Using WordPress to create a Wiki Area

Blog•on September 3rd, 2010•No Comments

This is a blog about using WordPress in order to create a wiki area for team collaboration purposes.

First of all, what is a wiki area? If you are familiar with Wikipedia, a wiki is a website page that can be edited by any number of people. The changes made can then be reflected immediately or can join a line queue of approval before they proceed to the live website.

The way this could play out for you is to have a spot on your church website where church members can go in and add their name next to a date/time to bring food to someone in need. It could also be used as a collaborative team effort to write a paper or even edit website content through different concerned parties.

So, first things first, there is a plugin that deals directly with a Wikipedia-type function. This plugin is called WordPress Wiki. But, I am not going to write about using this. I am going to write about a different option. My experience with WP-Wiki was that it did not function well within WordPress 3.0+.

Here are instructions to set up your own wiki page that can only be edited by people to whom you provide a username & password:

  • Add the following plugins to your WordPress admin area
  • Create a new page that will become your Wiki area page.
  • In your WordPress menu, go to Appearance > Widgets and click on Widgets.
  • Add the Sidebar Login Widget to your sidebar area.
  • Now, in your WordPress menu, go to Users > Add New.
  • Create a new user with an Editor role.  Be sure to note the username & password.
  • Go to the menu item Restrictions > Pages.  In this area, choose to ‘Restrict Selected Roles for selected pages.’  Put a check mark next to the Page Editor for the wiki page.
  • Now go to the menu item Roles > Pages.  Here you can assign your new user the ability to become a page editor for the new Wiki Page you have created.  These past two steps will limit the pages that can be edited to just the new wiki page.
  • Now test it out.  Go to your new wiki page.  Enter your username & password.  After logging in, you should be able to double click on any text on that page to edit it.
  • Now, send an email to those with an interest in editing this page.  Give them the URL, the username & password, and instructions on how to double click to edit and to click save to populate the changes.

If you have any questions or additional information, please use the comment form below.  Happy wiki!

Moving from Blogger to WordPress

Blog•on March 1st, 2010•No Comments

I recently moved a blog from Blogger to WordPress and was quite impressed at how easy the process was.  Here are the basic steps written out below:

  1. Set up a new WordPress blog.  Full instructions here.  Also, the hosting company GoDaddy makes a WordPress blog set up super easy.
  2. Once logged into the admin area of your blog, find Tools within the menu options.
  3. Click Import
  4. From here, you can choose a number of different Blog options in which to import from, including WordPress.com, Blogger, and LiveJournal.
  5. If you choose Blogger, just sign into your blogger account, choose the specific blog to import, and click the button to proceed.  This will move over all posts and comments associated with your blog.
  6. Once everything has been transferred over to your WordPress blog, it’s a good idea to forward your Blogger blog URL to your new WordPress domain name.

If you have any questions about this process, let me know.  The reasons to move to WordPress from Blogger are numerous.  The main reasons I moved my music blog from Blogger to WordPress were the availability of thousands of templates to choose from, a number of Plugins to add incredible functionality to your blog, and the ease of use.