WordPress MU

Yup - Yet Another Digital Photography Blog. It's a significantly hacked, older WPMU with an original theme and a couple of original plugins. Come visit my little space at:

http://shootingthekids.dpblogs.com

The nice thing about this project is we're really trying to work with the existing DP blogger community to build some cool interaction and to get new readers for everyone we're involved with.

As far as our development process goes: I think it's fair to say that any roll-out of WPMU takes some serious hacking and more than a few trips to ITDamager's site. Upgrading our site to the latest codebase is looking to be a good two day process, so we're just sitting on our hands.

We'd love to see what people think and would REALLY love for you photography enthusiasts to jump in and join one of our challenges.

Absolutely AWESOME. Hopefully when I am done, my site can look HALF as good as yours!

Very beautiful site. highlights the photos well. :)

Thanks for such inspirational site!!! I must say it will get all photographers excited!

Can you highlight key serious hacking you did to MU and what you used from ITDamager's site. Please also note your MU build date for the convinient of everyone here.

Another point of discussion would be your plans for cool interaction as a community. How would you intend to achieve that? A forum seems to be too much of a norm nowadays. What's yours and everyone's views?

First - thanks everyone for the kind words! It's fun to be part of this very encouraging community.

Sam - GREAT questions. Here are the details:

Build: r464 from December 19th, 2005

ITDamager Hacks: ALL patches released up 'til December. I'm also using his complete-site feed, but because we're on such an old version we have to use a hacked version.

MU Hacks: Mostly database related. Specifically rewrote add_site_option() to actually work. At first we just make edits to the DB, but eventually we needed it to work right, so I fixed it. I know we also have made some other DB edits, but I don't remember what they were.

Homebrew: The Flickr feed is totally custom and we use an aggregator plugin that we wrote to collect some additional information about the bloggers for when we launch our front page.

Community Interaction: The BIG question we're dealing with right now. We actually did a photo challenge that ended up getting some decent interaction. We're doing a second one right now. For details, check out this page. We've seen serious jumps in readership due to the challenge, plus we've had a few prominent sites mention us.

Comments are still horrible, but I've been wondering whether or not it's that big a deal if we're seeing real-world interaction. Same for forums. I'd really like to see some regional get-togethers happen and see people begin to interact on their own.

So that's that. Any other questions or suggestions?

Little questions...

May I know what does add_site_option does? Sounds interesting. Haha.

I like the way you work out the search page. May I know how you got the tags to work there, some plugin? Are they pulled from all the other blogs being global?
Seems real complicated cause you have features, tags and blog post search.
Also you have "Find post by date" is that standard search feature when you click on the month the search only searches that month's archives?

Little suggestions...

Great work with the custom made flickR feed. I like what I see of it. Still impressed. :))

Your challenge page is good site interaction!! So I am guessing you would be putting up the photo of the month on the front page and having a Hall of Fame kinda area at dpblogs.

I feel comments are important, as people feel good when someone talks about their works. :) Yours buggy?

add_site_option() is how you handle meta data for the site. You can create new key -> value records in the DB using it. In our version, however, it didn't work, making adding new features or changing sitewide values difficult. We just rewrote it to make it work. Not too hard, actually.

About tags, features, etc. We do all of that using reserved category names that our custom theme uses to display content in different sections of the page. For example, "Blog Entry" and "Feature" are reserved categories that tell the theme if the post should be displayed in the right or left column on the front page.

We then delineate between top-level categories and categories under the "tags" master category. All top-level categories are displayed on the bottom of every page. Categories under "Tags" are only displayed in the post meta area and on the search page.

ALL of this stuff is done using the custom theme, but it's all pretty simple stuff. We use all of the built-in template tags to display everything.

About the challenges - yes, we're planning on making our readers the stars of the site by making their comments integral (though who knows if that impacts readership - it's just the right thing to do) and highlighting THEIR work. It's really pretty common on digital photography sites, and it makes sense to us.

About the Flickr Feeder - the neat thing about it is that you can do just about anything with it. I can make it available if you're interested.

Wow! Thanks for the reply Chris! :)
Looks like I have more to learn about MU. Stuff like add site option... Interesting!

I would like to discuss in further details regarding the tags, could I contact you at an email address?

Oh yes, I think the entire community would love you for sharing your FlickR Feeder.

Nice implementation and photoes