 recording is on there we go okay so so the community chat topic today is beyond blogging so what we were kind of thinking was kind of highlighting other uses of WordPress I know you know we we we get to talk about how good WordPress is for you know digital identity and presence and of course we're big fans of the blog around here but we kind of wanted to highlight some of the other cool things you can do with WordPress of course splots is a big one a whole category forms type stuff but there's you know there's a lot of different things so I think we'll kind of share a couple examples but we really want people to just kind of butt in and just go hey this is a cool one that I am have seen or have done or want to do like one of my examples I'll probably I'll share if I have time isn't actually an example but just something I want to do with it so I I guess I can start by kind of mentioning the the the first community chat which is around the domains community site templates that I put together that was using gravity forms I think that itself is a pretty cool example of you know it's beyond blogging it's not a it's not a blog related use case I'll throw the link in the chat to the state you version of the template site you can see from the from the front end of it but also share my screen here in a little bit as I get my stuff together also while doing that welcome Tim Clark welcome Nick big fans so this is the community template here let me make this bigger easier to see so the long and short of this one if you haven't seen it now I'm not gonna spend a ton of time talking about it because like I said we've talked about it before but I think it's a decent example of what we're talking about here this is a site designed to collect screenshots and examples of cool things people are doing right so basically there's a form at submit site and you can fill it out there's a title URL you can upload a screenshot you can give your your site that you're submitting a category you can type in a description put the creator of the site's name in and you know what their context is obviously this is geared towards being used at College of University so you can say I'm a student faculty or staff member and then finally you can put your email in that so that they could be contacted if it ever need to be updated or something like that and what it does is it uses gravity forms on the back end to feed in that information and create a post based on it whoops and so as the form is filled out you know entries go into gravity forms and posts are created as part of this workflow in the main WordPress posts area and then finally I'm using a post-grid plugin to control the layout and it's a pretty this is just a free plugin I don't have it particularly fancy looking on the front end you can just see it's all it's doing is displaying WordPress posts by category right now there's only one site in here so these categories will only show one thing but if you had a bunch of class projects you can filter by that you could add other WordPress categories to you know make that filtering work just based on whatever categories you want so like I said I don't want to spend a ton of time on it because we've talked about it before but I think it's a pretty good example of the type of thing we're talking about where you know from if someone was unfamiliar with WordPress or or maybe like blogging CMS is in general they might not imagine that this was made with something like WordPress they might think that this is something that you need like a web developer to make potentially but I am definitely not one of those and I really just cobbled together a couple plugins to do this and in a way that anyone could so that's like I said I think a good example maybe Jim do you want to share an example here too why Taylor I just might happen to have one so I do I've been thinking about this a bit and I'm gonna make my screen a little bigger because I can actually you know do this so ready oh yeah okay so watch this this is actually something I just blogged about and I'm pretty interested in this because we created this at UMW in 2010 Kathy Derrickie in particular and it really and you talked about the stuff when we were doing the Gravity Forms workshop earlier this week about Onianta and it reminded me that Kathy Derrickie basically created this is just it was basically called faculty notes at some point and it was a biannual print of basically professional notes of what faculty staff and other folks had done that year it was printed twice a year and she had the idea of look we just want to make it easy for folks to share what they've done on a weekly basis and then those posts that come in weekly are emailed out to everybody in the community and then stand as a standalone blog post for each of the particular faculty members so this is loading right now this was all done with Gravity Forms you can see this and this was back in 2010 11 so you get a sense that I confirmed with with UMW that they didn't change really anything so this has been running in the same way using Gravity Forms for about a decade and I'm really interested in this because it's still used today if you looked at the post that I just showed this thing is still kind of this is June 2nd 2022 faculty are still using this it really points to the use case that Ed talked about for kind of making some of this stuff that right now is very manual copy and paste posts into emails or into WordPress this is all self-service it's vetted on the back end and it's super clean and I think I saw Alan join the so I couldn't not give Alan some love because this is the other example after Eagle Eye this is Inspire created by Linda McKenna and Rachel McGurk with the help of Alan at UMW and if you look at this it's very like this is early inspiration I think for inspiration for Splabbits right using Gravity Forms I believe Alan you can correct me on this to actually get people's the idea behind this was a student would submit work in the class that inspired and it would become a kind of postboard of all the things so it's not a blog in the same way it's a database of cool shit that people had created and shit and the final one which I love is this is by Martha Bernice this was one of the last projects before I left UMW I like this site because it's a gallery and I think she was using WordPress tool but Gravity Forms was the main tool and basically it's a workshop to build animated gifts using GEMP or Photoshop and then you submit those gifts and so these gifts