 Hello everyone, and welcome to the 4.30pm to 5.00pm session of the 2021 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are pleased to introduce the presentation, an easy-to-implement Open Simulator front-end with WordPress and W-4 OS. Our speaker is Magic Oli. Magic is an infographic from Belgium. His early work was the creation of one of the first CMSs. He works in web design, web development, and network management. Early on, he embraced 3D worlds and created Speculose World in 2011. He developed some in-house solutions for Speculose Grid, including an installation setup for Debian, enhanced some existing solutions like a unified set of helper scripts, and contributed to the OpenSim core. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions, and the full schedule of events. The session is 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 OSCC21. Welcome everyone, let's begin the session. Hello everybody, thank you for inviting me and thanks everybody for coming. My name is Magic Oli, we said that. Today I will speak about our project W-4 OS, which means WordPress for Open Simulator, and I tend to say W-4 OS or W-4 OS, makes sense. But first, let me tell you how we got there. The OpenSimulator set up journey, download and install. What could go wrong? Well, first, they have, they are a huge lot of configuration file, but that's not the main problem, they are well documented. The problem comes from when you try to add features. They come from plenty of different places, use different languages, different protocols, and it's not always easy to find the latest ones. And for a public grid, the first feature you'll want to add is online registry. Here again, there are several existing tools, last updated, it's somewhere between yesterday and 10 years ago. When we started the project, they were known for the most popular CMS WordPress. By none I mean there was something, but just bit of code split in several different git repositories, nothing ready to use. So not only did I want to have a solution meeting my needs, but also I wanted an easy solution to be available for everyone. So why do I want to make a single solution, the website and the online registry registration? Yeah, I won't speak long about that, but mainly for uniformity. And also, a one-stop shop for all web details is really cool things. Avoid as much as possible installing stuff from different source. After that, it will make it easier in the future to use grid data to make dynamic contents on the website. And of course, there is the integration of commercial solutions, which are really easy to implement on the WordPress, social media, of course, and the professional look. The main thing is uniformity. Okay, so WordPress is one of the most popular CMS, so a lot of people would want to use this one as a first choice. You always find people ready to help you because a lot of people know it. It's free open source, ready to use nearly out of the box with a few skills. And it's a smooth learning curve. So you can start easy and then add feature. There is a lot of huge catalog of additional teams and extensions. So it's ready for a small project, but also for a big project. Okay, all girls. A full solution, of course. That is the point of it. It's centralizing everything on the same place. Easy to set up. Okay, that's always a promise, but we try to do it. Importantly, theme agnostic. Some solutions come with pre-styled boxes or blocks. And if you use a different team, it's nightmare to override everything. So we go the other way. We make it as simple as possible and let the theme do the stuff. Same thing for the e-commerce. We don't want to implement the e-commerce inside. We just want the plugin to be ready for existing e-commerce solutions. And of course, it must work for grids, for standalone, hypergrid or not, free of commercial. Okay, that was learned before going to the real point, but no. What's the status of way for us right now? What do we have already ready? Read info and grid status. That's the first thing you want. You see the examples on the right of two different blocks of grid status. One with the simple theme of WordPress. The other one customized for a speculo website. You can use blocks. You can use short codes for those who already know WordPress, sidebar widgets. And there are also admin dashboards to see the main, most important things when you come in your admin section. Next, yeah, the splash page. It's included and you can customize it, but it's included with the latest news of your website and the grid info blocks. After that, you can do whatever you want. Okay, know the big stuff. Avatar registry. User can register. They can choose an initial avatar which you set up when you, from the admin console, you create your default account. You just choose what is the name. It's default by default. And yeah, that's it. So they come in with the, they are not root or at least not root 1.0. You have web profiles. So profiles are available on the website with the basic info about text, the profile pictures. You can reserve some names. So people in public cannot use a name like default, admin, or even the name of your grid. So on the speculo, you cannot register a john speculo or admin speculo. Anything and the same by default. But for general use, of course, you can still create some from the admin console. And the other big stuff is the asset server. It's not a big picture because it's a big feature. But it's just one click. The asset server, it's not easy to install and it's needed by every website solution. So we integrated it. And it just one click and it's automatically recognized and configured for the plugin. I'm very proud of that. There is also a basic configuration diagnostic. So you when you go to the status page, you see the if there are things wrong, instead of the okay mark, there will be a sign. And it gives a few hints on where to change the settings in the any file. It's based on the configuration, the robust configuration, because it is the place where it needs to be correct. So that was important not to say on your website that the welcome page is welcome and on your any file to say it's splash, for example. Okay. There are other features. I will not cover them here, but there were the main ones in my humble opinion. So that's it for the current status. And in the future, we want a profile edit page with some parameters like forward mail messages, or things that are not available in the viewer. Yeah, the one I cited is available on the viewer. But offline messages with mail forwarding, it's something we want even if it's implemented in OpenSim, it still doesn't seem easy to configure. So it's a workaround solution mostly for the mail forwarding. Same for the other helpers. Some are available in OpenSim now. But for example, the currency, if you want to implement another one, everything. Maps must be there because you need to have maps on your websites. After that, you have region controls for admin and for users. Full commerce integration, as it is now, it already can use e-commerce via the user roles and capabilities. Capabilities, I don't know. But yeah, we want more efficient commercial integration with the products, templates, files, and things like that. I put it on the wrong place on the list, but for admin region controls and user regions control, we need to have a remote server connection. For now, we only use database. So to start and stop a server, we need to implement the connection direct to the server. But the goal was not to change too much from the initial setup of OpenSimulator. That's why we went on the database way. And really, I think I really want to see in the future is decentralized service. But this is a big project and it will be probably implemented with integration of other tools. But the goal would be for different grids to be able to talk together and share or not their search results and things like that. In the integration, we will integrate our own other projects, including the to do IP events project, which is fork of the IP events, the initial no different project. So we made a fork, it seems to work well, and it allows people to share events. But it will be integrated to be so we can be used inside the viewer. For now, it's just via events boards. We have also a teleport board which could use info from the server with the regions and the regions names and things like that. Okay. I think I covered the most important. No, you just need to see it in action. So I've set up a demo grid. And it's already in use, of course, for our own website. If you want to try and create test accounts, just use the so it doesn't mess up our statistic. And okay. So that's it. Thank you very much. You can download the plugin from the WordPress directory or from GitHub or from our website and we try to make it good. It's speculus.world, not that arg. It's way for us that arg and speculus.world. speculus.world. Okay, well, we might have time for one question. Otherwise, that was very interesting. And I look forward very much to seeing more development about this. Okay. Thank you, Magic, for an informative and interesting presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out 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 five o'clock p.m. in this keynote region and is entitled Open Simulator as a Distributed System, the Future of the Metaverse. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC 21 Poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid resources in OSCC Expo 2 region along with sponsor a crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you again to our speaker and the audience.