In the summer of 2008, I began a personal blog powered by WordPress and quickly fell for the ease and extensibility of the platform. As an educator, I had tried a number of tools to power course websites, but had to be satisfied with the results. With the fall semester approaching, I decided to try WordPress in the classroom. As the academic year progressed, I found that I was able to effectively mold WordPress to fit the needs of my students.
In recent years the popularity of WordPress has exploded. It is estimated that nearly 15 percent of the top million websites and 22 percent of all new websites are powered by WordPress (http://wordpress.org/news/2011/08/state-of-the-word/). These staggering numbers can be attributed to the WordPress community, which has built thousands of useful plugins atop of the already impressive WordPress core. As an increasing number of educators use WordPress in the classroom, the education-specific plugin library grows, making WordPress an ideal solution for educators.
Chapter 1, Installing and Configuring WordPress, covers the installation of WordPress on a web server, explores the WordPress dashboard, and discusses the difference between posts and pages.
Chapter 2, Setting Up Our Class Site, covers how to build a basic course website by adding and editing posts and pages, changing the look of the site with themes, and enhancing the site's functionality with widgets.
Chapter 3, Enhancing WordPress with Plugins, discusses the use of WordPress plugins to add additional features to our site. This chapter will guide you through the process of installing plugins and provide a list of plugins that are useful in an education setting.
Chapter 4, Enabling a Multisite Network, describes the process of running a network of sites from a single WordPress installation. This is ideal for powering student blogs and portfolios.
Chapter 5, Creating a Social Network with BuddyPress, covers how the BuddyPress plugin can be used to turn WordPress into a socially collaborative environment.
Chapter 6, BuddyPress Courseware, covers how the ScholarPress BuddyPress Courseware plugin can be used to turn WordPress into a fully-functioning course management system with course content, assignments, bibliographies, and course calendar.
Chapter 7, Site Management, discusses how to keep WordPress up to date, secure our WordPress installation, and ensure that the WordPress database is backed up.
In this book, we will be discussing the self-hosted WordPress platform. WordPress.com is a commercial web site, powered by WordPress, that allows users to easily sign up for a free blog site. While WordPress.com is great for dipping our toes into the world of WordPress, it does not offer the rich features and extensibility of a self-hosted WordPress installation. For the same reason, this book focuses on the self-hosted WordPress platform, available at WordPress.org.
WordPress for Education is for classroom educators at the K-12 and college level who are interested in powering a course website or managing a network of student blogs with WordPress. Throughout the book, I do not assume prior knowledge of WordPress or experience with blogging software. This book aims to simplify seemingly daunting technical tasks such as installing the software on a web server or managing backups. The book is also useful for institution or district-level IT professionals who are interested in deploying WordPress. This book acts as a practical and easy-to-understand guide to WordPress in the classroom, aiming to increase online communication between instructors and students.
The only requirements for this book are a web connected computer, a web browser, and a self-hosted WordPress installation. Other tools that may be of use are a text editor and FTP software. In subsequent chapters, we will recommend appropriate open source options to fill these needs.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "If the new site was to be www.example.org/student1, simply enter student 1."
A block of code is set as follows:
// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host **
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');
/** MySQL database password */
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** /** The name of the database for WordPress */ define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere'); /** MySQL database username */ define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere'); /** MySQL database password */
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the OK button."
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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