not only show up here but then they are actually cycled into the video wall in UMW which is a physical wall so that people can actually see the gifts students created on a video wall in physical space and I always thought that was just a ridiculously cool example of how a WordPress blog using another kind of toolset could become something completely like not only a tutorial site but a visual database but then also linking in with the physical video board within what is called now the Hurley Center at UMW so super cool stuff those are the ones that get me excited recently especially because I'm digging in on Gravity Forms so I'm trying to be reminded what I can do so anyway that's that I will now get bigger ready Steve Martin got small but then he got big I can go next very quickly I have one from Carlton Sites actually which is called panel story let me quickly grab this and share my screen I keep losing my tabs that's great every time I'm sorry I just had this open if someone else wants to go first they can I feel very silly now I can share maybe my favorite spot that I feel like doesn't get talked about a lot how about that so real quick okay so this is oh right that's a bug Taylor has I didn't kick him out but I had I had just you know thought about it it's it's it's great when I in this case I actually just closed my grab so that's all but this is a it's actually an archive I don't have the original site as a WordPress anymore but it was made using Ellen Levine's plot point plot and a lot more I'm sure he could share more information about it but you Google it there's some information about how it works and everything but I really like it because it's kind of the only way I do presentations now I don't do a lot of slides I've never been a big slides person but when I do slides I do them on the web so anyway I love it because it's really simple it's really just you know what what your slides end up being is of course a website and if you you can upload for each slide you can upload an image and put your title in you can also I don't have any subtitles on this one but you put text below the title and then of course it is a page so you can put stuff below the page so the thing I always liked about presenting with this is that it kind of enforced the you know like it helped me not do the bad PowerPoint thing where you put everything you're gonna say on the page right in my case what I would do is I would show this demonstrate what I was doing and then this below part served as sort of notes for folks after the fact and I really like that that's kind of how I chose to use it anyway and one of the other cool things about it that you can't really see but you'll take my word for it you can also navigate it with your left and right arrow keys so that's kind of nifty and yeah it's a cool way to make you know a presentation using wordpress so that's why I'm a fan cool I now have all my stuff prepared so I can actually share my screen correctly this is the panel story which is a project by Eveta Jusova from Carlton and what it is is it's a collection of interviews with the inhabitants of a particular apartment building that is everything is half in English well not half in English everything is duplicated into check so that you can go through I can no longer read the menu so this is my mistake hop back to English but you can go through and experience the project in English or in Czech which is the native language that these interviews were conducted in and it is just a collection of people just talking about their lives and their experiences in this apartment building but it was made using polylang which is a wordpress plugin that duplicates your content into the languages that you've specified so I worked on Carlton did a migration of some of its sites and I helped to work on this migration and I don't speak Czech so polylang was a very important tool for making sure that everything got put together neatly and I just think that's cool and I can drop that in the chat and I'll stop screen sharing now I've got something to share maybe to get us a little bit away from splots I started thinking about this year sharing failed right give me a minute to someone else can go while I figure out my sharing permissions sure someone else have one they want to share right now otherwise and Alan if you're back it's funny because when you couldn't see or hear anything they were talking about so it might have been the self-editing mechanism of your browser I'm gonna go with that I think you may want to put that in the chat just in case Alan can't be here I think you can okay I'll take a shot at showing a couple real quick nothing so I can't say anything so weird all right can you see this map absolutely all right so this is just one custom theme that was done up for a particular thing I think maybe it's representative of just like you can do anything you want this was supposed to help people understand gentrification and where students spent their time so you got a heat map and you got different points that they're logging in blah blah blah but it's all in WordPress with some customized theming stuff it's going a little crazy right now you can tell that latitude and longitude got jacked up but but you get the idea like it's just you know it's a thing where you can put data and then you can do anything you want with the data here's another one that was really specific with the idea of trying to create these connections between ideas and so you can make more of these little things and connect them and it was you know it's just another thing using something called JS Plumber but it's using WordPress to hold the data and do the display and then finally I showed this before but it's for blackout poetry so you can black out the words from a particular thing and then you submit it and it turns it into that's not a very good one but you know you end up with these poems create it from the source text you know just strange stuff that you can do if you want to here it is meshing WordPress posts with Timeline JS and then breaking it down where you'd have an individual timeline per category so you know again you can just like take the data take the display of different things and mash them together so like to me WordPress is always like it's just whatever you feel like it being so I don't know that maybe it's too big a statement but like you can do anything with a little bit of effort which is cool yeah did you know is that Timeline JS to WordPress plug-in is that something that you built