In November of 2014 Brian and I had already set up our first multisite host for projects here for the SPLOT projects.
During a December meeting with the Open learning Instructional Designers we were discussing ideas about them doing work on WordPress based sites of their own to flesh out ideas for open portfolios as well as looking at doing some sort of group or network hub site for them as a group (this is still in progress at http://ideas.trubox.ca/).
In the midst about other possible projects and testing out various themes, somewhere we realized that some sort of sandbox site would be useful to experiment in rather than the hosted instance of WordPress (so we could try themes, plugins, experimental code). As almost a joke I suggested we call it a “TRUbox”… and it stuck. As I remember it, by the end of the meeting Brian and already registered the trubox.ca domain.
This site is located on the same platform as SPLOT, provide by Reclaim Hosting
This became a rather essential portion of the project landscape here. SPLOT was really where I tried out new things, and TRUbox was where we could offer sites to TRU people participating in the YOU Show (not to mention the site itself).
As of this writing there are 40 sites hosted there. I can see there:
- 19 personal sites
- Two You Show related (main site plus the Daily Challenge)
- Two sites I made to demonstrate the themes we have available (Mickey and Cadu)
- Two media collection built on SPLOT tools (Image Pool and Sound Pool)
- A version of the SPLOT Collector built by request of Susan Purdy as the Animal Body Parts site for BIO2290
- Five sites built on the TRU Writer SPOLT – two are for Ken Simpsons English classes (ENGL1110 and ENGL3740), two are development sites for online journals (demo site for Small Cities Imprint and for Undergraduate Research Journal), and my demo site of using as a portfolio of published papers
- A number of sites (6 to 7 some I have never seen) apparently for developing project, the most notable being the MOVE demo site part of a project in the Centre for Student Engagement and Learning Innovation funded by the Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training, Labour Market Programs Branch of the Province of British Columbia.
The central TRUbox site was set up rather basic, but it does list all of the hosted sites and a few announcements. We are able to notify all site admins via a network email plugin. We are are actively exploring the capabilities of the NC Cloner – Site Copier to be able to make template sites completely configured that we could roll out as needed as a more functional setup than a blank Vanilla WordPress install.
