ABOUT US:

What's VirtualPlantz?

VirtualPlantz.com is a web site where you can create your virtual garden and grow your virtual plants. Sounds weird? Just give a try, it's cool!

You can create plants for you or send them as gifts to your friends. Just take care of their plants and make them know you're thinking about them!

As soon as you will register to VirtualPlantz, you will be able to manage your garden, add your friends to your friendlist, send and receive messages from your friends and display your plants in your blog or website, in Google personalized homepage, or even on your desktop!

Creating a plant:

Creating a plant is easy! Just follow this steps:

From your garden, click on "create a new plant" to create a plant for you, or click on "send a new plant as gift" to create a plant for a friend of yours.

Follow the simple instructions: just select a species from the list, choose a name for your new plant and, if you are sending the plant to a friend, insert his/her username (if your friend hasn't registered to VirtualPlantz.com yet, first invite him/her)

If you created the plant for yourself, the plant will appear immediately in your garden. If instead you sent the plant to a friend, you must wait until he/she accept the gift, then the new plant will appear in his/her garden and in yours (in the "Plants you sent as gifts" section).

Note: you will take care of any plant you create, both those you create for yourself and those you send as gifts.

Taking care of a plant:

If you want a cool garden, you have to take care of plants you created and of plants you sent as gifts. Don't worry! It's simple and takes only a minute...

Basically, the only thing you must do is to water plants. To do that, just login, go to your plant's page and click on one of the three watering cans on the bottom of the plant (the first water the plant a bit, the second water the plant some more and the third is to be used when the terrain is very dry).

Maybe you will be wondering "yeah man, but how much water do my plant need?" Well, just follow an easy rule of thumb:

If the terrain is yellowish, it means it's too dry. Water it a bit until the terrain gets green.

When the terrain is green, it's ok!

If the terrain gets bluish, it means that it's too wet. Stop watering your plant or it will drown!

Remember: plants can die for 2 reasons: there's too much water or there's no water. You'll have an idea of your plant's health by its appearance.

Plants need some time to absorb water, it means that health status changes are not immediate (example: if your plant status is “too dry” you can water it immediately but it will take some time to get healthy again)

A more precise indication of the plant health is provided in the box on the right of your plant's page. It says "too dry", "almost too dry", "allright", "almost too wet" or "too wet".

Every plant grows up quickly at the beginning, and more slowly when it's bigger. That's because it needs more energy to grow up more as its dimention increase. Anyway, the more your plant is healty, the quicker it grows up.

And what if you can't water the plant for some period? Don't worry at all! We provided you a way to save your plants from the damages of negligence: it's called Freezing. To freeze a plant you just have to login, go to the plant's page and click on the snowflake on the bottom of the plant.

The plant will look as always, but it will be magically locked to its state: it won't grow and it won't fade untill you'll unfreeze it (by clicking on the icon with the snowflake and a red bar on it).

This is an useful feature when you are going on holidays and you don't want your plants (or even worst the plants you sent as gifts to friends) to wither.

So, now that I own a plant, where can I place it?

There are many places where you can place your plant. We developed some gadget for you to make things as easy and funny as possible:

Google Personalized Homepage:

You can put your plants into iGoogle personalized homepage just adding our VirtualPlantz Google gadget. It's extremely easy, just follow this steps:

click on this button to add VirtualPlantz gadget to your iGoogle homepage:

in alternative you can add the gadget from url. The gadget's url is:

http://www.virtualplantz.com/gadgets/virtualplantz_gg.xml
Go to your google personalized homepage and you'll see the new VirtualPlantz gadget. You may be asked for your plant's ID: you can find it in your plant page near Embed and URL fields.

Your blog or site:

If you have a blog or a personal website and you have access to its HTML code, you can place there your plants! There are basically two ways to do it:

Just copy the "Embed" code that you find in your plant page (you can see it only when you are logged-in) and paste it in your web page.

In alternative, you can obtain the code of the virtualplantz Google gadget for your webpage just clicking here. You may be asked for your plant's ID: you can find it in your plant page near Embed and URL fields.

Windows Live™ Spaces:

If you have a Windows Live™ Space, it's extremely easy to put there your plant for your visitors! Just follow this steps:

Click here to install the VirtualPlantz gadget for Live™ Spaces.

Follow the instructions and insert your plant ID when requested, then click "Save".

You will see your plant appearing in your Space!

VirtualPlantz Widget for WordPress:

Now you can place your plant into WordPress using the VirtualPlantz widget!

Download the widget from this page and follow the simple instructions.

WordPress widget was developed by Darryl Koster (great thanks to him!). DarrylKoster.net and VirtualPlantz widget for WordPress are in no way affiliated by VirtualPlantz.com

Managing your friendlist:

The friendlist is (as the name says...) the list of your friends. They are the only persons who can send to you messages and write in your message board. To add a person to your friendlist you have two ways:

Go to his/her page and click on "Mark as friend". If that person will accept your friendship request, he/she will appear in your friendlist (and you in his/her one).

Send a plant as gift to that person. If he/she will accept it, he/she will be automatically added to your friends.

Your friendlist is at the bottom of your garden's page. If you place the cursor over a friend's icon, a menu will magically appear, giving to you the possibility to quickly send a gift, send a message or delete the friend from the list (maybe you got angry with him/her...).

Your profile:

Anyone in VirtualPlantz.com has got a profile page. Profiles give informations about people, so you can edit your profile and add a description of you, a photo and other infos such as your hometown or interests.
Obiouvsly, if you don't want to provide those informations, you can leave those fields empty.

To edit your profile, login and go to your profile's page, then just click on "edit profile".

Sending and receiving messages:

At the bottom of your profile's page there's your message board. This is the place where your friends (only those who are in your friendlist) can leave messages to you. This messages will be visible to everyone, but in case you don't like a message you received, you can easily delete it.

Messages are ordered from the most recent to the oldest. The message board can contain up to 20 messages. Then, when other messages are published, the oldest are deleted. The data and time you can see in messages (only when you are logged-in) is referred to your time zone.

You can write in your friends' message board from their profile page (you must be logged-in to do that). If you don't want other people to see your message, you can send it as a private message. It will be sent to your friend's email address without publishing it in the message board