on top of because I know there was one but then you were developing something along that line like is that usually gettable I still think Timeline JS is such an elegant tool you're muted I'm sorry I made it a couple years ago and I think it still works I just haven't had cause to go back and like do it better but if like if I if I could ever get somebody who is like interested in it like to a certain level it's certainly something that could be done much better with greater sophistication but yeah I think it exists I'll throw some of those links in the in the chat I agree I'm a big fan of that too the other thing is I know as you let us know when you're ready but just in the interim how did you create the blackout poetry one in like the dumbest way possible like you have to understand too like like a lot of those are old like and so I didn't even really know how to program for a lot of them so like that one I just made a JavaScript thing that would look at the text and wrap all the text and divs and if you click on it it would just add a class and the class was like set the text to blue set the background to blue and do a little something to make the edges a little bit funny and then that stuff just is all written to a gravity forms postfield in a hidden way and so you're just submitting via gravity form so like you can you know what I mean you're kind of like Rube Goldberg in something together based on like I know a tiny bit of this and I know how this thing works so can I make can I make a contraption out of these little bits and pieces and then to me that's what's cool because then eventually you learn more stuff and you look back and be like that was a terrible way to do that I can't believe I did that but it like like Lauren said it works so I mean like that's part of the fun yeah and the thing too there is it's kind of a CSS and a you know data import hack right is that really using JavaScript is that right yeah yeah yeah I mean you just learn little bits of something and a little bit of something else you just have to not be intimidated they're like I don't understand the entire world of JavaScript right I don't understand everything about CSS so but I know this part and this part and can I just glom it together and I do want to quote Eric here saying that you know gravity forms is the hammer for any nail-shaped object I and that's why one of the fascinating things about this this month is I am convinced when I look back on the projects I didn't really understand for the last decade a lot of them might could have been done or have been done with some element of gravity which for a $90 plug it's pretty impressive anyway luckily this isn't a gravity forms commercial is Ed back back with us or anyone oh yeah he just and that keeps on leaving the meeting so I think he might be having problems with the sheet screen share anyone else and if we have issues of screen share too I can always share for them and kind of navigate we can do that too yeah and I see you're back in if we're still having problems with the screen sharing I can maybe be I can click around for you if you want and share my screen that be easier got it all right so I spent some time thinking about how could I make WordPress look more like the OER Commons and what I see when I look at something like the OER Commons is a pretty simple landing page I see a search bar I see a couple custom taxonomies that are exposed at the front end and I see a search and so I had done things in the past where I had created something splot like where I had like had students who were doing things like doing projects around the UN sustainable development goals and so we created a site that worked with the default categories we even did like introductions to each category and then we had the student projects uploaded as WordPress posts but you know it just wasn't quite cool enough for me it wasn't quite there yet and I was like okay how could I get more of this feel where we could categorize not just one way but multiple ways and the impetus for me to really dig into this was when Taylor released his community his community splot because I was like that's cool I want it to be cooler right and and and I don't mean that as a as a as a rub against Taylor because what was beautiful about what he did was the simplicity it was simple everybody could get rolling with it it was a splot but I started to say like okay what if I could make it a little bit different how would I do it differently and I started thinking about like okay in my community site what if I wanted to not just be able to categorize by the types of projects they were over on you know over on the side what if I also wanted to be categorized what it was built with and I also want to be categorized with whether it was student work or faculty work or faculty working with students so I started to think of like all these different categories that I would want to have if it was again my SUNY my SUNY create initiative runs at multiple campuses there's 64 of us so what if I wanted to have a landing page for each individual campus where they could see you know just their projects what would that look like and I could do kind of some of the things that I did in other places and I could make it sortable and filterable by both at the same time so that was kind of my goal when I went into this and I really found that by using the custom taxonomies in WordPress and again I don't code I don't do it I don't like it it makes me angry so I found a plug-in that I could manage the custom taxonomies pretty easily and I use tax opress for that and I said okay I want to build a filter that works and works with Ajax so that as I click things though that my tiles will appear and disappear because I thought that was kind of cool in the way that Taylor did it so I use search and filter and I started to think to myself okay is there kind of like a cookbook to make like a really good repository in the same way that we've found like cookbooks that make like kind of like really okay spots or really good spots by using gravity forms or gravity forms plus plus a similar yeah Taylor I can't design so the only thing that I'm able to do is copy something and I did you know with the plug-in I'm using the search the filter and search you can do a simple form and it advanced form and so I was thinking about doing that like maybe my simple form just has like type of site and built within the drop-down menu but then I have the advanced search where I have even more options available