The Rotating Gallery is a simple plug in that allows a user to have a (you guessed it!) rotating gallery of images appear in one of the sidebars of their site.  Each time a visitor refreshes or visits a new page, the image will change, giving them an appealing overall sense of the site activity.

Many of our professors use the ‘comments’ function on course sites to have students respond either to one another’s work or to a prompt, as in the example from Professor Rosen’s above.

And comments are not just useful for professors–encouraging comments from users is one of the main ways for a site to interact with the public, particularly the larger public outside CityTech.

Contact Form 7 is way of allowing visitors and users to contact you that is simple yet flexible (in wordpress that usually means there’s a simple set-up for people who want simple, and complexity for people who want complexity).  On the OpenLab, this plug-in is probably most useful to clubs and projects, particularly those who have visitors from outside the CityTech OpenLab community.

Adding a poll to your site is a snap with the WP-Polls plugin!  Clubs and projects can use polls on the OpenLab to determine user needs, interests, or even just set up a meeting time!

This short video is a perfect introduction to this simple plugin.

Image resizing gets easier and easier with WordPress.  Once upon a time editing of that sort had to take place elsewhere, but now most simple image editing can be done directly in the media upload dialogue box, or later in the Media Library.

The WP LaTeX developers created this plugin to “combine the power of LaTeX and the simplicity of WordPress to give you the ultimate in math blogging platforms” which, they admit really “sounds nerdy.”

The plug-in presumes you know LaTeX, but just in case you’d like to know more, or if you’re looking for a refresher, or if you’re just one of the curious, there is a useful tutorial here.

‘Calendar,’ the not-so-creatively-named but very-nicely-designed plug-in, is now available on the OpenLab.  As you might expect, it creates a customizable, searchable calendar for your course, club, or project, and that calendar can be hosted in a post or on a page.

The SlideShare plugin allows you to embed presentations or documents you’ve uploaded to SlideShare into your posts or pages. Since there are only a few steps involved, I’m including instructions below. But if you’d like help using the plugin — or using SlideShare itself — just let us know.