Joe Ugoretz has kindly broken down the plug-ins that are most useful to the faculty he works with, who use a system which has features much like the OpenLab (and the commons LivingLab site as well). Basically, wordpress (and buddypress) are customizable to the degree that one activates plug-ins, which is a fancy name for ‘tools.’ I spoke about them a bit last week, such as the one that allows you to insert a calendar for yourself or your students. One problem, though, if you’re not inherently endlessly curious about wordpress and buddypress, is sifting through them, to keep on top of what’s available. Here on the commons, for example, if you click plug-ins, which you can find here:

You’ll get this:

You can see that even on this system there are presently 139 (!) plug-ins you might use. Pretty overwhelming, especially given that you might have to page through all those pages to find what you’re looking for (there is a search function, so do use that–but wordpress developers like to give things funny names). Add to that this: Around the world, wordpress developers have created (as I type) 14,682 plug-ins!

Anything we can find that helps us break off pieces that are more useful for our pedagogical purposes, then, helps. You can find Joe Ugoretz’ whole post here on the commons. Scan about halfway down and you’ll see it. It’s a very valuable summation.

More importantly, let us know if any of these are features you think will be useful for you next term! We’ll certainly do our level best to accomodate any requests.