and so I was just really thinking about that of what's holding WordPress back from being like a truly great repository with really good searching and things and the thing that I haven't done yet is beef up the WordPress search because the WordPress search is really just a word search and pretty bad and so I want to integrate a better search into that like relevancy is one that I keep getting it suggested and it might be worth buying a subscription for that to make some you know some things where it's not just a visual collection but you can find it pretty easily so that's what I've been thinking about and working on is is like what would what stops WordPress from being just a really great repository it's funny to add because the things you're talking about remind me of another project I know you've been instrumental in is thinking of the what's based on WordPress Commons in the box right but talk about more than just WordPress like you had the group at the City University of New York who built that out as a social networking tool and it's funny when I saw this I didn't know and I'm so I'm asking is Sunni thinking about on top of the work you're doing filtering OERs also thinking about bringing in the social element of sharing and building some of that with a platform like Commons in the box does that make sense yeah you know what's what's kind of nice about Commons in the box is it does it for us you know when you create your site it puts the tiles on the home page each individual one has the choice of whether to put that in or not even if it's not part of the Commons in the box install you could still connect to it via RSS and still get a tile on that page so you know it's not so much the community site that that I was trying to solve here I was more trying to build community and you know the really hard thing the answer is okay what is domain of one zone we've all we've all struggled to give that one to two sentence answer and the easiest way for me to describe what it is is to use examples and show what's being done and so this was more drawn inspiration off of things that other people in the community talk about all the time the OU create ease how can we do that showcase of the best of the best and show that community but also maybe show how the sausage get made just a little bit so that people can look at and go oh yeah so that's an old mecha site I'm starting to recognize an old mecha site when I see it oh that's a wordpress site I'm starting to recognize those when I see it oh that's a press books and start to really think about domain of one zone beyond wordpress because if domain is one zone is just wordpress then maybe comes in a box does it better maybe I know that's fighting words in this group but like seriously you know I want to show the potential beyond which is why it was so important to me the second category added was what was this built with the only good thing there is boon who developed comes in a box doesn't even have a smartphone so he wouldn't know if we're talking shit on them which is kind of what I like I think that kind of gets into you I know I know this is literally wordpress beyond blog is the name of this but like one of my favorite things about wordpress in the context of domain of one zone is that it can be nestled in an ecosystem of other tools right like you can do things like alright we've got an OMEKA site but it's really common for people to have an OMEKA site as sort of like the repository and then the front-end site and depending on how you do it you can even beam them similarly so that you users don't even understand that there's a difference between the two we do this a lot like we're thinking about this a lot at reclaim right now with the way we do our ed tech offerings and like having some stuff we're still building out but like but like we want to have like a wordpress front-end that's flexible in a way where we can have that link into all kinds of different tools right so it like jitsie like like you know other like our headless workshop sites like all kinds of things yeah we've got a site that we're just starting to develop right now that uses that exact principle Taylor it's going to have a wordpress front as a theater and dance production studio site and you know we were looking at Zenfoto or maybe OMEKA as the as the gallery for the media so just getting this started what is I'm not super familiar with Zenfoto is that it's very similar to OMEKA or well it's there in the seat panel it's just one of those locations listed as a as a there's there's several of them that you can use as photo galleries basically you know literally your own version of flipper basically okay yeah I tried that I mean if we didn't even talk about it but I'd be interested I know Darcy Norman is one person who does this really well Alan probably another one and there's many others even here like using wordpress as a photo like photos I use Flickr but word press as a custom photo app it's something Darcy got off of Flickr and does all his stuff and I kind of love to have a sit down with Darcy and find out how he does it because while I love Flickr and I still have X amount of photos like I like the idea of my photo experience being integrated with my blog as I get off of Instagram and the rest of them you know like I like the idea one of the things I want to do with gravity forms but it's not a technical challenge as it is a social challenge is I want to make like a for my family and extended family essentially social network but not not all the features right but I'm thinking like a gravity form that's literally just like the you can give it a title and post a photo and that's it and the objective for me being less sharing of pictures of my child on social media but again much more social challenge is a technical one so yeah it's interesting too I mean the one you brought Tom the post you linked in the chat about the continuum of the made-of-one zone and wordpress multi-site me for me like it's not even fighting words because I think there's just depending upon what you need it's both it's like there's some real good places for comments in a box but you probably don't want to run that on the cPanel server right you probably want to have your own space for it there's a whole bunch of different ways of thinking about all of those tools but like for me it's just even down to the basic level of a cPanel instance wherever all the stuff you can do with wordpress right like none of this is limited to a special setup whether it's the