First a confession.. I missed two days of posts, I started this with the hope of posting twice every day, feeling a little disappointed.

excuses: We had a strike which destroyed any chance of work yesterday and last week had its own issues.

I have come back to a huge RSS list and spent most of the morning sifting through the chaff, I did find some interesting information on:

mobile technologies over on Kathryns blog – massive computing power in your pocket, accessible anywhere, no doubt about it.

A new plugin to research on linking facebook and wordpress (courtesy  of smashing magazine and John Eckman at open parenthesis) which I will be looking at today

a spell checker called after the deadline that looks like it may do a little more than the existing spell checker we have installed (thanks to Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day)

as well as some handy facebook tips on privacy for our next 23/14 things session.

I have also just made live a new plugin on our platform gdstar rating, it was a legacy request and survived dev testing. Its basically a little plugin that lets you rate pages with a star system and a little colosseum thumbs up/down action. Whilst the plugin isn’t that exciting I did learn some new things:

1. Read the ‘read me’ files – sometimes its all you get in terms of instructions.

2. check the forums of wordpress and the forums for the plugins for any initial or common bugs or install problems.

3. you can’t test for everything, when road testing the plugin in a development environment you can’t spend all day turning the different features on and off, that’s why you read the forums to get the common errors and a heads up on the common errors before you start.

4. If you install wordpress on top of itself, it doesn’t seem to delete the previous version folder structure, you will end up with a hybrid of the two instead of a clean install. Believe me this was a lesson well learned.

5. It seems apparent that it will be easy to put all the plugins in one place for the upgrade. It seems safer than transfering the contents of the plugin and MUplugins accross to the new server.

6. the plugins that will be transferred will themselves have new versions that will need to be retested on the new environment

7. we may require another development server, so we have a server to deal with the upgrade of the platform and also a server that has a current copy of the platform we can test plugins on.

8. Document document document. – it all need to go down somewhere, thank you for the reams of information Kathryn.

what I plan to do

So the day should be spent with :

upgrading documentation to include the new plugin

examine two new potential plugins

see if I can get a copy of the plugins in a central location

run some maintenece on the current platform

run some maintenance on the development platform

remember to have a play with the system, I’m still just starting out and play is informative and fun.

How the day ended up

the gd star rating plugin seems to be working ok

documentation for that plugin has been added to the old plugins section and a new documentation page created to deal with the new upgrade

spent a great deal of time chasing information on any changes to the unique identifier in wordpress, I was unable to find anything conclusive but learnt quite a bit on the open access plugin that is used through Will Norris and I am trying to clarify if what holds true for 2.8 holds true for 2.8.4.

I found some good installation pages as well, including this one at the web by booth blog.

I am currently seeing if the embedding a blog in facebook plugin will work, I am playing and seem to have completed it correctly but as yet I haven’t got it to work.

I have added an example to my fqacebook page and must admit if we can get it to work it will be quite good. I am a little concerned about the ease of use, this will be at a medium to high difficulty for regular users, we may be able to stramlinie it with a video or something, I guess we just watch this space.

We also decided to trail a facebook page for the library, we will give it a go next week.