I had previously thought about ways to get Canvas to aggregate and auto-submit learner blog posts to URL assignments, further freeing them from the bother of having to deal with conventional mechanics of the LMS. That would take significant work, and I probably won’t be convincing the Instructure engineers that this is a priority right now. But, what about going the other way around? Canvas has an open API, so why not have the blogger push their new posts into Canvas?

I have to credit Martha Burtis and friends up at UMW for inspiring this plugin. We were on a call discussing ways that their work on a syndication bus might cross-pollinate with my ideas to further extend and leverage Canvas as an open learning platform when Martha suggested this approach.

So, this WordPress plugin will do just 2 things:

1. Store your school’s Canvas URL and your personal access token
2. Allow you to send a Post’s URL to a specific Canvas course and assignment when you publish

I just began stubbing out the plugin this morning after thinking through specs on the plane. I’ll be building out the WP plugin parts in the next two weeks in anticipation of InstructureCon ’12, with the intent to work out the API calls and potentially troublesome AJAX during Hacknight.

But the import tool requires an OPML file, which can be a pain to create, and most online OPML generators create a file that WordPress won’t accept. So I scripted a quick and dirty OPML generator that takes a plain text list of URLs and turns it into an OPML file that WordPress can import.

OPML File Generator for WordPress

After generating the file, you can import it by either saving the file, or copying the file’s url, and pasting it into the link importer inside your blog: Login, then go to Tools > Import > Blogroll and feed it the OPML file. More details on the UVU Wiki.

This week students reported receiving this error:

ERROR: is already associated with another account. All accounts (including the admin account) must have an unique email address.

There’s obviously something missing from this error–the identifying/offending e-mail address! It turns out that though all students actually have a UVU-provided e-mail address, only staff/faculty addresses are sent through to LDAP. Since WPMU requires a unique e-mail address, this was a big problem. Thankfully it has a small and simple solution.

For our needs I found it easiest simply to modify WPMU LDAP (ldap_ro.php) to concatenate an e-mail address from the provided LDAP information if one was not already provided.

Paul Bearne on the WPMU LDAP list suggested a more holistic solution that is equally simple: prompt users to enter an e-mail address through a form field if LDAP does not provide one. I’m guessing Paul B. is going to script this into the plugin, but if not that’s a good task for me for some rainy Saturday, and another fine chance to give back just a little to the WPMU community that I ♥.

Set Up Blog Post Licenses

1. From within any blog post, add a new Custom Field called, for instance, “license”.

2. Use an easy, consistent tactic for marking your license. I’m using lowercase letters separated by dashes to describe Creative Commons licenses, e.g. cc-by-sa or cc-by-nc-nd. Use these marks in each post’s “license” field from now on.

Now you’re storing the license metadata on your blog’s server. It’s time to make it look cool in your theme.

Customize Your WP Theme

1. Isolate your theme’s folder in wp-content/themes

2. Upload whatever CC license images that you want to use to your theme’s images folder. Here’s a ZIP file of the CC images I use. Note how I named the images the same way I entered my licenses above, e.g. cc-by-sa.png or cc-by-nc-nd.png. This allows me to shortcut in the PHP.

3. Now the “hard” part: edit the files single.php and (optional) index.php. Find the spot you want to have your license display. This needs to be soon after the WP function the_content() is called. In index.php this needs to happen before the endwhile of the have_posts() function.

4. Write (or paste in) a little PHP. In short we need to use the get_post_meta() function to get the custom field value for this post. Here’s a quick snippet that I used to test theis approach:

   <?php
   if($license = get_post_meta($post->ID, "license", "true")) {
?>
   <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/licenses/<?=$license?>.png" alt="<?=$license?> license" style="border: 0" /></a>
<?php
   } else {
   ?>
   &copy; <?php the_time('Y');
   }
?>


   If there is nothing in the “license” custom field, it defaults to © and the post’s year.

   You can do this on both single.php and index.php or anywhere else you have post information showing.

5. Finally, upload and test!