main of one's own wordpress multi-site or whatever like it's pretty much the open source like think about it for a second if you will and this is I'm killing time till someone else shows some more examples of dude but domain of one's own is essentially what a lot of these tools were talking about it's basically wrapping cPanel around wordpress and integrating wordpress and using the open source plugins that we have access to and some of them obviously a premium to make this work whether it be shibboleth whether it be you know allowing dashboard access on a kind of restricted level like we built our infrastructure on top of wordpress so like you could say wordpress is not a blog for us it's actually you know the wrapper of a hosting company's infrastructure which I think really when I think about wordpress I think like it really is the limit as if building infrastructure for your company and think about how many sites you go to on a daily basis you know like I know this company did this in wordpress well and then top of that we're we're looking at moving more of it right like that that's kind of the thing is like long long term we would want even more of it inside of wordpress if you know it to give us that control over it that's the great thing about wordpress right I definitely have a habit of like sniffing out wordpress sites now where either you throw a WP login on the URL or inspect it and go ha that is a wordpress site in a way that I didn't before actually you should you should share the tech bar appointment process if you're willing to I think that's a cool yeah sure can you hear me okay yep cool okay well I will try sharing my screen alright I'll do my window let me just pull up oh the same thing happened with the screen sharing permission so somebody just give me a second sounds good I can kind of mention it because this is something that or I guess if you just want to share your screen sure yeah I'll talk to her so far still have a login on this site if you need me to lock in that is true so the tech bars if you aren't familiar with it it's what we it's staffed by students and it's what we use to support the main of one's own and oh the meeting and so the main of one's own is one of the majority of our appointments but we also do like we have a studio you can book studio time and you can get help with video production and all sorts of things so this is a site completely built in wordpress and we're using a plugin called bookly for the appointment system so if you want to click just go through just go through the appointment process so you're able to select the service and you can choose for either in person or online and I would just do yeah online so then it will show you what if you can keep it on any or it will show you the ones that are available we only have one student working this summer so that's that and then the next is just choose the time and it'll tell you since it's since he selected any it'll tell you who it's with and then it has some additional questions on it and some of this is conditional logic as well it won't ask you if you have a website if you're doing a video or a video appointment and the one for is this for a class if you hit yes it'll drop down more information because we do have a lot of professors work in either domains or we video projects into their class and then you can hit submit booking and that's all good I do think you might have to I don't know it's required on this page to be honest but it'll go through and oh those are required okay um you'll get an email you'll get an email of a reminder you're able to cancel it and the person that's booked gets the email and we have it integrated with Google calendars so all of the workers can just see appointments at a glance in our Google calendar so yeah and that's just the booking side we also have a blog attached to the site and our basic about and all that kind of stuff yeah I think that's a cool one and like how much like I know I know because I was I was there as this was being created like we spent a lot of time at SNC figuring out how we could do something like this on a platform that would be like affordable and because there's there's things to do this but not not a lot to check every box there of like multiple people you can register with and calendar integration and things like that and bookly was I think by far the most full-featured and cheap cheapest option and it was in WordPress so we could integrate it in the stuff we were already using so that was a really cool one yeah the best thing with bookly is it was a one-time purchase it was not a subscription and all of the add-ons then you can like sort of pick and choose to like add more functions to your site so we have quite a few add-ons going on but those are still only a one-time purchase because we were using meeting bird but then it got bought by something so then we had to find meeting bird had some significant restrictions because we couldn't do things like have the concept of multiple people you were meeting with we were only able to take one meeting at a time there even if we had five people working oh or maybe we're paying for the pro I don't remember exactly all the things there but the fact that we could do it that way and and do that on bookly I think the only ongoing cost is support but like it was it was kind of a no-brainer yeah and honestly I I haven't I mean I haven't had to use the support it's been working pretty fine and it's pretty easy to they have their own sort of customizer of like appearance but then I we also have some CSS on in the additional CSS thing and WordPress doing our own stuff so yeah thanks I did want to I I don't want to throw Lauren under the bus so I'll jump in here and it's interesting that Tom should see that one of the things that we played with recently and I kind of dig it and I'll just show it to you quickly and Lauren found it and she did all the work so Lauren at any point if you want to jump in or not that doesn't matter I just wanted to make it know I'm like here's a really cool example and let me kind of get rid of myself this is an events calendar plugin and I think Tom linked to the right plugin but this actually is what we're using for some of the reclaim and text stuff and just to get a sense of it but like this fully plug and I think I don't know if it was like a hundred bucks or whatever but it actually like integrated into our main WordPress site and created a whole kind of booking event system where we could link out like it's pretty