Along the same lines as a previous post regarding laptop apps, here is a list of the plugins that make the Avoca do all of the things we are able to do. First the fundamentals – running wpmu 2.8.4a and hosting here at school on a dedicated mac server. Install was done by John Kirn at TechCare and design (the stuff that looks mediocre) was done by myself and (the banners that look much better) my far more talented wife Kara Kotwas.

In a couple weeks we are going to open up our student blogs to the public which should be very exciting.

WPMU Plugins

Simple Dashboard – removes widgets dashboard for all blogs – typical teacher doesn’t need any more info than than what helps them post.

Batch Create – so happy WPMUdev Premium put this one out – allows mass creation of blogs which for our project with students is a necessity – in conjunction with others it is a huge time saver.

Blog Defaults – sets many defaults including a default theme and modifications to blogroll and categories automatically created when a new blog is made. In conjunction with Batch Create is a powerful combination to crank out 100s of blogs.

Default Categories – using this with the two directly above, we could push out categories correlated with subjects/classes students are taking. Also enables you to push out at a new category to all blogs if necessary – for example we wanted a category “Book Review” that any student could use – instead of each kid one by one we could blast it out.

Peter’s Collaboration Emails and Peter’s Post-it Notes (WP Plugin)- Peter has made two great plugins that are vital to what we are doing here at Avoca with student blogs. Collaboration emails allows review of posts by category – for example if a kid writes about Science they would check the science box.  The post is then sent to the Science teacher for review and publishing. If there is an issue with the post the Post it Notes plugin can slap a post it note right on the post for the student to review in the dashboard. Takes some manual labor to get it setup but a fantastic tool!

Power Tools – allows php commands to be sent to individual blogs or the whole site.  Here’s one example of how we use it – with student blogs I have about 80 students pre grade – rather than going to each blog and adding their teachers as administrators I can push out a command that will add them all at once. Tremendous time saver.

Tag-feed – premium plugin that creates a feed of any post, site-wide, that uses the same tag or category. We use this to create the feed “Book Review” and Feedwordpress to take that feed and create a compilation blog of all book reviews by kds.

Unfiltered-Mu – convenient, but dangerous, plugin that disables wpmu from stripping <iframe>, <embed>, etc in posts/pages. Useful but use with care.

WP Plugins

Angsuman’s Authenticated – activate this plugin and the blog is password protected.

Anarchy Media Player – makes using audio and video simple for teachers – all they do is upload and insert into post.  Anarchy creates a standard video player or flash audio player depending on the file type. We edited the video poster frame with our lighthouse logo which is easily done.

BM Custom Login – easy to use editing of the login page – put the lighthouse logo there but when I have some time there is more branding possible.

DD Import Users – batch create users for blogs and specify their roles.

FeedWordPress – creates posts from a feed which we use in conjunction with tag-feed to have all student book reviews aggregate into one blog.

FireStats – stats for your site pure and simple.

KB Advanced RSS – takes the standard RSS widget and adds a number of useful features – all of the RSS widgets are done using this plugin.

Next Gen Gallery – upload images and next gen does the rest – inserts whole albums/galleries of pictures into posts made into a slide show or browseable image gallery.

Page-Links-To – turns a page or post into a URL – in our navigation area there examples of this in action – at avoca37.org under navigation clicking Business Office takes you to their site.

Translate – creates a widget to translate content into a variety of languages.

User Permissions – using this along with Angsuman’s Authenticated enables our school board to use the site for their meeting info. Certain posts can be read by school admin, while others are available to school board members.  This plugin allows this scenario to happen.

WP-Mobile – enables a mobile version of a wp blog – is editable but the default appearance is great – is enabled for our entire site.

WP-Table - we use the original version from Alex Rabe but this is the updated version that seems to have some additions that will make me upgrade(export table to csv would be useful)

Thanks to all of the developers of these great plugins – any I am missing or ones I am using that have better alternatives?