eduSWAN

I’m glad (and relieved) to finally say UMW Blogs has been upgraded to the WP 3.0 merged core files without a hitch. Whew! This was a burner for me, a bit more fear and trembling going into this one than usual, but alas all is good in the UMW Blogs hood. In no small part thanks to Ron Rennick who recently upgraded his SharDB plugin to 3.0.1, which did the trick in terms of making sure all was smooth with the multiple-database setup upgrade. You rule Ron!

As for the rest, it was pretty standard, and only one pretty minor hiccup in regards to the Atalhuapa theme which I will outline below (and the fix below comes care of the inestimable Luke Waltzer).

Basics before upgrade
You know the drill by now: Always back up all files and the database (or in my case databases), and make sure not to copy over wp-config.php as well as the wp-content directory.

OK, done with disclaimers, now for some preliminary steps before copying over the WP 3.0.1 core files, make sure you
delete the wp-content/blogs.php file for those upgrading from WPMu (which is whom this tutorial is for).

You will also need to change the .htaccess file, particularly the line pointing to wp-content/blogs.php, which now needs to point to: wp-includes/ms-files.php

This line in our .htaccess file now looks like this:

RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/(.*) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]

You should also delete your wpmu-settings.php file located in the root install directory.

If you are like me and you are using SharDB to spread your sites/blogs across several databases, you need to update to Ron’s Rennick’s latest version of SharDB.

And where ever Ron is, Andrea is not far behind (or is that vice versa?). In order to ensure that all the blogs using the default theme (which was Kubrick) are changed to TwentyTen, include the following call in your wp-config.php file (a tip you can find thanks to Andrea here):

Our default theme define in the wp-config.php file looks like this:

define(‘WP_DEFAULT_THEME’, ‘default’);

And to contextualize this a bit more, we changed the twentyten theme folder name to default, and moved the old default theme files for Kubrick into a folder called Kubrick for any of the faithful who still want to pursue it (be sure to make it available in Super Admin). Now, all sites on UMW Blogs that once had the default Kubrick theme now have TwentyTen automatically–which also means Menus will work for all those sites, and there are a good number.

Finally, I was sure to upgrade DSader’s More Privacy Options plugin before upgrading given it was throwing errors in the bavatuesdays WP 3.0 setup, I keep the new version of this plugin in the wp-content/mu-plugins directory.

The Actual Upgrade
Now run the upgrade by simply copying all the core files and directories, except wp-content and wp-config.php, into your WordPress install.

After that, go to http://yourinstall.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php and upgrade the database, cross your fingers!

If that works, go to Super Admin–> Update and updates all the individual blogs, this will take a while if you have a lot.

Finally, in the Dashboard you’ll be asked to add a Nonce Salt to your wp-config.php file. Something like:

define( ‘NONCE_SALT’, ‘yoursuppersecretkey’ ); to your wp-config.php file

The Ongoing Aftermath
The upgrade should then be done, but there may be some cleanup. For example, Luke Waltzer pointed me to this fix If you were using Ataluapa in WPMu, you’ll find none of your customized header images in Ataluapa are there, it returns to the default. This is because the theme is looking for the file wpmu-settings.php (now deprecated) instead of wp-settings.php. A quick find and replace of wpmu-settings with wp-settings on the following three files in the Atalhuapa theme did the trick for me:
functions.php
functions/bfa_header_config
functions/bfa_rotating_headers.php

And, that’s about it thus far, it was all rather smooth in the end. Though I am sure many more issues will emerge over time, I’m sure they will prove resolvable and I am quite relieved—especially given 3 sites within sites (what would now be called multi-networks?) http://greenwoodlibrary.org, http://facultyacademy.org, and http://hamptondigitalhumanities.org all survived unharmed. Saying that, I was also relieved to see that mapped domains were also left intact.

And what’s more, Ken Newquist at Lafayette College sent out the following email to the wp-edu mailing list, and it provides an excellent list of issues and updates on their road to an upgrade to WP 3.0. I’ll reproduce it in it’s entirety below, and it is very good to know new activations of Next-Gen Gallery may have issues:

Everyone,

Back in June there was some talk about WordPress 3.0 and its compatibility (or lack there of) with popular plugins and themes. We’ve recently upgraded our production instances of WordPress to 3.0, and I thought I’d give a rundown of the the problems we encountered.