amazing and the work we had to do on our side on the back end was you know I don't want to speak for Lauren it might be more than I'm assuming but I mean at least from my point of view like it was pretty seamless as an integration and getting us up and running with a really well integrated events calendar to a site that we're already running I love it so like more and Jim to your point I mean in terms of plugins and how those can generally go you know this one was fairly simple to get up and running which I appreciate and it's pretty lightweight as well you know it doesn't seem super bulky or heavy for the site and it's very robust so that's something that was super exciting for me I like that you can have different options for the types of sites or the types of events that you want to pull in and then the views that you want to show so there's a lot of settings on the background in the background to configure that based on what you know we're wanting to highlight or show and so I like the list versus month options this plugin also has a lot of different add-ons there is a free version which is what I started with and then very quickly was like no it's going to be worth it to just go ahead and get the paid version but I think there's even more that we can add to it in the future around registering for events for instance or dealing with like calendar notifications I know that that's something that at least I would you know like to pursue I think right now you have that add to calendar button which is super nice but you know for flex courses for instance you don't want a calendar event that lasts a month long right so being able to say okay like the week one event for this flex course can we create sort of a sub event or something like that and just being able to subscribe to the calendar as a whole so yeah there's a lot of flexibility here and we'll continue to make this you know a more helpful space over time as we're filling out descriptions and everything but Jim that's a great point that plug-in has been really cool to work with no I've loved it now I mean just as we're talking about beyond WordPress like that's a full-fledged calendaring tool within WordPress right and that's like it's an application within an application which for some of these early plugins like gravity forms or even for those of you remember pod press like there was like oh wait like there's whole applications within WordPress now that could do you know you know when the first time that podcast were popular WordPress was building out infrastructure around it and there was video tube and stuff like that which was always hard to do video but M you're put your hand up so I'll shut up and you can talk yes well I just want to share a quick thing that one of our faculty does quite often for off-campus studies we have our learning management system which is Moodle that requires sort of a dual authentication and it's very difficult with our students abroad in different time zones calling the help desk to get authenticated abroad so what one of our faculty members does is that he creates a WordPress site to share an itinerary to share essay prompts and just to basically create his course online but has it locked down because they do share an itinerary they do share a map so only the students have access to that site as logged in users or users that are added to the site and they share a password so that they don't have to go through the authentication process but it's secure enough that they can access abroad but it's not completely public and I want to see if I can share all right is this good can everyone see my screen yep all right so this is the site is architectural studies in Europe and they go to different parts of Europe so this year was Rome this is actually a Google Maps iFrame embedding so it's not a plug-in but they just embed the iFrame and they highlight different locations like where they're staying different spots they also have the courses that are being used for abroad studies and they have their itinerary so some sensitive information is shared here that's why it is locked down so if you just visit the site it's required to have a password and even when you go into the password to add your sort of blogging experience for students they have to log in so it's it kind of has a two layer security aspect to it and they have different site visits which is great for students to just visit on their own time and they don't have to do submissions through our learning management platform and he shares the prompts for essays and presentations they have an archive of different countries that they visited before and presentations and that I just wanted to show that as a different possibility for WordPress to host a site instead of just blogging I'll stop sharing yeah that's like an elegant travel site right like almost like a travel guide site of here's where you go and use your itinerary I didn't like that that's cool there was mention of a podcaster and I know that a podcasting site for those if that's something you're interested in Joe and I can't take I'm only showing what Tim Owens already did which is a theme for me but here is the Reclaim Today site and this is a like it's kind of more of a video podcast but these are ones and there's Linda McKenna DS 106 for life but this is using I believe a plugin and theme combination called podcaster seriously simple for the for the podcast feed part which is that right in the chat yeah I just logged in and put poking around and so here it is podcast media podcast widgets seriously simple podcasting and then you know some of this redux framework I don't know I'd have to I mean see I think this is a premium theme but again Tim built a lot of this so I'm not sure all of the ins and outs but this has been pretty slick and pretty simple to do I have to say it's not too too crazy of a setup in in my mind and it works pretty well what else you got people is that publishing sure you want to go down that road you have made great strides yes Tim you're muted how about now is that better we can hear you now okay I have something I can show but it's so simple as to maybe not rise to the high standard is some of the things that we've seen but in trying to get faculty to think about using WordPress beyond blogging assignments I just invite them to use dead simple plug-in called a to z listing which turns posts into alphabetical entries by the first letter of the title and here I'll just I'm not going to try to share my screen because I'm pretty sure