my mini wiki's rss

I've mentioned earlier that we are trying to make piece of wiki page available as an rss or json.
We played with an idea of

• using tags within wiki page to enclose the part that needs to be pushed as mini rss/json and also with an idea of
• offering content that is under headings (if you look at typical media wiki page that would be the h2 tag equivalent).

We decided to go with content under h2 only as the first idea seemed a bit risky - users could simply accidentally delete the opening or closing tag.

aboriginal.ubc.ca - semi-open community website

We are working with members of aboriginal strategic planning committee to create a web presence that will, in short term, primarily host static content about the committee and its role, and in longer term potentially grow into ubc's aboriginal portal.

There is one interesting challenge.
We need to setup 10 survey questions (textual answers only) that will be available to the subscribers of the blog only.
Also, the committee wants extended user profile so that they can see users' demographics.
As usual, we will use WP as a backend for the system and this is the plugin that we are going to use: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/extended-user-profile/. If we like it we'll also use it for blogs.ubc.ca.

education eportfolio audit project

education eportfolio

we are helping faculty of education to design wordpress-based solution to run eportflio system for its students.
huge part and important deliverable for this app is the ability for external auditors to audit the content and examine whether students have met the government criteria (number of standards that unfortunately varies year to year).

agreed so far:
olt will create plug-in for batch upload of students. Each student will get with predetermined categories (government standards - 1 to 13). Students will then have to put their entries into appropriate standards' categories.
we will divide students into cohorts (groups up to 30) There will be 10 or more of cohorts per year.
On the certain date, towards the end of students' program, - we will export all students' eportfolios (blogs) into one-per-cohort audit blog. the audit blog could be browsed per student or per standard (ie, the auditor can click on student name and see all the student entries and which standards those entries meet OR auditor can click on the standardX category and get the entries from all the students within cohort that meet that standard.)
To achieve this we are using tweaked spam blog plugin. Administrator enters the blog URLs and plugin gets all there blogs and re publishes them within the audit blog, while preserving the authors name, categories and tags and original location of the blog entry. This is essentially the snapshot oof the current date that student cannot edit within audit blog, but could continue changing within his/her own environment.

ingredients of wiki page

one of the recognized needs when reusing content at ubc is to clearly credit the department that authored the content as well as to display other pockets of information such as related links, contact info, department logo etc.
originally, we played with idea of building the extension so that user could enter this info, but we settled on much simpler, wikipedia-like approach – to use regular page elements to describe any sort of meta-data. for example, to display related links we would simply create new section of the page called “related link” and add content there. this seems like very simple and effective way to address this requirement.

syndication model - part of the page

in addition to syndicating the whole page we are looking into ways to republish parts of the page.

there are two ways to do this:
- using <feed> text </feed> plug in that uses tag to enclose the parts of texts that need to be republished
http://jimbojw.com/wiki/index.php?title=WikiArticleFeeds_Extension or
- push the content from under each of the subheadings only.

we’ll also provide the feed of recent changes (standard mediawiki feature) and other standard feeds.
both of these approaches have potential problems : <feed> could be easily broken or edited by different users (intersecting <feed> tags). pushing the content from within the certain subheading automatically does not have this kind of problem but it could be broken if the given section is renamed or page is reordered.
in order to use this functionalities we would have to build system that will notify the user when their part of page has been changed or deleted. tbd.
we’ll also provide the feed of recent changes (standard mediawiki feature) and other standard feeds.

syndication model - the whole page

ubc wiki, built on the top of mediawiki will provide various ways to republish content; any page on the site will be available for republishing and subscription through these formats:
- rss(RSS 2.0 format)
- json (javascript)
- raw html
- mediawiki api

ubc wiki

we are finally getting close to having our vmware environment (hosted by University IT) ready.
we do have big plans about this wiki. quite megalomanic, actually.
we want it to be ubc's coolest website, robust content management/publishing system, intelligent course management system along with first ever usable learning object repository, e-portfolio that actually makes sense, and possibly few other things along the way (you name them)

in the next few blog entries i will try to tackle few important decision points and how we may forward with those.