Scott - WordPress for Education

Adam D. Scott is an educator, designer, digital book developer, husband, and father living in Connecticut. He has been a classroom teacher for six years where he focuses on web technologies with project-based outcomes. He writes about the intersection of design, technology, and learning on his personal site, www.adamdscott.com.

I would like to thank my wife, Abigail, for lovingly supporting all my ideas, no matter how far-fetched; my sons, Riley and Harrison, who are a constant source of energy and inspiration; my parents for encouraging my interests in technology and learning; Judy, for giving me the opportunity and freedom to explore the world of education; Sarah and Sonali, for their encouragement and editorial guidance; Leena, for her management and organizational assistance; John and Sam, for their expertise and thoughtful advice; and the WordPress core team and plugin developers, for creating an incredible platform.

John Eckman is a digital strategist and consultant, and one of the founding organizers of WordCamp Boston. He has created and maintained a number of popular WordPress plugins, and is active in multiple open source communities and projects.

He blogs at www.openparenthesis.org, tweets as @jeckman, and speaks frequently at conferences on open source content management, e-commerce, and community. He holds a PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, an MIS from Northeastern University, Boston, and a BA from Boston University.

He has technically reviewed the following books for Packt Publishing:

I'd like to thank Packt Publishing and the WordPress community (developers, designers, and users), without whom none of this would be possible.

Sam Rose is a student and will be a Computer Science graduate soon. He has carried out book reviews for a variety of technologies and subjects including Ruby, Rails, ANTLR, WordPress, and Career Development.

He enjoys working with Ruby and Python most, as well as dabbling in newer languages on the side such as Scala and Haskell.

When not coding, he can be found blogging at http://samwho.co.uk.

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Preface

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.

What this book covers

, 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.

, 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.

, 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.

, 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.

, Creating a Social Network with BuddyPress