==More Privacy Options==
The plugin continues to work, but it generates a PHP fatal error when you edit a site’s properties as an admin, making it impossible to save configuration changes. The latest version of the plugin fixes this problem.

==nextGen Gallery: Ignoring MultiSite directory options==
nextGen Gallery has issues with WordPress 3.0 multisite. While existing installations are working ok, folks who add the plugin after the upgrade get this error message:

“Directory wp-content/gallery/ didn’t exist. Please create first the main gallery folder !”

The problem is that Blog Directory Path, which is a network-wide option set under the super admin menu, is no longer being respected at the per site level by nextGen. If you manually set the site’s directory path using the site’s ID (available from the main site directory list in the super admin view), then things work properly, but the default setting is now incorrect.

The plugin author is aware of the problem, and is working on this and other MultiSite-specific issues for the next release.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/41200…

http://code.google.com/p/nextgen-gallery…

==nextGen Gallery: Slideshow links don’t work on a static home page==
If you insert a nextGen Gallery into a page, and then make that page your home page, the link to the slideshow will not work.

==Anarchy Media Player==
Anarchy’s settings page no longer loads under WordPress 3.0.

==Mandigo (theme)==
The Mandigo setting page doesn’t load if you’re using Mandigo 1.40.1. It works properly with the current version.

==Mandigo + nextGen + WordPress 3.0==
Here’s a very specific bug — Mandigo uses an older version of JQuery in its theme, one that doesn’t include a particular method that nextGen needs. This causes a fatal error in NextGen, which then causes the JavaScript portions of the Mandigo theme to stop working.

That’s about it, and I’ll be sure to blog any and all issues, problems, or fixes we come across, and I am sure there will be more than a few. In fact, I have to do this fix for Userthemes, thank you Boone.

My blog contains over 600 posts, but my longer writing typically goes to more academic outlets like journals. Thanks to the help of the amazing folks at BYU’s Scholar’s Archive (our institutional repository), much of my peer-reviewed work now has a stable home online, too. I’ve gathered up links to these peer-reviewed articles as well as whitepapers and other long pieces on a new page called Articles. While, it’s not a “complete” collection of my writing (e.g., few of my book chapters are there yet), it should be enough to cure any amount of insomnia. Feel free to poke around when you have absolutely nothing else to do…

I’m very happy to announce that BYU has just received a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The pilot project will examine the deeper learning and cost savings that can be achieved when open textbooks replace traditional, expensive textbooks in public high school science classrooms.

15-20 public high school science teachers in Utah will replace their expensive, traditional textbooks with open textbooks from CK12.org for the 2010-2011 school year. Approximately 2,000 students will be impacted by the changes. Most will use printed versions of the books, while a few hundred students in one-to-one schools will use the online versions of the books on netbooks or iPads. Teachers will continue to supplement the CK12 books with additional resources and activities just as they have historically supplemented expensive, traditional textbooks.

Because expensive, traditional textbooks have to be passed from student to student over 4-7 years, students are typically prohibited from marking in the books in any way. By contrast, because the open textbooks are so inexpensive as to be considered consumables (from a budget perspective), students will be able to engage these books through active study processes like highlighting and annotating. These active study strategies may promote deeper learning for participating students. This difference provides a theoretically grounded reason for us to anticipate OER being more educationally effective than their expensive, traditional counterparts.

At the end of the school year, test scores of participating students on the state of Utah’s Criterion-Referenced Test (CRT) will be compared to the CRT scores of nonparticipants in comparable classrooms. We hypothesize modest gains in student performance for those participating in the study due to their ability to utilize active study strategies with the open textbooks.

Throughout the project we will carefully monitor costs associated with the use of the open textbooks for comparison purposes. At the end of the school year we will report on the comparative costs of using open textbooks in traditional public school science classrooms. We anticipate curriculum cost savings of approximately 50%.

OER have not yet had the impact they are capable of making. By empirically demonstrating that OER can simultaneously promote deeper student learning and save districts and schools significant financial resources, we hope to catalyze significant a uptake of OER in public schools.

