I need your help. I have a new project that will include features of Wordpress that I’m not that familiar with and I need some ideas on what plugins you’ve used in the past to accomplish these types of things.  The site is being built for a Chicago-based group of individuals who just want to get together and have fun by posting topics to the site, and displaying information on upcoming events in the area.  The owner of the site would like to see the following sections:

Streaming Music

Music files, likely in MP3 format, will be loaded dynamically into a player on the site where the visitor can turn it on or off at will.  The idea is to give the visitor a taste of Soca music from the Trini community.

Social Events Calendar

The events calendar, preferably a page on the site that displays upcoming events in the area, will be the highlight of the site and the events need to be advertised throughout the site in order to gain interest in attending them.  Site admins can enter the events through the WP admin.  An option to register for the event is a nice-to-have, but not necessary.

Photo Gallery

An easy-to-use section to visitors to upload photos to a gallery that can be displayed to all visitors.  This requirement is somewhat vague right now, but I imagine that each user who wants to submit photos will have to have a registered account on the site, and upload the photos after they’ve logged in, making them instantly visible to anyone who comes to the site.

Contacts

I’m thinking this list might be a directory of individuals who have chosen to allow their profiles to be publically available, showing their contact information at various social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.  The Media Page plugin does a nice job of displaying the media links of the site owner, but doesn’t break it down into individual user profiles. Possibly an extension of the user profile would work nicely here.

Check out my progress on the site as I update it to match some of the suggestions that you will provide here.  Visit Croiseepeople.com.

I downloaded Wordpress 2.7.1 today at work with the intention of using it as a collaborative tool for my team to track development plan items for discussion. We have our own renegade web server with a LAMP stack installed, so it only took me about 5 minutes to put the whole thing together. Wordpress is so stinking simple to install as long as you have easy access to your database.

So by the end of the day, I had a running copy working on our production portal and had user accounts assigned to the 5 of my team members along with a welcome post to kick off the conversation. I’ll update you later as to the success of this experiment. I have a feeling it will go over pretty well since the team is pretty tech savvy and really strive to get more Web 2.0 tools into the company.

We are also toying around with the notion of building a wiki to store all of our documents and processes. TWiki and MediaWiki are the two that we’re working with at the moment. Are there any others that we should be considering? Since we’re a small group, just about any tool will be easy for us to install. I’m interested in your feedback, so let me know your results from testing both blogs and wikis in the enterprise.

In an announcement made by Sirius XM recently, the company is introducing a higher quality live Internet feed which they will begin charging for in the near future.  I received the following email today with information regarding the change to their online stream as well as an indication of the price adjustment that will be required for anyone who does not renew their service on or before March 10th, regardless of whether you just renewed.

This has me wondering, with the coming release of the Sirius Star Playr application in the iTunes store (supposedly set to $12.99 initially), is Sirius XM setting themselves up here to try and retain a customer base that may already be deciding to switch to free Internet streaming elsewhere?  What exactly is the future of satellite radio?  I mean, I love my XM subscription because it keeps me entertained on my drive to work and back without having to wait through 90% commercials, but should I really entertain the option of extending my committment with XM to longer than a year at a time?  I just don’t know that I’m ready for that committment yet.  And if that means that I won’t benefit from the Star Playr application being on my iPhone, then I guess I’ll have saved myself the $12.99 for the app plus the $35.88/yr for the streaming service that Star Playr relies upon.

I’ve been testing out a new theme over the past week, converting all of my widgets as necessary to support the changes in the theme formats, and finally built up the courage to enable the new theme on the live website.  So, you’re looking at it.  It’s called “Illacrimo” and the link to download it can be found at the bottom of the site.

While I was working on the conversion, I noticed a couple of small bugs in my Twitter Visual Stats plugin, so I made those minor changes and the new version of the plugin is linked to the downloads page.  If you have previously downloaded the component, please grab a new copy for your blog.  If you haven’t tried it yet, take a look in my sidebar to see how it might look on your site.  As always, let me know if you run into any other bugs, or would like to suggest some improvements to the widget. Also, I could use someone’s assistance in publishing the download to the Wordpress site. I have the SVN account created, but have no clue how to upload my content off of my Windows workstation.

Are you testing a new Wordpress theme or plugin that you don’t want to release to the world until you’re completely ready?  Test your Wordpress blog offline by setting up a simple test site using actual content from your live blog site using the import and export features of Wordpress.

Setup

If you aren’t familiar with the process of setting up your own offline webserver with PHP and mySQL, you can check out some free resources on XAMPP, which according to the website:

“XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.”

Find the XAMPP software at: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Export Your Live Blog Posts

Your Wordpress blog (version 2.x) has a built-in feature that allows you to export your entire list of posts into an XML format that can then be read into another blog, which you will already have running offline.

On your live blog site:

• Open the Tools menu
• Click on “Export”
• Click the “Download Export File” button and save the XML file

Import Your Exported Blog Posts

Now, log into your offline site and import the file:

• Open the Tools menu
• Click on “Import”

You will see a list of options like the following (click to view full size):

To work with the above exported file, choose “Wordpress” from the list and continue below:

• Browse for the location of your exported file from the export steps above.
• You will have the option to download and import all of the linked images as well, which is a good thing to do ONLY if you have a small set of posts that you’re importing, otherwise this step could take quite a while to complete.

That’s it! Hopefully, you will now have a copy of your production blogs posts in a non-production blog site running on your local PC or laptop which you can then use to try out new code and themes without affecting the users who are currently on your site.  Happy Blogging!!!