So I’m going to talk a little more about the overall plan, expected plugin use, and managing some of the known hurdles.

The homepage:

In the last post, I mentioned my homepage issue. The current homepage is housed at www on a Windows box. I currently expect I’ll do a permanent redirect to the default WPMU blog for just the default.php page. One of the reasons is Featured Content Gallery. This plugin gives me an easy way to do something I’ve long been hounded for, linked images and movement, without Flash. I hate Flash. It’s deeply personal. I’ve tried to implement SmoothGallery, the script that spawned FCG, but it’s got javascript errors in IE7 and I just can’t get past it.

An issue I have with FCG and a WPMU homepage is that I’ll need the gallery to show images for and link to various places all over the collective University site. It appears that I’ve found an answer with Redirect, a WP plugin that simply redirects the user to a different URL based on the content of a custom field. This, plus an automatic post expiration plugin such as Post Expirator or Auto Delete Posts could go a long way toward filling my need and making the daily cleanup/maintenance fairly painless.

Calendaring:

I recently implemented Google Calendar campus wide. It’s been a positive experience, but getting upcoming events to display on plain php pages the way I want them has been a challenge. The RSS feeds can be questionable. Luckily, there are WP plugins that do great things with iCal feeds. Specifically, AmR iCal Events List appears to have promise. I’ll be able to widget an upcoming events feed onto the homepage and be done with it.

Additionally, since our Google Calendar setup has included a lot of separate calendars for different departments merged into various configurations, I’ll be able to use the plugin for many lovely department specific feeds. It also merges multiple iCal feeds…very handy indeed.

Misc:

  • I’ll use one of a variety of RSS widgets to feed “news” & a text widget or two to manage static content. Site search will utilize our existing Google Custom Search and I’ll feed Google the new urls with a sitemap plugin.
  • Moving the sites back onto the University network means I may actually be able to get the LDAP plugin working…wouldn’t that be a slice of awesome? Today, since we’re running separate WP installs, we’ve got separate logins for each.
  • Universal header/footer plugins exist for WPMU that will alleviate the current php include thing I’m doing and allow me to manage the files within the admin AND use WP tags in them.
  • I can have customized universal dashboards for all site admins. So, for example, I can push links to the video tutorials we’re working on directly to the people who need them.
  • Universal update capability means no more 3 days of single install upgrading.