Probably the best overall aspect of using WordPress is its seemingly never ending library of plugins.  In a school setting with primarily Mac’s one easy way to capture Video (with Audio) is to use the program Photobooth – easy to use – fun for students and staff.  To post and embed one of these videos into WordPress is simple using the plug-in WordTube or the Add Video button.  WordTube works with the latest version of WordPress as of the time of this writing (2.9.2) and easily accepts movies from Photobooth.  You can download version 2.2.2 directly from Here – or better yet add it through WordPress directly – see Podcast Below.

First off the advantage to using WordTube is that you can resize a movie, embed it directly in a wordpress post/page and use a built in player to start and stop.  If you use the built in Add movie button in wordpress you will save time but the movie will open in a different windows and will appear only as a link in your post.

Here is a Podcast on how to get WordTube, convert – upload – and embed a movie from photobooth nicely into A wordpress Page.

Here content created from a teachers Macbook in Photobooth uploaded to WordPress.  Here is a sample movie from Photobooth Embedded into WordPress using the WordTube Plugin.  (I also embedded my screen podcast using this plugin as well).

I came across a great plugin for WordPress today that simply makes your website look good and work easily on an Iphone.  The theme is called WPTouch and it is free and setup is almost effortless.

You can download the Plugin from the admin console of your wordpress, and simply click Activate.

After activating the Plugin – Here is a screenshot from an Iphone.

The Plugin Preserves media content and images, and overall makes reading and navigating the website pleasant from an Iphone.

You can read more about the plugin from the authors website here.

If you are not happy with the default settings, you will find under the wordpress settings WP-Touch panel – almost all themes icons, colors are customizable.

When it comes to online documents, collaboration and storage most people probably think Google Docs right away. Without taking anything away from Google and its excellent selection of free services – I want to mention another cloud based system that offer better functionality in many respects.

One of the biggest complaints I have heard about Google Docs is its inability to import complex documents and its lack of features as a word processor. If you have shared these concerns I would suggest you check out Zoho.com. Zoho is very similar in functionality to Google Docs but just comes with a more full featured word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation applications.

In addition to offering full functional clones of Excel, Word and Powerpoint – Zoho offers a variety of online tools making it probably the most overall complete package in terms of providing a full suite of productivity tools online.

Zoho is a free service for individual use – Interestingly it has been rumored that Google is considering buying Zoho as a way of upgrading its current services.

With the eminent release of Office 2010 online – Zoho might find itself lost among the major players.  Still will an obvious technological advantage over Google Docs I would not be surprised to see the Zoho logo become a large G for Google.  (Easy way to catch up if Microsoft Online System is better)

Here is a screen shot of Zoho loaded running its Writer Application.  Notice the tabs across the tab – much better set of editing and formatting features than Google Docs.

Here in the district we host our own webserver, an mysql database running websites.  Many of the sites I use WordPress as a basic template since only a few staff members are interested in coding a site from scratch .  In 3 short years of using this code I am impressed with the size and diversity of plugins, add-on’s, themes, etc most of which are available free.  Here is a free plugin that I came across awhile back that work great, does not require any membership or outside service, and work with the latest version of wordpress 2.9.1.

This plugin is easy to use, efficient and effective.

Plugin is called  Quizzin (http://www.bin-co.com/tools/wordpress/plugins/quizzin/).

Quizzin can be added directly to your wordpress installation by clicking on Plugins, search for Quizzin and then click Add New, then search for Quizzin, and click Install and Activate.

From the admin Console you can now easily create and insert a quiz directly into your website – free, fully functional and fully contained within the code of the website.

To use this plugin simply login to the admin portion of your wordpress site and then click on Tools – look for Create or Manage Quiz.

Now click on Create New Quiz to get started.

Once you have a Quiz Created you can Now click on Manage Questions to start creating the quiz.  Easy and functional.  Using the editor you can easily create and add questions.

Here is a short 3 question quiz using the plugin.

With the Quiz ready I simply add the code ["QUIZZIN 1"] without the quotes and the quiz is automatically inserted into the post or page.

If you like this pluggin you may also like another plugin by this same author called Surveys – very similar to Quizzin.

Surveys can be found here http://www.bin-co.com/tools/wordpress/plugins/surveys/ .

On our district website http://www.dist228.org we have online calendars used for a variety of purposes.  Each School has their own calendar which contains events for the school year and every computer lab & mobile lab also have online calendars used to sign up and reserve the resource.  To implement this we use PHP scripting based on that of Calendarix (http://www.calendarix.com/index.php) .  These calendars are simple, functional and straightforward and are easily customizable as the code is done primarily in PHP.  Unlike many other web calendar services – this product gives complete freedom to customize anything since you can easily just manipulate the PHP scripts.  Calendarix has two versions available, one is the free basic calendar and the other is the advanced version which adds more PHP scripts enabling some nice added features – one such feature exporting to ICS and VCAL formats.

One great thing about PHP code is that it does a good job of embedding a website within a website.   For Example with Calendarix a mini version of each calendar is available which appears as small website.  Using the following PHP code you can insert this mini website into an existing website creating a nice mini calendar widget.

<?php
echo”<base href=http://www.dist228.org/calendars/ms/smallcal2.php>”;
?>
<?php
$remote = fopen(“http://www.dist228.org/calendars/ms/smallcal2.php?op=smallcal&date=2009-12-01&catview=0″, “r”);
fpassthru($remote);
?>

In addition to embedding the website using this PHP code I also modified the smallcal.php script removing the control options.  I did this because this widgetized version of the calendar will not keep its links embedded in the windows so it gives an overall cleaner look removing this mini control panel.\

This screen shot shows the mini calendar embedded using the original smallcal.php script with the control panel below the calendar.  I modified this script to exclude these options since CLOSE does not really make since in with an embedded webpage like this.

Here is finished product using embedded webcalendar fully working with control panel at the bottom.

Another nice feature of Calendarix is the ability to export an event or events into ICAL.

To do this only a few modifications are necessary of the Calendarix code.  If using the Advanced version this can be accomplished by just changing a couple of preferences in the Admin Control Panel.

To settings need to be changed under the GENERAL Settings tab of the admin screen.

The first setting is the number of events of recent events.  This is set to default to 10 events, this is not really that helpful because then the max number of events the can be batch exported to ICAL is 10.  Here i set this number to 400 but you could really set this to 1000.  The idea being that this way when you export you get all events for the entire year from this date forward.

The other item I changed is the default EXPORT format from VCAL to ICAL – I have found the ICS format works better with ICAL and with Microsoft Outlook.