WordPress uses a concept of Roles, designed to give the blog owner the ability to control and assign what users can and cannot do in the blog. A blog owner can manage and allow access to such functions as writing and editing posts, creating pages, defining links,creating categories, moderating comments, managing plugins, and managing other users.

There are five main user roles within WordPress:
Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber.

When users are created in the realsmartcloud, default roles are automatically assigned:

• realsmart admin → WordPress Administrator
• realsmart mentor → WordPress Contributor
• realsmart learner → WordPress Subscriber

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Sometimes you’ll want to assign a custom image to post instead of the author’s avatar. This is easy to do and can help identify individual posts much more efficiently.

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Google forms can be used to make vote or survey. However, it can not prevent multiple submission. Here is a Google Apps Script “voTer” to solve this problem. For each submission, the script will compare the “username” with previous recorded usernames. If the username is existed, then the new submission will be deleted. At the same time, an email will be sent to that person for notification. Please do tailor the highlighted part in the script to fit your situation.

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The only thing you cant do with Google Apps that you can do with Office is mail merge, right?

WRONG!

Here is how….

1. Create a spreadsheet and organize your data in columns that include one row per individual that you want to create a personalized document for.  Make sure each column has a header. Individualized data might also be fed by a Google form.
2. Go to Tools->Script Editor and delete the existing code, pasting in the script from the attachment below.
3. Save the script with a name.  I like to call it the “autoCrat”;)
4. Use the small dropdown in the scripts editor to Run the “onOpen” function.   This will prompt you to authorize the script.
5. In order for the script to work, you will need to create a Document to use as a template for the merge.
   1. Create a new collection for your templates.  I like to create a collection called “Merge Templates”
   2. Include double bracketed tags for any personalized data you want to populate from the spreadsheet.  Ex) <<First Name>> .  It doesn’t matter what you call the fields, because you will map them to your spreadsheet headers in a few steps.
6. Refresh your spreadsheet in your browser.  Wait a few seconds and you should see a new menu item to the right of “Help”, called “Document Merge.”  If you don’t see it, try running the onOpen function from the script editor again.
7. In the “Document Merge” menu, select “Settings” and complete the settings.  If you don’t have a collection that contains a template file with <<Merge tags>> in it, go back to step 5 and come back to this.
8. Now you will see a new “Document Merge” dropdown item, “Set Field Mappings.”  Map each <<Merge tag>> to the spreadsheet column you want to use to populate it.  Save the mappings.
9. Another new “Document Merge” dropdown item will appear: “Test/Run Merge”.  Select it and decide what type of merge you want to try…there are a number of combos and cool possibilities.  Look to the bottom of the panel for a clue as to the $variableNames that are available for any of the fields you want to populate dynamically per row.
10. Here are some basic options to play with.  Checkbox allows you to test on first-row only if you like.
    1. ONLY saving merged Docs to a collection, either as PDF or Doc format.
    2. Saving to a collection AND emailing PDF as attachment.
    3. Saving to a collection AND emailing recipient a link to individually shared Docs as View-only
    4. Saving to a collection AND emailing recipient a link to individually shared Doc as Editor
11. Note that as of Version 1.1.0, Date formatting can now be handled. You must use the Format->Number menu from the spreadsheet to format any dates.  Currently only three formats are supported:   “M/d/yyyy”, “MMMM d, yyyy”, and “M/d/yyyy H:mm:ss” … i.e. 1/30/2012…January 30, 2012, and 1/30/2012 9:32:34.
12. Note: As of Vertion 1.2.0, the document Header and Footer can now contain merge tags.
13. 1.2.1 fixes a silly bug that occurred when the document didn’t contain a header or a footer.
14. We also recently discovered that non-alpha merge tags don’t work.  Eg <<90>> will not work.  Needs to be <<ninety>>.  So avoid using anything in your merge tags that’s not a letter.

Thanks to the folks at http://www.youpd.org/home for this great script.

Here is the text files with the script – autocrat_1.2.1

Sometimes you’ll want to create menu items that open in a new tab as you would with sidebar links. While this is slightly more complex than doing it for a standard sidebar link, it is still easy enough to do.

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Another nice feature of Google apps is the ability to create default email footers/signatures for each group within the organisation. This can be very useful for identifying staff and students within your school.

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Flubaroo is a great free tool that helps you quickly grade multiple-choice assignments. Take a look at the video below to see it in action.

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Your realsmart items can be shared in more ways than just the one.

You can actually embed them as you would with any other web content. Items be put inside WordPress posts, emails, or even inside of other realsmart items. This is particularly useful if you want to use an item as evidence within another realsmart item.

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In a nutshell, Pingbacks and Trackbacks were designed to provide a method of comment notification between WordPress websites. Unfortunately, on heavily active sites, such as realsmart cloud sites, the notification emails can become a bit of a pain! Don’t worry, switching them off is easy.

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Google forms are a great way of collecting data from all of your stakeholders and are really easy to set up! In this guide we’ll go through the basics of creating a form in Google Docs and embedding it into a WordPress post.

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