Kaltura WordPress MU Setup

At the request of other education colleagues here is how I did the setup for our Kaltura Video and WordPress install.

First, we went with the Kaltura Community Edition server so that we could house the videos on-site and have more control over the system.  The kaltura CE edition also needs RED5 installed so that you can do webcam recording.  We run Kaltura on Ubuntu and there are plenty of tutorials on how to setup RED5 from the command line.  Kaltura CE install is pretty straight forward and similar to wordpress or moodle types of installs.  The only trick is that you need to add a symbolic link for the webcam recording to work.  The webcam folder is already in the Kaltura CE install, so the one trick I learned was to first delete the existing folder and then add the symbolic link folder.  I posted about this in the Kaltura forums.  Setting up webcam recording is also in the README file with one additional step of adding it as a menu option for the Content Wizard.

The WordPress All in One Video Pack from Kaltura needs to be installed in the plugins folder for the blogs like any other plugin.  It is not recommended (And I don’t think it works properly) if installed in the MU-plugin folder to activate it sitewide.  In the All in One Video Pack folder there is a file called settings.php.  You need to modify this file and add the link to the Kaltura CE server that you installed.

I also did some modifications to this folder kalturaCE/content/uiconf/kaltura/wordpress.   The files in this directory allow you to control the user experience once the plugin is running.  The one file I had to modify that is very important is se_wordpress.xml.  I changed this line:  <enableCW>true</enableCW> to <enableCW>false</enableCW>.  This disables the uploading of new files when using the remix feature.  In a K12 situation we did not want just anyone uploading files to the remix.  This forces that.  You can control who has access to remix via the plugin by only allowing registered users of the blog to edit the video but we do not allow students to register on our teacher blogs.  They can only leave comments.

The other files in this directory I changed were:  cw_wordpress.xml and  cw_wordpress_in_se.xml.  This is where you can control what sources and options users have for adding video via the Content Wizard.  I basically stripped out all the options and added Webcam Capture.    When I came across Kaltura I was looking for a way for teachers to easily add a webcam recording to their blogs.  A solution that would help the non-techies be able to easily embed the videos with no special tools other than a webcam.  Kaltura fit the bill.

My next endeavor is to setup Kaltura on our Moodle box and then integrate the moodle plugin.  With the Moodle setup I plan to allow uploading of videos and provide a wider range of options for teachers.

Here are some examples of how teachers are using it.