?php $current_site = get_current_site(); ?
lia href=http://?php echo $current_site-domain .
$current_site-path ? title=?php echo $current_site-site_name ??
php echo $current_site-site_name ?/a/li
?php wp_meta(); ?
/ul
/li
?php } ?
?php endif; ?
/ul
/div
/div


Theme: sidebar2.php
div class=sidebar id=sidebar2
div class=sidebarcontent
ul
lia href=”URLimg src=”URL alt=” border=0 width=162 height=180//a

lih2a href=http://www.voxeo.com/free/img src=http://blogs.voxeo.com/
files/2009/07/get_started_button.png alt=Get Started Now Building Apps border=0
width=189 height=60/abr
a href=http://www.voxeo.com/free/img src=http://blogs.voxeo.com/files/
2009/07/download_free_button.png
alt=Download Free Software border=0 width=189 height=60/a/h2 /li

lih2Voxeo Blogs/h2
ul
lia href=http://blogs.voxeo.com/Blogs Home/a/li
?php list_all_wpmu_blogs('100', 'name', 'li', '/li', 'updated'); ?/li
/ul

lih2Tags/h2
?php wp_tag_cloud(''); ?

?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : else : ?
?php endif; ?

/ul
/div
/div


Theme for portal
page?


blogs.voxeo.com


PLUGINS


Plugins
  WordPress and WordPress MU have “plugin”
framework for extensibility

  LARGE repositories of WP and WPMU plugins:
  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ (5,941 today)
  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=WordPress
+MU

  CAUTION: Not all WordPress plugins work with
WordPress MU


Plugins in WPMU
  Two VERY different locations for plugins:
  mu-plugins
  Apply to ALL WPMU blogs

  plugins
  Available to blogs, must be activated per blog (or by site admin across all)

  Site administrators must install plugins
  Can allow blog admins to activate plugins


mu-plugins
  Unfiltered Mu
  Allows users with Editor and above to use any embeds
  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/unfiltered-mu/

  List All Posts
  Lists all posts across all blogs – used on portal page
  http://www.wpmudev.org/project/list-all-Posts

  Sitewide Feed
  Creates three RSS feeds across all blogs
  http://wpmudev.org/project/WPMU-Sitewide-Feed-Plugin---ITDamager

  Search All Blogs (GT Search all Blogs)
  http://joevanni99.wordpress.com

Plugin Commander
  http://firestats.cc/wiki/WPMUPluginCommander
  Caveat: WPMU 2.8.2 appears to have similar
functionality
  Located in mu-plugins


Plugins


Plugins
  Akismet – blog comment spam
  http://akismet.com/
  http://akismet.com/commercial/

  Feedburner – syncs WP feeds to FB feeds
  http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?
hl=enanswer=78483

  WPTouch – iPhone interface
  http://www.bravenewcode.com/wptouch/

  PodPress – podcasting support
  http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress/

Plugins - Twitter
  Twitter Tools
  Posts to Twitter and also incorporates tweets into blog
  http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress

  Twitter Publisher
  Post-only, and uses bit.ly (which lets you track usage)
  Haven’t tried it with WPMU yet
  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-publisher/

  Twitter Posts
  Suggested to me, but I have not tried it yet
  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-posts/

OTHER
ADDITIONS


Feedburner – My Brand
  http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mybrand
  Use “feeds.voxeo.com”, yet still get FB stats
  Useful abstraction layer should you want to move from
FB


Google Analytics
  https://www.google.com/analytics/
  Small bit of JavaScript in your theme


SOCIAL
INTEGRATION


The Grand Plan

Blog
WPMU
Post
Text

E-mail


The Grand Plan - Implementation

Blog
WPMU
Post
Text
E-mail


LESSONS
LEARNED


Comment Policy


Comment Policy
  http://blogs.voxeo.com/comment-policy/


Comment Spam


Beware of
Plugin-itis


Beware of
Tweaking WPMU
Code


Plan for
Upgrades


(every 3-4 months)


(“Auto-update” is great
in theory, but ﬁrewalls
destroy theories.)


Plan for Backups


TO DO


Integration of Other Sites

  Don’t want full duplication of content
  Considering blogs with partial syndication
  WP-o-matic
  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-o-matic/

Mirroring

blogs.voxeo.com

Primary Backup
Server
WPMU Conﬁg
Server

MySQL DB


Author Training
  Education a key to growing pool of authors

  Create screencasts showing how to create a post,
categories, tags
  Danger that this gets outdated with WPMU updates

  Create internal wiki documentation, author guides,
HOWTOs


The List Goes On…
  Publish to Identi.ca (WordIdentica plugin… didn’t work… WPMU issue?)

  Identity plugins – make it easy for visitors to comment
  OpenID

  Twitter

  Facebook Connect

  Google Friend Connect

  RSS Plugins – to embed contact info in feed to combat content scrapers
  Improved Sidebars
  Performance Plugins
  SEO Plugins

  And… and… and… and… and…

Would I Do It
Again?


RESOURCES


Resources
  WordPress Codex   WPMU Tutorials
  http://codex.wordpress.org/   http://www.wpmututorials.com/

  WordPress MU Forums   WPMU DEV
  http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/   http://www.wpmudev.org/

  WordPress TV   Behind The Blog
  http://wordpress.tv/   http://blogs.voxeo.com/behindtheblog/

  WPMU on IRC
  #wpmu on Freenode


Thank You!

Dan York
Director of Conversations, Voxeo
blogs.voxeo.com

twitter.com/voxeo
twitter.com/danyork
dyork@voxeo.com

slideshare.net/voxeo

OSCON 2009: Building a Corporate Blog Portal using WordPress MU (WPMU)

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Andere mochten auch

Andere mochten auch (13)

Ähnlich wie OSCON 2009: Building a Corporate Blog Portal using WordPress MU (WPMU)

Ähnlich wie OSCON 2009: Building a Corporate Blog Portal using WordPress MU (WPMU) (20)

Mehr von Voxeo Corp

Mehr von Voxeo Corp (20)

Kürzlich hochgeladen

Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)

OSCON 2009: Building a Corporate Blog Portal using WordPress MU (WPMU)