Image credit: Thomas Hawk’s No Dark Sarcasm in the classroom

I’m not sure when I got derailed from the Summer of Love, it was all going so well. And then the bastards, scum bags, and profit-driven web denizens seemed to hang over my thoughts like a dark cloud. I’ve been brooding a lot, and generally gnashing my teeth, in fact I’ve found myself pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet. And whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking peoples hats off — then, I account it high time to get back to some tinkering. And the only thing I know how to tinker with is WPMu, which is now gone, so I started playing with WP 3.0 and BuddyPress for a project I am working on (more on this anon).

And for the last few days I have been hacking around in 3.0 and BuddyPress, and doing some research into what is working on UMW Blogs and what isn’t in terms of plugins, themes, etc. And what struck me as I was searching for updated versions of plugins for WPMu (as well as themes for BuddyPress) was just how brilliantly James Farmer has turned the hard, GPL-licensed work of many a WPMu plugin developer that once lived contently on http://wpmudev.org into a subscription-based business model. I mean, it’s as if all those plugins on WPMuDev that the WPMu community consulted and used for years have all but vanished behind a pay wall.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are still a few free plugins there, but the original links to WPMu plugins like Dsaders Userthemes, More Privacy Options, and his Sitewide 3-in-1 Multi Widget Panel have strangely morphed into plugins behind the pay wall. Let’s take a look how this whole SEO, google-inspired, redirect scam works.

So, I look for the 3-in-1 widget and I get to the above wpmu.org page (no link there from this blog, which reminds me that I need to clean up my database, which has become inadvertently full of links to the premium.wpmudev.org site—given the old links to the plugins on wpmudev.org are now all redirected there….scummy). This post about the 3-in-1 plugin is on wpmudev.org, and was submitted to wpmu.org for the WPMu plugin contest sponsored by Farmer and co. for the last few years, and has since become one of the top hits in google for getting this plugin.

Now, what happens when you click the link to get his plugin….

It seems subtle, but what happens here is that wpmu.org is pushing you not to the plugin site (which seems all but gone off wpmudev.org), but rather a plugin cobbled together by the wpmudev premium team that has the same ideas and functionality as dsaders 3-in-1 widget, with one huge difference—its not free to download. Its locked up with the rest of the history of WPMu behind the premium pay wall. And you might say, oh well, such is life. WPMu is defunct now, and those plugins would just be so much internet kipple anyway, so no big loss. In fact, Farmer and his ilk are doing us a favor—they are keeping us clean and honest, not unlike Apple. But what strikes me here, is that those plugins are just as relevant as they were two years ago, we still need to display content from the tags blog in UMW Blogs, and a whole public space of development happened on Farmers server, and when the time was right, he commodified all that work and development to make his brand, seal is google dominance (which is insanely impressive, btw), and I guess he had every right to. He provided the space, and ultimately that means he dicatated the terms. The terms were pretty unilateral in retrospect, and a lot of great work seems all but lost now

And just in the event someone says the example above is an isolated case, let me give you yet another one that I stumbled on while trying to piece together a site.

More Privacy Options, which used to be a plugin that you could get on wpmudev.org through a straight link: http://wpmudev.org/project/More-Privacy-… (I link to that plugin in this post from 2009) and if you follow the link you’ll quickly see it has been transmogrified into a way to sell Farmer’s premium service plugins (links as capital remains its own crazy economy, and one farmer has figured out very well). It points to a page selling their Privacy options for WordPress MU plugin (almost exactly the same plugin as dsader’s, with one or two tweaks for sitewide settings). So, the bava has become a way of driving traffic, and by extension advertising, wpmudev’s premium subscription and I didn’t even realize it. I’m gonna need to erase a whole series of links from my database. Now doesn’t that seem scummy? Not even a redirect to the plugin which is now in the wordpress.org repository, why? Fact is, all these plugins are still relevant, and this link-laid scam makes it seem as if they are all pay-to-play now—how is that for stewardship of a community?

Is there anyone else out there in the WPMu/WP community that sees this shit going on and is like, “Jesus, wpmudev can suck it!” Sometimes I wonder, and add to that they are the only folks pumping out BuddyPress themes, and it would appear that WPMUDev are the main developers for the flagship projects like multi-site and BuddyPress in the WordPress community. Once again, the Google manipulation works, and the emergence of wpmu.org and wpmudev.org as the dominant sites for wpmu, buddypress, and beyond is all too apparent to me these last days of rusty searching.

