digress.it version 2.3 was released last night and this marks the last major release of this WordPress plugin funded within the time frame of the JISCPress project. It is worth pointing out that our project funding effectively boot strapped the re-birth of CommentPress and paid for Eddie Tejeda, the original CommentPress developer, to rewrite CommentPress from scratch into digress.it. I was recently told that this work has led to Eddie being asked by Cornell University to work on a really interesting and high-profile digress.it-based project for them which we’ll be announcing soon. It’s great to see JISC’s work sustained in this way and hear that digress.it will be properly maintained through additional funding.
This release brings better IE6 & 7 compatibility, a smoother, better Comment Box, a document section level comment view, an option to parse lists into separately commentable points, BuddyPress compatibility, document section level feeds and a bunch of bug fixes. Overall, it feels like stable, feature rich code.
As noted above, we added one more RSS feature which now means digress.it can be used as an RSS feed builder. Each paragraph in any given blog post/document section, can be extracted as an RSS feed ‘item’. See http://writetoreply.org/jiscstrategyreview/feed/paragraphlevel/8-measuring-success/ for an example (and note the /feed/paragraphlevel/post_slug/ syntax used!)
I’ll be writing more in the next day or so about all the other ‘open data’ end points that we’ve developed during the JISCPress project.
Thanks for digress.it What happens now?
In terms of digress.it or JISCPress? In terms of digress.it, Eddie is continuing development of his project. He’s got funding from Cornell for a high-profile project and is in the process of taking on more digress.it based work with other public sector organisations. In this way, our employment of him for JISCPress has boot-strapped quite an intensive period of digress.it-based work for him that the wider community of digress.it users will benefit from at each version release.
In terms of JISCPress. We’ll, we’re wrapping up the project. Pulling together the code and documentation and will deliver the relevant reports over the next two or three weeks. Everything we’ve learned and developed for JISCPress is available for anyone else to use in the same (or different!) ways and we’ll be pulling much of it into WriteToReply. Hopefully, JISC will see this a prototype worth main streaming, but that’s up to them. I’m looking forward to talking with them about it.