As you publish media content to a WordPress-based website for your school, church, or other organization, it makes sense today to further amplify your photos and videos through “digital signage” in your organization’s physical building(s). While a wide variety of commercial software programs are available for digital signage, our church has been utilizing the FREE software provided by digitalsignage.com for the past year.

Last week when I was in Denver for the 2012 EDUCAUSE conference, I was captivated by not only the digital signage in vendor booths but also digital signage in many of the stores on 16th Street. It is remarkable how powerful and effective digital signs can be from a marketing standpoint, especially compared to “traditional” signs which are static / unchanging.

If your organization wants to invest in a digital signage solution, you’re typically going to need both a software solution to “drive” your signs as well as the hardware (televisions and computers) which will actually display them. There’s no getting around the purchase of physical hardware for digital signage, but it’s great to know digitalsignage.com offers a free software option. Users can either opt for a free or paid-version of mediaCLOUD, or self-host content using mediaSERVER. Both of these options provide the actual hosting of media content which you serve / display on your the screens / televisions which comprise your digital signage physical footprint.

Each screen you use for digital signage requires a computing device to output video according to your instructions. With DigitalSignage.com, those devices take the form of either mediaDROID or mediaBOX options. In all cases, the content you actually display can be web-managed, which means you can login from ANYWHERE online to control and change your signage.

Hat tip to Bill Crouch who told me about DigitalSignage.com today, and also revealed that LifeChurch (a huge mega-church based here in the Oklahoma City area) is also using DigitalSignage’s solution for their needs. If DigitalSignage.com is good enough for LifeChurch, you can bet it’s good enough for your school or other organization. Check out their offerings and service. I’d love to see our local PTA/PTSA groups start purchasing screens for digital signage at our schools to better advertise, market and communicate upcoming events with parents. It would alsobe  a great way to show off student digital work!

WordPress is a powerful, database-powered content management system. MySQL is the database platform WordPress uses. By default, WordPress supports two different kinds of database entries or “post types” which are called “Posts” and “Pages.” They function a bit differently. Generally posts are used for dynamic, time and date stamped entries which display in reverse chronological order on your site, with the most recent ones showing first. Pages, on the other hand, are for more static content which is always accessible from your navigation bars. Designers don’t have to conform to these guidelines, but many do.

These two post types are just the beginning, however. Since WordPress is powered by a database and does not have a “flat” structure like a spreadsheet, it’s possible to create very complex and powerful information sharing solutions. Depending on your site’s purpose and needs, you can create “custom post types” as well as taxonomies which are connected to those post types to facilitate information entry and sharing about specific kinds of things. These might include events, movies, products, or just about anything else. In this post I’ll highlight a few plugins which can make the process of creating and using custom post types and corresponding taxonomies easier.

The following video shows how you can use the free WordPress plugin, “Custom Post Type UI,” to create a sample WordPress site which tracks different movies. This tutorial was created by Brad Williams.

As Brad explains in the video, taxonomies are used to describe different post types and organize entries. “Categories” on your WordPress blog is an example of a taxonomy. So are tags. Where categories are hierarchical (they can be organized as parent and child objects, showing their relationship) tags are non-hierarchical. A custom taxonomy classifies content included in a post type.

When you’re teaching students to create with and use WordPress, a project-based approach works best. Consider asking your students to create a product-based eCommerce website which offers specific kinds of products for sale. Custom post types and taxonomies can be helpful to list different kinds of products which will be available in your “website catalog.” By creating custom post types and taxonomies, you can design pages which display specific products in specific ways you define, based on search criteria selected by website users or specified by site links you create. The $30 commercial WordPress plug-in “Easy Custom Content Types for WordPress” can make the process of creating and managing custom post types, taxonomies, and meta boxes much easier.

I’d like to share a big shout out and thank you to iThemes developer Kristen Wright, who discussed custom post types and taxonomies during the October WordPress OKC Meetup. My notes from the event are available if you’d like to read more about her presentation and other info shared on Monday night.

