USF using WordPress

Neil T. | April 11th, 2005 @ 1:09 am

Are they using standard Wordpress or a Multi-User version? Would be interesting to know.

Joe Watson | April 11th, 2005 @ 3:29 am

I study at Warwick University (UK), which offers free blogs to students and staff. Unfortunately, the blogs are based on a bespoke system that works well enough, but is inflexible and badly designed. It would have been far better and easier to do like USF build around open source software. Ah well.

Still, it’s been an enormous success so far. People tend to use their blogs for trivia and chit chat but there’s a fair amount of serious academic use too. I expect to see many more universities follow suit. The blogs are at http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk

Marc | April 11th, 2005 @ 3:37 am

You may also be interested to know the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism has started a blog using WordPress.

Inside the PCIJ

Geof F. Morris | April 11th, 2005 @ 4:11 am

The only thing about efforts like this is the necessary to have continuity in the post-graduation years. Things like this would attract a strong affinity from alumni, but not enough universities like to do that kind of thing…

huphtur | April 11th, 2005 @ 5:17 am

What is the difference between these two features:”digital photo album manager based on Gallery” and “Flickr, an online digital photo management system”. Seems a bit confusing.

Michael Pate | April 11th, 2005 @ 5:29 am

It is always nice to see my alma mater (BS 1992 and MA 1997) get some good press.

Gregory Wild-Smith | April 11th, 2005 @ 5:34 am

The difference is that one is integrated into the blog - the other other is a integrated interface to a third party product.

I’ve yet to actually use flickr, I get the feeling I’m missing out, but I’m not entirely sure on what…

alvin | April 11th, 2005 @ 5:45 am

This is huge!

Syamsul | April 11th, 2005 @ 5:51 am

This looks really interesting. According to a post in one of the USF blogs, it is based on WordPress 1.2.2. But might anyone be able to get screenshots of the interface? I’m really curious to see how exactly they’ve put together a unified interface for so many features.

XeroCool | April 11th, 2005 @ 6:01 am

Neat! I got to bookmark that link, and visit it every 1 hour. Pretty amazing that they choose WP :).

Scrivs | April 11th, 2005 @ 8:26 am

Of course they implement this after I graduate. Bastards.

ryan king | April 11th, 2005 @ 9:39 am

My first reaction to the headlines was: What? Why haven’t I heard about this? Then I realized Matt was talking about the the other USF, not the one I go to.

Recipher | April 11th, 2005 @ 11:04 am

I just graduated from USF, that’s really cool. I’ll see if my brother (who is a junior there) will sign up to see what it’s all about.

Elliott Bäck | April 11th, 2005 @ 1:53 pm

Since WP is GPL, does this mean they should also be offering their modified source code back to us? The intergration they’ve done sounds cool

Mark J | April 11th, 2005 @ 4:30 pm

Hm… good question Elliott, but it appears that they do not have to:

Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public?
The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.

gnu.org

So apparently, because they only offer it to students at that university, it constitutes a private use, and they aren’t required to release the modified version.

Elliott Bäck | April 11th, 2005 @ 10:54 pm

But it’s got a public interface, which makes it a public use, right? For instance, http://mccolson.blog.usf.edu/ and all the other blogs are public… even though we can’t sign up for one, we’re still reading them. Hmmm:

It is essential for people to have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately, without ever publishing those modifications. However, putting the program on a server machine for the public to talk to is hardly “private” use, so it would be legitimate to require release of the source code in that special case. We are thinking about doing something like this in GPL version 3, but we don’t have precise wording in mind yet.

Guess not!

Eric Pierce | April 12th, 2005 @ 9:14 am

I’m the developer/administrator for blog@USF. Thanks for all the comments.

We are using the standard version Wordpress 1.2.2. I wanted to keep everyone’s blog installation seperate so I can keep track of filesystem quotas with standard tools. 1.5 came out while I was developing blog@USF, so instead of starting over with 1.5, I finished up with 1.2.2. I’m going to start on blog@USF 2.0 soon and that will be based on WordPress 1.5.

The code for blog@USF is available at http://epierce.blog.usf.edu (BTW, I think we should be considered as distributing the code under the GPL because my blog creation script copies an entire WordPress install into the user’s home directory, if we were using mu-wordpress, it would be a “private” use). I wasn’t thinking about the possibility that other people would want to see it when I started putting blog@USF together, so its not very pretty. You have been warned.

Benjamin Geiger | April 13th, 2005 @ 1:06 pm

If I wasn’t proud of my school before, I would be now. (I’m a CS/EE major at USF, running two blogs, here and here. The latter is part of blog@USF.)

And just to satisfy my glory-hog side… I’m the one who let Mark know about blog@USF. (Specifically, I pinged something he wrote from my USF blog.)