WordPress MU

I have now been working with WPMU for a while now. In the start of '06 I launched a WPMU-powered blogging portal for one of the largest danish newspapers in Denmark: http://www.urbanblog.dk/

And now I see a lot new usages for WPMU since it's gotten mature when reaching 1.0. I do have a few wishes though:

1) Ability for users to upload header graphics for their template

2) A built-in sitewide feed that works (the current one at Urbanblog is not functioning at all)

3) A built-in sitewide tagging/category feature (like the ones at wordpress.com or daria.be)

4) A statistics plugin that works well from /mu-plugins/, am currently considering FireStats.

I am willing to contribute to the following model to see some progress here:

- Set up a Fundable group or so, contribute money to the development, follow the development, make sure it gets done

- When done, ship as open source for everyone

I am thinking we could use something like rentacoder.com for this, or a local from this forum, but who's up for it? I am thinking we could be five people putting 200 bucks on the table each. Making 1000 USD for the above projects. Too much or too little?

boetter,
You still have the problem with shortstat?

I do, and actually while it was on all new blogs got a weird error message saying Wordpress wasn't rightly configured and sent to an un-existing install.php page.

Did you use the version I posted here:
http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2195&replies=8

1) That's theme dependant, not a WPMU issue. You're going to have to build that into the themes, for the very simple reason each theme is going to have a different header image size anyway.

2) Works for many folks, including me.

3) I'll get to the write up of this someday. It involves editing files which i know will go over so well around here. *sigh*

4) I got shortstat (One of them at least) to work fine for me. What I would like to figure out how to get new database tables created upon new blog creation. I'm doing it by having modified the new blog function but, again, that means modifing core WPMU files.

drmike,
I have shortstat working for me with no core file changes. You can try it from here:
http://www.ringofblogs.com/wp-shortstat.phps

Let me know if you face any problems?

For anyone who supports the use of a forum over a wiki, just consider that this thread has gone way off topic and that there is no way to reattribute the content onto a suitably named topic, AND the old topic has been stemmed by talk about shortstat.

mrjcleaver,

You are right and it is my fault - sorry.

As for boetter's idea for funding, I'm in.

Don't worry, selad, we go off-topic all the time.

So, how do we rearrange this forum content so that people coming in don't find content filed under the wrong topic title?

How do we move the useful talk about shortstat to somewhere people would expect to find it?

Any answers?

Maybe a Moderator like drmike can delete some of the non-related posts here. The info about shortstat is here:

http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2195

Given the 3hours sleep reference, maybe the moderator is already over-committed.

People are given power in forums once they prove themselves invaluable. By then, of course, they don't have much time to spare, especially not for tactical stuff.

A strategic decision would be to enable the community to do this type of task for themselves.

Just arrived back at the office, great to see a lot of activity!

For drmike:

1) I know, but if someone could make the backend work, I wouldn't mind integrating it to my themes. I don't see it as a big change in themes (just a different call for header graphics). But rather a nice backend where preferably you could put dimensions (like 720x230) in the themes' functions.php and the header uploader could read that file. Would that be possible?

2) It works technically, but it keeps showing up old items. At the moment I have 881 blogs running at Urbanblog.dk and it doesn't really work that well. Take a look here:
http://urbanblog.dk/wpmu-feed/

Today is oct 23, but one of the posts in the feed has this pubdate:
<pubDate>Fri, 13 Oct 2006 18:12:08 +0000</pubDate>

3) But wouldn't writing it be easier if you were paid to do it? :-) I can easily see why you're frustrated with the community, but really I am just trying to find a solution so that we can all benefit from your knowledge :-)

4) I also have some things where I would like to find out how to execute functions on new blog creation. A clear lack of documentation.

Has anyone worked on Firestats for WPMU?

I fixed the sitewide feed, it seems to have been an old version I was running. Sorry about that.

I am still very much looking into both the header upload, sitewide tags and some good stats. Shortstat really doesn't work that well.

How hard would it be to make Firestats mu-plugins compatible?

As said before, I would be willing to pay for it and then later on release it for open source usage.

I have coded a stats plugin (was tired of looking for one that suited me) that uses a single table for stats, has an admin page where to see the stats, and has a sidebar widget for a hit counter based off it.
The good thing about it is that everything's in one table which is good when you have thousands of users, and when you want to extacr stuff from it like "most visited article today" etc.
Screenies:
http://www.creerunblog.fr/stats1.gif
http://www.creerunblog.fr/stats2.gif
http://www.creerunblog.fr/stats3.gif

Thing is, it's really not release material, since i really never planned to release it. Everything is hardcoded in french, as well as table names and stuff in the code. Also it's running off a nightly from april so there might be some changes necessary. I don't have the time to make this code clean, but if anyone wants to and is not too scared by the above mentionned constraints I can imagine giving the code away.

Looks awesome! I'll give it a shot - my french shouldn't be too rusty anyway :)

Please email me source code to p (a) studinski.dk.

Merci :)

Stutley: Would you mind publishing it when you're done? Since we're both danish, a danish version would be great. Or rather just an international one that could be translated from the .PO files. Possible?

Sure. I'll probably gettext it :)

You know what I just love?

Statistiques Du Blog.

I just love it.

I think we should keep "Statistiques Du Blog" as the name for the plugin. Just for the beauty of it. I love it too.

It's quite beautiful even without the French, I'd love to try and get it working at edublogs.org.

J'adore le nom. :)

Ah, oui, c'est un nom extaordinaire :)

You guys are wonderful :-)

Yeah looking forward to the stats release.

I wonder where the idea went for contributing for developers. I think $200 is a steep entry fee for people who just love WP and WPMU and want to see it prosper. Maybe the admins could setup a paypal fund and allow even for micropayment donations to get the ball rolling, no?

abhic: I believe, and I might be wrong, that a specific project would be the best way to go.

If we could agree that we need a super stats solution, then we could start a fundable.org group around that. Let's say we want 200 USD as a compensation for quenting's work, we could be ten guys contributing 20 bucks each.

Now you could then contribute to several projects, but I agree, the entry barrier should be lower.

I have these current needs:
- Proper stats
- Proper sitewide tags/tagcloud
- Proper sitewide search
- A way for users to manipulate their themes, could be editing CSS, could be uploading (in an easy way) a new header img or so
- Some simple MU additions to SK2-mu-edition, like auto-approving comments from users that are logged in.

I wonder if I share these needs with others? I think we should then start collecting money and then finding the right developers. Afterwards ofcourse release it for opensource at wpmudev.org.

I agree with you on a bunch of those.

Proper stats (I just had some success with shortstats, but requires individual auth)
Proper sitewide tags (going through this today and what a headache)
Proper sitewide search

Themes - I am wary of this for security reasons.

I am surprised the WP community hasn't embraced WPMU yet. Those people aren't being funded per se, are they?

I do believe they have some sort of funding for Automattic, not sure how much or from who. But Toni Schneider and his True Ventures are heavily involved, that's also partly why I wouldn't want to contribute money to a big WPMU pool. I want all of this to be public, and not like the stats plugin at WP.com which is not available for anyone (as far as I know, but did Le Monde buy it for their new WPMU installation?!).

Let me know what you think about the security issues involved with themes editing. I wouldn't want people to edit and execute PHP, just CSS and stuff like what Jason's Customicer does.

Hey boetter, you on msn?

I am, add jacob (at) boetter (dot) dk

abhic, have you had any luck with the sitewide tags?