For more info about this topic, check out the post “Introducing Custom Posts and Taxonomies.” Also see Konstantin Kovshenin‘s posts “Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0” and “Extending Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0.” Also check out “Innovative Uses of WordPress Post Types and Taxonomies.”

Have you used custom post types and taxonomies in WordPress sites you’ve developed or helped students create? If so, how have you used them? I’d love to see links to some student-created websites using WordPress which use these techniques and features.

  by  whiteafrican 

Unless you opt to use WordPress in a hosted environment like that provided by WordPress.com, EduBlogs, KidBlog or another host, you’ll be SELF-HOSTING your WordPress installation. The vast majority of self-hosted WordPress sites I’ve used and seen are physically located on servers owned and operated by hosting providers other than Amazon. It’s now possible, however, to run a self-hosted WordPress site on the Amazon S3 Cloud. This can be a more cost-effective solution in some cases, especially if you have large amounts of video content to share with your audience. Michael Cabral Poubel Bastos shared the following links recently on James Farmer’s post, “ServerBeach takes 1.45 million edublogs offline just 12 hours after sending through a Pearson DMCA notice for a 20 question list…” which provide thorough instruction on how to setup WordPress on S3. The first two links are from recent WordCamp presentations, the third is a Google presentation. This is definitely a more technical setup than a standard WordPress installation, but it’s worth knowing about. As a classroom web design teacher, it’s also something you should discuss with and highlight for your students!

http://2012.vegas.wordcamp.org/session/wordpress-on-amazon-web-services-from-start-to-finish/
http://2012.nyc.wordcamp.org/session/wordpress-on-aws-from-start-to-finish/
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zM5O6HhfBg2Hz80K9LYszQ8I9HJZasioPwFDoYVL8PI/edit#slide=id.p

Copyright is an important topic for bloggers to understand, since bloggers ARE publishers and are therefore subject to laws regarding intellectual property. Here are some resources you can use as an educational blogger and with your students discussing copyright / intellectual property issues.

Miguel Danielson & Kimberly Isbell’s January 2010 presentation at WordCamp Boston, “How Not to Get Sued,” provides a good overview of US copyright law, DMCA take down notices, and other intellectual property issues as they apply to bloggers.

The “Copyright” chapter of my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing” is available free online in its entirety.

My February 2009 presentation in Portland, Oregon, “Copyright 101 for Educators,” is available as a Slidecast (synchronized slideshow) on SlideShare.

Storychasers has a good list of resources on Copyright/Fair use as well, including the PDF “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education.”

Social media platforms are now used by millions of people around the world. Although it’s a relative newcomer to the social media scene, Google Plus reached 400 million users in September. TechCrunch reported Twitter exceeded 500 million users worldwide in July 2012. The Associated press reported on October 4th Facebook has exceeded 1 billion users worldwide. When you share a post on your WordPress site, it makes sense in many cases to cross-post it to different social media channels or pages. In this post, I’ll describe free techniques for cross-posting a WordPress link to both Twitter and FaceBook.

WP to Twitter is a free plugin you can use to cross-post WordPress entries. Since this plugin is indexed in the official WordPress Plugin Directory, you can install it directly from your WordPress dashboard by searching for it under Plugins and clicking Install. After installing it, you’ll need to first set it up as an official Twitter app. You’ll login with your Twitter credentials, and then follow the instructions provided on your WordPress Plugin. This will involve giving the app READ/WRITE permission to your Twitter account, and copying several passwords or “keys” into your WordPress settings. You can choose to auto-post every new post as well as new page, if desired, to your Twitter account. I chose NOT to auto-tweet updates to WordPress posts and pages, as well as NOT auto-tweet new comments. Depending on your website and the way you want to amplify site interactions as well as changes, you might want to choose different options.

