I also cleaned up a few custom plugins that I’ve used on ClioWeb and various other sites. These two plugins, CW Author Base and CW Page Categories, do some simple stuff, but they’ve been handy to me, so I’m sharing them here in hopes that they’re useful to someone else.

• CW Author Base—This is a really simple plugin that lets you change the base for author URLs in WordPress. You can already do this for categories and tags in WordPress under the Settings tab, but not author URLs. I think this should be part of the core, but its not. So, if you wanna change the author URL base, save this file as a .php
• CW Page Categories—Another very simple plugin that lets you add categories to a page. It includes a template function called cw_listcategories() that you can use in the sidebar to list pages under a category heading. You can also return an array of pages with cw_getpagesbycat($cat) and replace $cat with the category ID.

As always, if you have suggestions for improvement, or add you own code to these plugins, please share!

Even though I had taken a digital history documentary class a few years ago, it still surprised me how much work creating a podcast involved. Like Dave, though, I’m pretty happy with what we came up with, despite getting a little rushed. Dave did a lot of work at the end, so most of the credit for the success of the first show should go to him. Thanks, Dave.

Our plan is to roll out a new THATPodcast show once a month. In February our show will cover Omeka, the free, open source platform for managing collections and exhibits now in development at the Center for History and New Media. We’re going to time episode two with the public release of Omeka, so be sure to check back next month!

ScholarPress

CHNM News and Dave have already pointed this out: Dave and I have started ScholarPress, a suite of WordPress plugins with academics in mind. We have two already out in the world, being downloaded as we speak, and a few more in the works.

The first plugin is Dave’s WPBook plugin, which acts as a bridge between a WordPress blog and a Facebook application. I’ve used the plugin to put my course information, pulled directly from my course website, in an application on Facebook that students can add to their profiles. Just another way to make course information available to students.

The second plugin, Courseware, was originally created by me and Josh Greenberg over the summer of 2006. I’ve used it for all of the classes I’ve taught so far. It gives you the ability to manage a syllabus, bibliography, and assignments through a WordPress blog. I’ve always set up a WordPress blog for my course site, and used Courseware to publish class assignments and meetings. The schedule page includes a link to subscribe to the schedule in a calendar application; it parses events marked up with microformats and creates a vCal file.

A few other plugins in the works:

• Gradebook—a plugin that works with Courseware to give instructors the ability to store and share grades securely with students.
• Bibliographer—I’m considering making the bibliography portion of the Courseware plugin separate, and beefing it up to do multiple reading lists, reviews, ratings, etc. Of course, it would work with Courseware.
• Footnoter—Would give post writers the ability to easily and quickly add footnotes to blog posts through the WYSIWYG editor of WordPress, and have the footnotes appear when hovering over the superscripted note.
• Highlighter—This plugin would allow readers to select a portion of a blog post or page and associate a comment with that selection.

Omeka

The biggest project I’ve been working on at CHNM for the past few months is Omeka. Put simply, Omeka is a simple platform to allow cultural institutions (museums, historical societies, libraries), or pretty much anyone, to manage and publish items, collections, and exhibits on the Web. We’ve used earlier versions of Omeka to power the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and Object of History, and we’re using the latest releases of Omeka to run a few projects currently under development, like Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, which is set to launch at the end of November.

If you’re interested in getting on the list of beta testers before the public release (which is early March), visit Omeka’s website for more information.