Razvan Antonescu

As you might know I’m a big fan of using WordPress as a CMS. There are different mods and plugins for different purposes but so far I haven’t seen a full CMS plugin for e-learning. Today i Have found out about ScholarPress Courseware a Buddy Press plugin that seems like that optimal solution for an Open Source E-Learning CMS.

Of course this, as many other e-learning open-source solutions might not be ideal for an university but here are a few cases where it might work perfectly:

• Tutoring: If you are a teacher or a student that offers private classes and you want a low cost solution
• Trainers: You started a small business on training others on various fields
• Schools with low IT budgets
• Online counselling

Below you will find a list of features and a presentation video. This project looks so good that I hope it won’t be abandoned and become incompatible with future WordPress releases

BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware features:

• Class Dashboard
• Courses (Works for both learning models: European/United States)
• Bibliography
  • Web API’s integration with WorldCat/ISBNdb
  • BibTex Import
• Assignments
  • Responses
  • Forum integration
  • Gradebook
  • CSV Import
• Schedules
  • Calendar
  • Month, Week, Day view
  • Integrates with Assignment due dates
  • iCal export
• Customization using an external CSS

BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware presentation video:

BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware from Stas on Vimeo.

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Today, by chance, I’ve discovered one of the greatest resources on WordPress that I’ve seen this year. I’m talking about Vladimir Prelovac, a croatian wordpress developer (and at first look a pretty darn good SEO guy). One of his biggest projects is ManageWp.com. What can you expect to find here:

• add multiple (self hosted) wordpress instalations
• create groups of blogs
• quickly post articles / pages in one or more added blogs
• quickly upgrade plugins / installations

For more details you can check this post.

Usage ideea:

If you are a freelance developer that has a focus on wordpress (or even if you are a web agency), create a sample wordpress install on your server and add all the plugins that you regularly use. Once you’ve done that, add the newly created blog to ManageWP.com. Each time you will need to create a new blog, just use the cloning feature and you are good to go. Now, 1-2 hrs of working have been reduced to a few simple clicks.

TIP 1: If you create themed wordpress installs (presentation, blog, CMS, ecommerce) make as many installs as you need

TIP 2: Before cloning make sure that all plugins and WPs are at their latest version

P.S. If you are worried giving to a third party your wordpress credentials, Vladimir is preparing a self hosted version of the plugin

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WordPress › Multi-column Tag Map « WordPress Plugins

Multi-column Tag Map display a columnized, alphabetical and expandable listing of all tags used in your site. This makes it easier for visitors to quickly search for topics that might intrest them.

This is a plugin that I’ve searched for almost 2 years. Before this plugin, I have used static pages to list tags alphabetically but this was to hard to maintain (on an instance where you have more then 900 tags). Mostly is for WordPress CMS cases because it targets those users familiar with a certain niche and taxonomies within it, making it easy to locate a certain tag.

Use cases:

• Music blogs where tags are bands.
• Blogs about celebrities

In a few days I’ll post a link to a live demo

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I have always recommended (where it was possible) WordPress as a CMS platform. One of the main reasons is its extensibility and that for almost any task there is a plugin or one can be easily developed. I’m checking daily the WordPress Plugins section of WordPress.org and you can see my favorite plugins on del.icio.us. From today, I’m going to post them here too.

WP Download Codes

From developer:

The plugin enables to generation and management of download codes for .zip files.

Applications:

• Use it for any limited downloads that you might have on your WP based website (EX: release a beta software to a limited number of users)

Booking Calendar

From developer:

Using this plugin, you can add booking service to your site. Your site visitors can make booking of one or several days. Its can be interesting for hotel reservation service, rental service or any other service, where is needed making reservation at specific dates.

This post is written from the new WordPress 2.7 beta 1 that was released a few hours ago. So far so good:

1. Upgrade was without issues
2. All my plugins work
3. The new backend is confusing for a few seconds but once you start using it feels great

On the bad side I’m so curious who was the genius that changed “Write Posts” to “Add New” and “Manage Posts” to “Edit”

So if you are eager to try it, go ahead and download your copy from here