WP-to-Twitter will auto-shorten URLs before tweeting them out. I am impressed that in addition to supporting well known URL shorteners like bit.ly, it also supports the open source URL shortener Yourls. I’ve been using Yourls for the past year, but it’s not supported by the WordPress Plugin Twitter Tools. The fact that WP-to-Twitter supports Yourls might convince me to switch over to it on my own personal blog. To use bit.ly with WP-to-Twitter, you’ll have to use or create an account with a userID, you can’t use an account which simply logs in with your Twitter or FaceBook credentials.

After configuring and testing your installation of WP-to-Twitter to cross-post to Twitter, you can configure your Twitter account to automatically cross-post to Facebook. You can cross-post to your personal FaceBook wall, or (as I’ve chosen) post to a specific Facebook page for which you have administrator rights. While there are several third party applications and ways to do this, I’ve most recently opted to use Twitter’s official Facebook app. The steps for using it are described on the Twitter support article, “How to Use Twitter With Facebook.” After authenticating/logging into Facebook, you’ll need to authorize Twitter to post to your FaceBook account. Then you can select the specific Facebook page you’d like to post to.

This is the configuration I’ve used for our crowdsourced school news site on ClassenSAS.com. It’s great to be able to post an article and immediately have that link shared to both Twitter and Facebook! Since these cross-posts are almost immediate, it’s very important to carefully proofread before publishing a WordPress post!

Learn more about setting up a moderated, crowdsourced WordPress site using a straightforward contribute form by reading my recent posts about  using Gravity forms or TDO-Mini Forms.

Mobile Podcaster is a $2 application for iPhone which allows WordPress users to record audio podcasts and directly post them to their sites. Once you’ve entered your blog’s URL and login credentials, you can record audio within the app and post it to your blog. You’ll want to install a free podcasting plugin and set the default episode tags to correspond. I used the Blubrry PowerPress Podcasting Plugin and it worked great for a 40 minute in-car podcast my wife and I created this past weekend about Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. You’ll also need to enable XML-RPC in your WordPress settings so this ‘third party’ application can directly post to your site.

This app works with both self-hosted WordPress blogs and WordPress.com sites, although WordPress.com users will need to pay for a “space upgrade.” (See WordPress.com audio support for more details.) I’m thrilled to find this app, it definitely can reduce the “number of clicks” required to publish an audio podcast to WordPress!

This fall semester, I’ve been working with members of the Communications Committee of our school PTSA (Parent – Teacher – Student Association) to improve our communication channels with parents, teachers, students, and other community members. One of the new communication channels we’ve created is a new WordPress-powered site for school news. For many years, PTSA news has been shared primarily through an email newsletter. That e-newsletter is still available and continuing, but we’ve migrated from using GroupVine to MailChimp. Some of the comparative advantages of Mailchimp as a paid e-newsletter solution include:

• Better and more comprehensive metrics about how many people are opening and reading the newsletter
• The ability to let people directly subscribe and unsubscribe from our mailing list
• A webpage (HTML) version of each newsletter, which we can link directly from a post on our news site
• The ability to auto-post new e-newsletters (which MailChimp calls “campaigns”) to both our FaceBook page and Twitter account
• The ability to dynamically create an updated, linked list of archived newsletters

While MailChimp offers many paid/commercial options, it also includes a free plan if you have less than 2000 members on your mailing list. The number of emails you can send per month is limited with the free plan, but this might be adequate for some groups which are not sending out updates on a weekly basis.

I used the free the MailChimp WordPress plugin to add a widget in the footer of our school news website, which lets people directly subscribe to the list. To configure that Plugin, I had to create an “API key” in my MailChimp account settings. This may sound complicated, but it was just a matter of clicking a button to create a key, and then copying/pasting that text string into the WordPress plugin settings. My site could then “log in” to MailChimp, and I could select the mailing list I wanted to use for my WordPress widgets.

