FeedWordPress and Admin Menu
You may have noticed that I redesigned this blog just recently (or, you didn’t because it’s been about a year since I last blogged). In redesigning and restructuring, I came across two WordPress plugins that have been very helpful.
For one, I needed a page that would display posts from my EchoDitto blog and EchoDitto labs blog. I probably over-engineered this (in fact, I know I did), but rather than keep it simple… I downloaded and installed FeedWordpress. This plugin reminds me of Feeds (and Feed Aggregator) for Drupal – it basically does the same thing. I can pull a feed in from anywhere, and it creates posts from that feed as posts on my site. You can see this in action here. I set it up to automatically categorize posts in a certain category, and then created a page template to have it display posts of that category using <?php query_posts(‘category_name=echoditto’); ?>. This is the part I’m sure I over-engineered. There must be an easier way.
In any case…
The second plugin I am using is called Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu. Another comparison: this one is quite like Administration Menu for Drupal. It provides a nice admin menu. It removes the standard sidebar admin menu and instead gives you a horizontal one at the top with dropdowns. You can customize colors, remove the WordPress admin header (as I have done here).
Other than that, the plugins I have installed are relatively standard. I’ve made some theme tweaks (this one is from WooThemes), including adding a “Post a Comment” link in the left sidebar for each post and changing the link colors to NOT be a hideous red (sorry theme developer, I do love the theme though). I still need to fix instances of text running out of appropriate areas (twitter links in the sidebar) and figure out how to actually blog on this thing regularly.
4 Comments to “FeedWordPress and Admin Menu”
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I love me some FeedWordPress, and it is what we have been using on UMW Blogs, and what is engineering my Digital Storytelling class this semester:
http://ds106.umwblogs.org
If we do an open version of ds106, I want all the blog to feed into some kind of site like ds106.us, and hopefully have people add their feed (using the add link widget/plugin) and you have a self service aggregation hub, and one feed for the whole class. You would also need to maybe categorize from there, depending on how many do it. But it could be enough, you also run a twitter plugin through that blog which automatically pushes out the posts and the course hahstag. All very simple, and you have a badass course management system in for which it counts, creating and sharing—as well as owning all your own stuff.
What other plugin you need now is subscribe to comments so I’ll know if and when you reply.
Just added subscribe to comments – thanks for flagging that
never even thought of it. When you talk about aggregating feeds I almost always think of Drupal, to be honest. Feed API and Feed Aggregator does what you’re talking about REALLY well. But I probably think that because I work with Drupal a lot and am in that mentality.
You could def. customize the add link widget in wpress to have users categorize their own feed, which would probably cut down on having to maintain much of it. There’s also my custom widget (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mycustomwidget/) that would be good for this I think.
Anyways, curious to see how the open version of ds106 will look. When are you working on it?
I don’t know, when do we start working on it? I wanna blog the idea and kinda work through the process of how the design will work, but it would be cool if we all kinda just set up a server space, share the ftp info, etc. and started playing with it.
I’m gonna buy ds106.us right now to make it official.