Google Docs Shortcode is a small plugin for WordPress that allows you to use a shortcode to easily embed a Google Doc into your blog posts or pages.

The shortcode supports the following Google Doc formats:

• Documents
• Presentations
• Spreadsheets
• Forms

This plugin was developed for the CUNY Academic Commons.

Social is a new plug-in on the OL, taking over for the moment as our primary Twitter and Facebook broadcasting plug-in.  While Twitter Tools (which is being updated) is a more robust option, offering url shortening, category exclusion, and other options.

We’ve recently added Gravity Forms to our suite of plug-ins here at the OpenLab.  Gravity Forms can do a lot–in fact it was developed as a robust contact form plug-in, and is perfect for polling users, collecting contact information, and organizing reservations for events.

Anthologize is a wonderful tool built by CUNY’s own Boone George (and others), during the NEH-sponsored “One Week, One Tool” workshop at the Center for History and New Media.

To quote Ryan Cordell‘s article on the plug-in: “Anthologize was developed as a way for scholars to easily publish blog content—from a personal research blog, a course blog, or scholarly group blog, or the like—in a number of formats:

Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts.

“Share This,” adds a social media bar to all posts and pages (and the site itself), allowing your followers, members or readers to easily share things across outside social platforms. You can even click the green “Share” button in the bar and then choose multiple platforms to share with simultaneously (that is, you can share on both your twitter and facebook accounts with one click).

Recently we had a request for a way to have the same material appear on multiple OpenLab sites.  This would especially be useful for faculty, who sometimes teach the same material or want to relay the same messages to more than one class, but for various reasons still want each class to have a separate site.

CubePoints is a way of awarding points (or “dollars,” if you’re feeling materialistic), to users for participating in your site–users have a great deal of control over what sorts of activities are worth points, and how many each activity is worth.

How To Install & Use PageMash For WordPress by newbizblogger

PageMash makes menu manipulation easy. Use if if you want to hide pages so they don’t show up on your menu, or if you want to quickly rename the page, or if you want to create parent/child pages (an odd way of saying “I want this page to appear as a dropdown on my menu”–the way the tutorials on The Open Road appear under “Useful Tools”).