So far our PTSA leadership group and newsletter coordinator are LOVING MailChimp. It’s great to be able to directly integrate it into our WordPress site. If you have an organization that uses or needs an email list, consider giving MailChimp a try. (If you use this link to sign up, our PTSA will receive a referral bonus.)

Alternatively, you can use iThemes’ Premium WordPress plugin, EmailBuddy. It’s included with both the Developer Suite and (if you qualify) the free iThemes Educator’s Toolkit.

There are several different ways to add content to a WordPress website. Generally, users will log into the “WordPress Dashboard” and add a new post, including links, images, tags, and sometimes other types of embedded media. Sometimes, however, site designers want to find even cleaner, less cumbersome ways to permit others to contribute content to a website. I’m currently aware of two two different options for doing this, using a free or a commercial plugin (TDO Mini Forms and Gravity Forms) for WordPress. In this post I’ll highlight the process of using TDO Mini Forms to meet this need.

On the sharing website for the PlayingWithMedia.com project, a few months ago I setup a contribute form which people can use to submit different examples of student multimedia projects shared online. I used the WordPress plug-in TDO Mini Forms to do this. I really like TDO Mini Forms and appreciate the fact that it is free. I’m also aware however, that it hasn’t been updated in over a year and has been removed from the official WordPress plug-ins directory because of some identified security vulnerabilities. Because of this, I recommend you proceed with heightened security caution if you opt to use this plug-in and method of soliciting draft blog posts via a web form.

After manually installing the TDO Mini Forms plugin, you’ll see a sidebar in your dashboard of the Plugin. On the main menu, click to configure the plugin. This is where you’ll select the default author for your posts, which you do NOT want to be an administrator. This user needs to either be set as a “contributor” or “author” in your Users menu.

Next click on FORM CREATOR in your left sidebar. Click NEW to make a form. This is where you can drag and drop widgets to define the elements you’d like to include in your web form. The significant thing different from TDO Mini Forms and many other WordPress form plugins is the fact that you can solicit information which will become a draft post within WordPress.

After you’ve placed desired widgets/fields into your form, it’s time to create a WordPress page with it. Click the link on the top of the FORM OPTIONS page to create your page with the embedded form.

This is what your page’s dashboard view will look like, using “WordPress shortcode.” With the TDO Mini Forms installed, WordPress will insert your form elements in place of the shortcode.

There are more customization options available with TDO Mini Forms, but those are the basics. Our organizer team for the free, asynchronous K-12 Online Conference has used TDO Mini Forms since 2009 to solicit information for presentation posts from all 40+ presenters each year of the conference. It’s worked great. That said, remember my previous comment about TDO Mini Forms not being updated recently and its identified security vulnerabilities. While it has been a great and functional plugin for me, I’ve moved to Gravity Forms (a commercial WordPress plugin) as a solution for building flexible contribute forms. I’ll describe how to use it in my next post.

For the past several years, “quick blogs” like Posterous and Tumblr have grown dramatically in popularity, in part because of their mobile apps and ability to both post and host rich media content including images, audio, and video. Posterous in particular has grown popular with many educators because it permits students to submit media to a class blog using a common email address, but still allows the teacher to moderate or “gatekeep” content submissions before they “go live” and are viewable by the public. As I discussed in my July post, “Why WordPress? Class Blogging with Moderated Posts and Comments,” content moderation is an essential ingredient for most classroom blogs. This is one reason Tumblr makes a poor classroom blog, since posting via its “secret email address” doesn’t permit content moderation.

With Twitter’s acquisition of Posterous in March of 2012, many educators have wondered if Posterous will continue to be available as a free platform with its current feature set. While that question remains unanswered, a question we can address today is this related one: Can WordPress Act Like Posterous with Emailed Attachments? The answer appears to be a qualified YES, at least for hosted WordPress.com blogs at this point. For self-hosted WordPress blogs, I think the answer is “sort of, but not very well.” I’ll explain.

