This semester students in Karen Anewalt’s Software Engineering course (CPSC 430) will be working with DTLT to create a series of WordPress plugins/themes for UMW Blogs and Domain of One’s Own. This is pretty awesome because we could always use some development, and it gives these students experience working with clients who need particular functionality for an open source application. Traditionally students in this course put a call out to the community for projects and built applications for any takers from scratch. This model had some success, but the issue with this approach was that there was no one to take care of the application after the students graduated. Under this new approach, DTLT will be maintaing whatever they program. Major kudos to Martha Burtis for coming up with this model as well as taking the lead on organizing it. Below is a list of the projects we are asking the Computer Science students to develop. The descriptions are in italics and were written … [Read more...]
When Plugins Go Rogue
I logged into UMW Blogs yesterday only to find this garrish header advertisement in my dashboard panel: What the hell is this? Advertisement? On UMW Blogs! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! And so forth. I posted on Twitter to get see if anyone knew anything and it turns out, thanks to Scott Reilly and Kailey Lampert I quickly learned it was the Facebook Like Button. @jimgroom @andrea_r @sabreuse It’s the “Facebook Like Button” plugin. That isn’t permitted in Plugin Directory; author is getting notified — Scott Reilly (@coffee2code) January 9, 2013 @sabreuse @andrea_r @jimgroom Ewww. BTW, Facebook Like Button is the culprit (plugins.svn.wordpress.org/facebook-like-…) — Kailey (@trepmal) January 9, 2013 So, it is now deleted from UMW Blogs, and shame on us for ever giving into the Facebook-inspired “Like” web. A useless plugin with a terrible ad to remind us of our sins, it seems to me a metaphor for the larger web right now … [Read more...]