Extending your website with picture albums, videos, polls and more

There are more and more cool and useful tools out there on the Internet. No single website can dream of providing each and every service anyone can ever need. Thus, a hugely popular concept of 'mashups' has been born - embedding your website with 'widgets' - little pieces of content and functionality provided by other websites.
Wild Apricot system is designed to address key administration tasks for a member-based organization: member database, event registrations, mass emails, online forms, website content management, donations and payments. However, there are situations when we might not have a tool for you (for example, Wild Apricot does not have a built-in polls functionality) - or when our built-in function (e.g. mass emails) is not as robust as some other services dedicated solely to this function.
Thus we have decided to compile some examples and ideas on how you can extend and enhance Wild Apricot with some third-party tools:

Specific examples:

Other tools:

Photo albums

Even though Wild Apricot does provide a function to store and display pictures, it is primarily designed to embed a few pictures on a given webpage - vs. a nice presentation of a large collection of pictures. Again, there are many free and very inexpensive picture-hosting websites which will solve this need for you - and then you can embed individual pictures or large picture galleries and albums with cool animations into your Wild Apricot website.
Here are a few examples and instructions:

Bubbleshare

Bubbleshare provides some of the coolest animations and many options to embed your Bubbleshare albums:

See Bubbleshare integration examples

PhotoBucket

PhotoBucket is one of the biggest and most popular picture hosting websites and provides a very nice and easy way to embed a slideshow:

See Photobucket slieshow integration example

Flickr

Flickr is a service that has grown like fire in the last few years and is now a part of Yahoo. One of its most powerful feature is the use of 'tags' - meaning that it is very easy to find pictures on a particular topic.

See Flickr integration example

Picasa

Picasa is a service by Google - and just as you would expect from Google, they provide a lot of free storage space (2GB at the moment). Its strong trait is a PC-based companion software you can use to manage and process your pictures - and then effortlessly publish them online through the Picasa website and embed into your Wild Apricot page.

See Picasa gallery integration example

RockYou

Rockyou is another excellent service which creates very powerful and impressive animations from your collections of photos

See RockYou gallery integration

Please let us know if you have found other great tools to use in conjunction with Wild Apricot - so that we can share your findings with our community.

There are many other tools you can use in the same way:

Delicious feed integration

Zoho Show

Google calendar

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