We’ve currently got an instance of Pressbooks installed on the Unizin servers, and are testing several plugins which extend the core functionality of Pressbooks. I wanted to start this forum as a place to discuss some of these plugins and what we’ve found in the course of our testing.
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In my Pressbooks-installation i’m using two plugins right now:
During the development time, I want the installation being hidden:
With this plugin, my whole pressbooks-installation is SSL encrypted, which seems to work right now: https://de.wordpress.org/plugins/really-simple-ssl/
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We’ve been very enthusiastic users of H5P, a plugin developed by a group working in Tromso, Norway, which allows authors to create a wide variety of interactive HTML5 activities that can be embedded in eBooks. We love it, but have noticed a few issues. First, the H5P plugin is not very well designed for WP Multisite currently, and fails to work as expected when network activated. There is a workaround, however, for others who are interested in using H5P on their networks. Rather than network activating it, we install it and then activate it on each text that wants to use it (see the discussion here: https://h5p.org/node/6499). A bit cumbersome, but it works. I’ve documented several other desirable changes for H5P + Pressbooks use cases here: https://github.com/h5p/h5p-wordpress-plugin/issues/41. We’re hopeful that H5P + Pressbooks can play together well in the coming months/years.
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We’ve also been using Hypothes.is to allow native annotation for our books (without requiring users to install hypothes.is in their browsers). I believe @ned is now one of the plugin’s lead authors, so he’s probably the most knowledgeable person for how it works, but we’re big fans, and have found that the latest version of the plugin works well with the latest releases of Pressbooks. Highly recommended for open textbooks!
We’ve been doing some testing with Mathematica Toolbox, a plugin which allows users to embed .CDF files produced with Wolfram’s Mathematica in open books. We’ve run into an issue with this plugin in our testing, however. Mathematica Toolbox is designed to add two meta boxes in the WP admin panel just below the text editor (see an example). I believe these are supposed to be made visible or hidden in the screen options menu, but that’s not currently happening with Pressbooks. Any insight as to why from @ned or others would be very much welcomed.
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Thanks @Sascha_Foerster–this both look interesting. Our network admin has installed two security plugins on our instance that might of interest to others. One is SSL Insecure Content Fixer (which includes a network settings menu for multisite users that’s very easy to configure), and the other is WP Mail SMTP.