I'll flame out but I'll just put the link to the course site in the chat and the idea is that students are engaging with key terms or keywords I guess in the spirit of you know there's a whole genre of key terms books now in different disciplines but so they'll come up with a term and write a post that the term is the title the body of the post is there encountering it in the in the readings and then they're just all sort of sorted a to z and if you enable replies then students can comment or add or continue to grow the different entries in the a to z listing so it's a good way without there being a ton of lifting on the technical side for for faculty to kind of ease into other more creative uses of WordPress so I've actually used this a few times I wish I had a better example to show than this one but I couldn't find one while we were while I was listening but this this gets the idea anyway a to z listing is the plug-in and it works really well I mean a glossary of terms like that where you can go in I mean I already went in and I saw it like the alienation and then a comment on it that's like yeah that's that's amazing like especially I kind of love WordPress plugins like that that can be just kind of like here's one aspect because a I think it makes it easier to show people like this is what this thing does and they don't have to wrap their mind around like well first we have to talk about all the possibility you know and then on top of that like this could easily be integrated as if you did want to do something more complicated definitely use this as part of that I think another one that was kind of given to us by oh you that I think is an interesting example of WordPress beyond the blog was using a plug-in called doxify I think basically oh you created documentation for the domain of one zone early on 2015 2016 and then they basically said anyone could just import a version of our documentation into their own WordPress instance using a plug-in called doxify and then there was a combination of plugins doxify and then a find and replace tool so you could take out all the examples of you know of Oklahoma and put in another university and it was a really it was a little bit labor intensive but not much not much more than copying and pasting templates for gravity forms but that was a great example of WordPress as a documentation hub that can be shared seamlessly across it I don't have an example to point to because I don't want to go into anyone's docs but I'm sure there'll be some that people oh is it you is that what it is yeah perfect thank you sorry about that document or not that's fine I don't know what the hell that is yeah there it is I love that one that was a very useful one and you know all of our schools now have some version of that I like this because it doesn't look like a WordPress site at all right like this is full-blown documentation of getting up and running in domain of one's own created by a one school one school but because of the way the plug-in was made simple to package up find and replace names and images were still manual work and then allow other folks to import it for their instance which I thought was really pretty awesome Adam Kroom actually was the responsible party behind this and it was really really elegant so kudos to Adam Kroom I'll share on a press books and Jim's making fun of me because I've been hitting myself against a wall for the last couple days but press books is a system that's built on top of WordPress and it looks like it's just a theme if you only look at the surface level a theme that orders your pages into a specific type and gives you kind of a simple table of contents and kind of forces your content to be in a linear way but when you look under the hood of press books the real thing that it does that gives it value beyond WordPress is you can export in different versions different versions of the same document and I think the way the press books did that is really interesting first they built an export routine where you can export just a simple xhtml file of your entire website and then that xhtml file becomes the foundation of all of the other exports that they do all the other exports like an EPUB they take that xhtml file they have a custom CSS sheet for EPUBs they put it through an EPUB validator and then you get an EPUB popped out the other end which is your same exact content and when you look at the content on a PDF page it looks just like the content that is on your press books page including like doing some pretty cool things like having logical fallbacks for things like what if there was a YouTube video it'll add the image from the front of the YouTube video add a link to back to the chapter so that you could go through that and get to the YouTube video somewhere else so if I were to go to the same you know page within the web interface I look at the same page within the app it's gonna look very similar which lets us do some book publishing let's do some book publishing using press books and WordPress as its base yeah that's pretty gorgeous and press books is another nice example of just spitting out an entire like ecosystem on top of WordPress right like the tool upon a tool and you know I know your struggles have been I was one to say Herculean but you said more appropriate Sisyphean or however you pronounce that but one final thing about it that I really like all the press books create a federated network with each other and so what that means is you can clone a book from one university's press books to another university's press books without getting the backup file so if this is if it's creative Commons license and Tim Clark has an awesome you know project that he's been working on at Mullenburg and I just find the website I can pull his book into mine as long as his site is creative Commons license if it's copyrighted and they set the copyright in in the book info it will fail but if it's got the creative Commons license I can do it and I don't need permission from him and that's one of the reasons why the open education community loves it so much is because the technology works like the license does and in SUNY I'm only allowed to talk about licenses and not technology just jokes but he's not better cool that's I didn't know about the federated part of press books at all it's really cool that's yeah I now I'm like man I wish that was a thing in WordPress core but for like pages or categories of posts or something just because that that could that would be amazing what you could