Option 1: WordPress.com Hosted Blogs

The WordPress.com support article, “Post by Email,” includes a nice breakdown of configuration steps and options for posting via email. After clicking the setting to enable “post by email,” WordPress.com generates a “secret email address” similar to the way Tumblr blogs work for posting via email. You or anyone else can send an email to that address, and the contents will AUTO-MAGICALLY appear as a new post on your WordPress.com site. Like Posterous, you can include many different attachment types with your email and these will also be posted to your blog. You can include one or more images as attachments, and if you include multiple images they’ll show up as a gallery. Attached document files (like PDFs or MS Word files) will appear as hyperlinks.

Before you get extremely excited and think WordPress.com can be a complete replacement for a Posterous blog, consider these limitations. While it’s possible to use a modified version of your secret WordPress.com email address to just upload attachments but not create a new blog post, it is NOT currently possible to make all email submitted posts PENDING posts needing editor or administrator level user approval BY DEFAULT. It’s possible to designate a WordPress.com emailed blog post as PENDING, but to do that the sender must include the following “short code” somewhere in the email message body:

[status pending]

You could instruct your students to always use this short code in their emails, and if using iPads from an iPad cart even put that short code in as part of the included email “signature” with every post. Students certainly could, however, intentionally or unintentionally, delete that code and then have their post automatically (and without moderation) post to your class blog. Although a “moderation by default” option isn’t available for WordPress.com emailed posts, these options ARE powerful and worth consideration by teachers.

While image and some document attachments can be posted by email on a free WordPress.com site, audio and video attachments require paid upgrades. The WordPress.com support article, “Accepted Filetypes,” includes these details. To post audio files via email (including mp3 files) to a WordPress.com blog, you’ll need to purchase a space upgrade. To post video by email, you’ll need to purchase the VideoPress upgrade.

Check out the two minute video on WordPress.tv from 2009, “Introducing Post by Email for WordPress.com,” for a quick overview of the email to WordPress.com possiblities.

Option 2: Self-Hosted WordPress Blogs

If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, your “out of the box” options for posting via email with WordPress are much more limited than they are with WordPress.com sites. The official WordPress codex article, “Post to your blog using email,” explains how ONLY PLAIN TEXT can be posted via email to a self-hosted WordPress blog using default settings. It’s necessary to create a unique email address which will be used ONLY with your WordPress blog, and the site will basically “check” that email account to post new messages sent to it. Again, this setup does NOT permit post moderation. Unlike WordPress.com, simple shortcodes are NOT available to submit posts by email for moderation by a teacher. Clifford Paulick’s post last month, “WordPress ‘Post via e-mail’ demystified,” includes specific settings required if you’d like to use a Gmail account for this purpose.

If you want to submit posts with attachments to a self-hosted WordPress blog, you’ll need to use a special plug-in and/or some paid WordPress enhancements. Postie is a free plugin which allows images, audio and video to post directly to your WordPress site. Like the default email to post WordPress settings, it requires the configuration of a unique email account, but some shortcode-enabled post customizations are possible. This process for both setup/configuration as well as use is MUCH more complicated that what’s offered on a free Posterous blog, but it CAN work for similar functionality. As previously stated, however, the biggest limitation for classroom teachers is the LACK of post moderation, which probably makes this option a non-starter for most U.S. teachers. PostMaster is another WordPress plug-in which offers post-by-email attachment support, but it’s less popular and (as of this writing) hasn’t been updated in over two years. VideoPress is available commercially for self-hosted WordPress sites as well as WordPress.com hosted blogs. It appears to be the best way to post and share video to your WordPress site via email, but it’s not free and (again) doesn’t support post moderation.

Can WordPress Act Like Posterous with Emailed Attachments? Kind of, but not completely. I hope this information has been helpful to you. I’d love to hear about your own experiences using email to post to WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress blogs, and also learn about any other options for posting-by-email to WordPress sites that is even easier and more “Posterous-like” than the options I’ve highlighted here.