Step 6: Review Widgets & Plugins

Plugins and widgets add additional functionality to your Model Course Site.

The following Plugins and Widgets have been enabled on the Template. Depending on your course needs, you may choose to use, ignore, or remove these plugins and associated widgets. Certain widgets, such as the About text widget are recommended in order to follow recommended Best Practices.

Template Plugins

  • OpenLab Attributions Plugin: Allows anyone to add attributions for Creative Commons licensed content they’re using on an OpenLab site.
  • Easy Table of Contents: Adds a user friendly and fully automatic way to create and display a table of contents generated from the page content.
  • Mammoth .docx converter: Mammoth converts semantically marked up .docx documents to simple and clean HTML.
  • OpenLab GradeBook: This basic gradebook allows faculty to confidentially record and share students grades and comments via the WP Dashboard.
  • WP Grade Comments: Privately grades and comment on student posts.
  • Private Comments: An OpenLab plugin that allows logged in members to leave private comments.
  • Ultimate Category Excluder: Easily exclude categories from your front page, feeds, archives, and search results.
  • Category Sticky Post: Mark a post to be placed at the top of a specified category archive. It’s sticky posts specifically for categories.
  • Gravity Forms + all Add-ons: Gravity Forms is a robust plugin that can do many different things including polling, surveys, quizzes, collecting contact information, organizing reservations for events, collecting student work via Dropbox, and more.
  • Require Post Category: Require users to choose a post category before updating or publishing a post.
  • WP QuickLatex: Math formulas in WordPress. 
  • Duplicate Post: Clone posts and pages.
  • Easy Custom Sidebars: A simple and easy way to add custom sidebars/widget areas to your WordPress theme.
  • Embed Images in Comments: This plugin embeds all image URLs (.jpg, .gif, .png) with an IMG tag.
  • Search & Filter: Search and Filtering system for Pages, Posts, Categories, Tags and Taxonomies
  • TablePress: Embed beautiful and feature-rich tables into your posts and pages, without having to write code.

Template Widgets

  1. About (Sidebar)
  2. Recent Posts (Sidebar)
  3. Recent Comments (Sidebar)
  4. Gradebook Widget (Sidebar)
  5. Portfolio Widget (Sidebar)
  6. OpenLab Help (Sidebar)
  7. Creative Commons License (Footer)
  8. Sharing > Clone This Course (Footer)
  9. OpenLab Help (Footer)

You can add or remove plugins and widgets through the Dashboard.

Please note that plugins and widgets are often edited and updated, so plugin availability can change.  Plugin and Widget suggestions are always welcome. Learn about all the plugins and widgets available on the OpenLab in the Guide to Plugins and the Guide to Widgets.

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