do with that if that was a feature maybe a plugin or something but I keep telling him to look at the way press books does it but there's something in there that he's not satisfied with but he doesn't quite tell me why because that would be so cool to you know to like I guess it's just kind of another type of blog post syndication but sometimes like like you could kind of do this stuff with RSS but I like that the license integration is there and it's not an ongoing poll right it's just like I just want to kind of grab this stuff in now you know it's much cleaner than like copying and pasting obviously once you make your copy you can make differences of course they built in a tool where you can wow tool up side by side and see what's different since the open community uses h5p so much they've made sure the cloner also pulls all the h5p data which is really important like they've done some really nice things that extend it which is why even though I'm really frustrated with them today I'm still big fans of press books yeah well it's interesting Tim you brought up the h5p thing too and like how does h5p fit into to more than a blog I'd be interested because h5p is not my strong suit I know a lot of folks like Alan if you still here built the h5p kitchen and there's been some amazing stuff but I would be interested from folks who play with that to know how that's working and how wordpress and h5p work together you might be muted Tim even though you have that honking microphone right sorry I tell folks that WordPress can serve as a container h5p will allow you to build components and then essentially embed them as iframes the same as the night lab stuff so you know as long as you sort of work folks through or we saw a Google My Maps example earlier too as long as they sort of understand how to work with that you know little little bit of HTML then they're off to the races and you know I'll defer to Alan on any anything other than that when it comes to h5p yeah h5p isn't as integrated into WordPress as it is into Drupal because it's just a little bit different but you can see here's a book that has some h5p in it already and that's working and what that looks like on the back end is it's embedded in here in doors by a shortcode so we can go in and go to our h5p content we have the full h5p content selector so you can see there's about 74 h5p interactives in this one book we can do we can import all the different types of h5p and then it kind of lives alongside and can be inserted into a post by using a shortcode and these are all developed on the h5p side like not in WordPress but as there is there's a separate h5p so you've got to understand that h5p is a series of plugins that can be installed into multiple platforms so you when you install h5p into WordPress you can be the source it's not that you're just embedding h5p made h5p.org or h5p.com you have everything that you need to both create h5p and also share and embed them throughout the internet the application all of those options h5p can be installed into our Moodle WordPress and Drupal where Drupal has the tightest integration into the way it works WordPress is like alongside it but Drupal can be more integrated that's one of my favorite things about h5p is that because you have that flexibility it gives the end user of it a lot of like so there was a situation I helped affect the number years ago with they made like a little h5p thing and wanted to put it in an LMS that I didn't have access to it was it was not one that I was administrator of but they were able to still use it in an iframe and hosted on h5p.com or.org or whatever so having that flexibility of like you can just embed it or you can do the plugin in the integration and then you have a lot more control over it so cool Tom you're up like to speak well just real quick I mean like that's the thing like you you can do anything you want like the h5p is just like chunks of code and you're keeping the data and WordPress then you can iframe it anywhere like to me that's the same thing like we built a WordPress theme that we could stick in canvas so that you could hide like the header and the sidebars and it would feel like it was stuck in canvas but on the outside it would look like a regular WordPress site so I mean same idea though like iframe to stick the thing in there and if we wanted to copy pages from other WordPress sites like I can't say anything about the legality of it but it'd be super easy to do you just have a place where you paste in the URL of that thing and like getting the content from it easy not not a problem so I mean like that's the fun thing about standardized platforms like that grabbing the stuff or putting this stuff someplace else you have all those controls and doing every one which I think is super cool yeah it's interesting too because a lot of that early on playing with WordPress for years was syndication right that whole idea of pulling a post from one site to another and thinking wow that's magic and then they can all live together but that link out to the original and yet you know that syndication platform feed WordPress is the plugin I'm referring to like there's a whole like there's NS Cloner which I understand clones entire sites and something like Trinity Western University is using that to create like cloned templates for their WordPress multi site right like so they're getting in there and their WordPress multi site it's like you want a portfolio template clone based on what we have is that a fair kind of take on on how a tool like NS Cloner works for kind of building out some of that standardized platform stuff on top of templates good cool it's good to be right well we're a few minutes over time so I think if anyone wants it needs a head out that's cool I'm gonna probably close up here in a couple minutes but I appreciate everyone who came and shared stuff as well that was really cool and we'll have recording up probably today so that was fun thank you Taylor and any major things we missed in terms of like you know I know we can stop the recording at a point but I love the idea it's like reinvigorated to get back into the idea of WordPress as platform for all these different things and then see the examples people have done like the glossary one as you say it is Tim it's still like yes like a post that's a link that's a glossary item yes like that that to me is always the exciting or had been the exciting piece of working one that comes up and I think is impressive but I don't I'm not like a huge fan