But then, there is a light, a strong beacon I can hold onto: this list of free (can you imagine that?!) plugins at CUNY’s Academic Commons gives me hope for an developmental education community around blogging, multi-site, themes, and plugins that is not all about link baiting for Google juice to control the world. Long live Boone Gorges! Oh wait, and then there is the awesome work by the hit squad at UBC’s OLT, featured beautifully in this wiki page on their Management Framework development.

My only question is, can the free and open rebellion survive when the essence of the web, a simple url, is being hijacked for profit or eliminated all together by the gold-lined app revolution?

The world is increasingly divided. The world is increasingly bitterly divided. Of all the things I worry about late at night, lying in bed unable to sleep, the almost absolute absence of civility in our nation’s political discourse has loomed largest lately. Everyone on the left seems to think everyone on the right is a moron. Everyone on the right seems to think everyone on the left is a moron. The louder you scream and the meaner the things you say, the greater standing you seem to have in your political group. The recent round of vilifications of “Republicans in Name Only” and “Democrats in Name Only” provides a preview of what may soon come – an America where radicalism (i.e., actions and words showing your allegiance to either the radical right or the radical left) becomes the primary political currency. There is precious little room left for those in the center who put pragmatics before ideology and would rather discuss and understand than accuse and belittle.

(It sort of reminds me of Lady Gaga, and the way that the music industry has become a contest to see who can pair the most outrageously pornographic music videos with the most yawningly mediocre music. There’s precious little room left in that industry for talented people who just want to make great music but aren’t willing to take their clothes off while doing it. But I digress.)

In my humble opinion, the “open” space should be the world’s foremost exemplary showcase of tolerance. We should be models of “open”-mindedness. And we should be the most open-minded in our thinking about openness itself!

The idea advocated by groups like the Open Knowledge Definition or the Free Cultural Works crowd that there should be a litmus test for openness really bothers me. Deeply bothers me. What is the point of crying from the rooftops that some content is “Open in Name Only?” Why must we, the “open” folks, be in the business of ideological purging like the politicians? If someone has gone out of their way to waive some of the rights guaranteed them under the law so that they can share their creative works – even if that action is to apply a relatively restrictive CC BY-NC-ND to their content – why aren’t we praising that? Why aren’t we encouraging and cultivating and nurturing that? Why are we instead decreeing from a pretended throne on high, “Your licensing decision has been weighed in the balance, and has been found wanting. You are not deemed worthy.” Why the condescension? Why the closed-mindedness? Why the race to create machinery like definitions that give us the self-assumed authority to tell someone their sharing isn’t good enough?

Why isn’t the open crowd more open-minded?

And I have to ask… Has their really not been any useful intellectual advancement in this field since Richard Stallman enumerated the four freedoms (1986) and Bruce Perens laid out the Debian Free Software Guidelines (1997)? I think the last decade has shown that content is different from software in meaningful ways. (For example, there are no objective tests to tell whether or not modifications of a still image, video, piece of music, or essay have improved that creative work.) Clinging to statements of principle laid down for software (apples) to help us think about all other creative works (oranges, bananas, kiwis, etc.) ten or twenty years later just doesn’t make sense to me. By slightly reworking the four freedoms or the DFSG, statements like “Freedom Defined” and the “Open Knowledge Definition” seem both (1) unwilling to acknowledge the important differences between software and other creative works and (2) all too anxious to find ways to exclude people from the club and tell them they’re not good enough.

The original OpenContent License (1998) was a simple modification of the GPL. But within the year I felt that was a poor fit for content. The Open Publication License (1999) rethought some of these problems and took a new approach (laying the structural foundation for the Creative Commons licenses). And we’ve seen additional problems since the OPL was first released in 1999 and Creative Commons followed in 2001. My relatively recent statement on the definition of the open in open content takes another new approach to operationalizing the construct “open” – one that is informed by lessons I’ve learned in the last decade. It’s not a new license, but new thinking a decade later about a broad framework in which everyone who shares can locate their activity. It’s goal is not to exclude, but to include. It’s goal is not to arbitrarily declare what is good enough, but to describe the options available. It’s goal is to be open and inviting, not judgmental and standoffish.

I wish we could get over our innate need to feel superior to others by establishing frameworks that allow us to judge them as inferior (and yet, at some level, that’s what this post seems to be doing, isn’t it?). I wish those of us who associate ourselves with the open community would be more open in our thinking about many things… especially openness itself.