 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 8 a.m. to 8.30 a.m. session of the 2023 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are pleased to introduce the presentation Open Simulator WordPress Interface with W4 OS. Our speaker is Gudul Lapointe. Gudul Lapointe is founder and public face of Speculus World that she created in 2011. He is a respected creator who is currently involved in the development of W4 OS, the Open Simulator WordPress Interface. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of the sessions, and the full schedule of events. The sessions being live streamed and recorded. So if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to at opensimcc with the hashtag pound OSCC23. Welcome, everyone. Let's begin the session. Hello, everyone. First, I want to apologize. My neighbor started heavy works today, and I hope it will not disturb my speech. Sorry for that. I make my best to reduce it. So I'm Gudul Lapointe, and I am 12. Yeah, not me. My avatar is 12 and Speculus Grid also. And during all these years, I faced the same challenges as most of you getting a fully operational grid and offer all the features OpenSimulator Core provides, the main ones, but not all of them. You need to install at least a web interface, web asset servers, and a couple of helpers, and for those who needed a currency server. And that makes a handful of different applications, each of them from different projects using different platforms or languages. And even when they use the same language, they use different standards. And so it's a little bit of a mess. So that's how I came with the W for OS plug-in WordPress for OpenSimulator. In my head, I say WAVE for OS, but that's up to you. And this allows to have everything on the same website, the user registration and also all the content you want to put on the website in a single place. It started six years ago. But by then, it was only a collection of helpers. And four years ago, I decided to put everything in a plug-in and chose WordPress for that, to have a one-stop shop for all needs, user registration, grid management involved, and web helpers. I chose WordPress because it's one of the most popular CMSs. So there are a lot of people already using it. And if you don't know it, there are a lot of chances you know somebody who can help you. It allows central grid management. And it should be an easy setup. And about the easy setup, I got some several support requests and I understood it was not as easy as I would want. It's already way better than installing all the third-party pieces, but there were more work to do. So I focused development on making the whole process easier. I rearranged the settings in several distinct pages. And that's the next slide, actually. Yeah. Yeah. No. Up. Right. Yes. And they are organized by their functionalities. Everywhere I could, I asked extended explanations, instructions to help users to understand what the settings are made for, what's the scope. And I also prepared, I made, sorry, a troubleshooting guide. But for now, it's only in our text file within the plugin or on the website. It will be integrated in a section later also, but it contains the most issues people were faced. I added basic translations for French and Dutch. I globally made them myself. The other ones are automated translations. So if people want to contribute to the translation, it's good. And if you wonder why there is a Wells translation, it's a tribute to one of our most creative members in Speculose Grid. So with the plugin, the first thing is the avatar registration. The plugin allows users to register an avatar from the website. The accounts are synchronized with the WordPress accounts. You can protect some names. For example, in my grid, I don't want people to register. I don't know, John Speculose. And things like that. Or admin or things like that. So they are protected. The admin can still make an avatar with those names, but from the console. It cannot be done from the website. And they can choose users, can choose their initial outfits. I rewrote totally the models settings page. The models are basically fake avatars, which are dressed with the required outfit. And they are defined by a name pattern. So in this example, any avatar with the first name or the last name being default will be listed in the models. But you can also just use a custom list. It's not something I would recommend, but it can be done. So you choose custom list and you select manually every avatar that needs to be considered as a model. And there is the web profile. So the web profile you use in the world is available on the website also. So I will make a quick tour of some of the functionality. We have blocks like grid status or grid info. So that's basic need. It's also available as widgets for the dashboard. And you have also the registration form. So you can put it in any page you want to. And it's an option, but you can enable configuration instructions once the people have chosen their avatar. They get basic instructions on how to configure their brother. But they are a viewer, sorry. You have a block with popular places. That's useful for the website homepage or the splash screen. And that's new and still a work in progress. We have the web search. In some viewers, you have in the search, sorry, in the search window, you have an option. The first option is a web search. So this allows to define a web search page, which is different from the other tabs of the search palette. So this is an example of the splash page. And as you see, I can use the different blocks made available by the plugin. Here I use the green info, the popular place, and the latest news from the website. That's the whole point of it is to be able to mix the content of the website and the OpenSim functionalities. There is a new destination guide. That's also a work in progress. It's not available in all viewers. But as you see on the screen on the left, there is a small button and then you have a destination guide. It's really useful. So I implemented that. As you see, the thumbnails are not yet there, and there will be the basic description of the places. But yeah, it works. And yes, that's the web search. So that's what I explained earlier. No, you have the ability to use web search. It will evolve. For now, it's only a search on the place, but it should allow other criteria like the rating of the place, the categories. I think it will be done in the next few months. Okay, about the helpers. The web assets servers, that's also something absolutely needed if you want to use grid contents on the website. So particularly, it's for the images. The in-world search, so that allows to use the normal in-world search features of the viewer. The economy, so that provides the web helpers for economy. You still have to install the appropriate module in OpenSim binaries, the DLL. And offline message mail delivery. It could disappear in the future, but because as I understand, it begins to be implemented in Core OpenSim. But for now, it's still there. So that's the settings for the search helpers. As you see, for all the settings, I have examples explaining where to put the settings in OpenSim configuration or robust configuration. And here are examples of the search. We've seen earlier the web search, but that's the standard search, that's for land sales, the classifieds, which are under a little bit differently. And the events, which are linked to the to-do IP events server, which allows to show events from several reads. For now, it includes the whole OSCC calendar. So I made a quick tour. The next moves. For some reason, OpenSim Core allows several avatars to share the same email address. So that was something when I discovered that I said, okay, the plugin has to allow it to. So it required a rewrite, which is still in progress. I know last year I said it would be done early 23. It's not. But this works allowed me to work on the rest. More modular architecture, better settings, and that's a part of the work that is already in the in the plugin release. The current release is with all the functionalities I showed you, it's already available on the website, on the GitHub repository, and will be released soon in the WordPress repository. So thank you. This project is a huge work. It relies a little bit on financial, financial support, but mostly on the feedback. I have already more, I've seen that more than 20 users use this, this plugin, which seems already a lot to me for a niche market like this one. And people asking me questions allow me to fix bugs and also to realize some things people need and I didn't think about. So the more feedback I get, the better. That's it. Thank you very much. I will add a few links to the project and the related links here and if there is time for questions, that's okay for me. I'm so glad you asked. We did have one question. Lisa Laxton was asking how she can reach out to you to connect with what you're doing and some of the projects they're working on. Do you have contact info for people to contact you? Yes, on the w4os.org website there is a contact form. You can also contact me directly via my avatar. I would be happy to get contacted for that. Great. So that's w4os.org for contact information. Thank you. What a fantastic session and let's see. I'm so sorry. All of a sudden all my pages decided to flip at the exact same moment. Here we go. Thank you for such an informative and interesting presentation. We love these kinds of connections. As a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out the conference.opensimulator.org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule. You won't want to miss our next session which will begin at 830 in this keynote region and it's entitled The Art of Smoothly Moving Objects in OpenSim. We also encourage you to visit the OSCC 23 poster expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information from our presenters and to explore the hypergrid resources in OSCC Expo 2 region along with the sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you again, Gadol and to you, the audience.