WordPress for Education

By Adam D. Scott

WordPress for Education is full of screenshots, practical examples, step-by-step instructions, and best practices for using WordPress in an educational setting. WordPress for Education is written for educators and education personnel interested in implementing WordPress in a classroom setting. You are not required to have previous experience of WordPress or any other content management system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Release date: Jun 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781849518215

Adam D. Scott

Adam D. Scott is an engineering leader, web developer, and educator based in Connecticut. He currently serves as the Web Development Lead at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he focuses on building open source web applications with his talented team. Additionally, he has worked at the crossroads of technology and education for over a decade, teaching and writing curriculum on a range of technical topics. He is the author of WordPress for Education (Packt, 2012), the Introduction to Modern Front-End Development video course (O’Reilly 2015), the Ethical Web Development report series (O’Reilly 2016-2017), and JavaScript Everywhere (O’Reilly 2020).

Book preview

Table of Contents

WordPress for Education

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why Subscribe?

Free Access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

Self-hosted WordPress or WordPress.com

Who this book is for

What you need for this book

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Installing and Configuring WordPress

Installing WordPress

Purchased hosting

Installing WordPress with purchased hosting

Finishing the installation

Manually installing WordPress

WordPress overview

Creating posts and pages

Writing a new post

Creating a page

Settings

General Settings

Writing Settings

Reading Settings

Discussion Settings

Media Settings

Privacy Settings

Permalinks

Summary

2. Setting Up Our Class Site

Basics of post and page editing

Previewing and publishing options

Pages

Creating a home page

Making the Home page static

Syllabus page

Deleting the sample page

Posts

Adding a video to a post

Categories and tags

Editing an existing post and adding an image

Adding an image

Editing post categories

Themes

Widgets

Menus

Summary

3. Enhancing WordPress with Plugins

Finding and installing plugins

Managing plugins

Plugins

Preinstalled WordPress plugins

Hello Dolly

Akismet

Education plugins

ScholarPress Courseware

WP Survey and Quiz Tool

Grader

Conversation and communication plugins

Contact Form 7

Semi-Private Comments

IntenseDebate Comments

Disqus

bbPress

Social plugins

WP to Twitter

Simple Facebook Connect

Other Plugins

Jetpack

Calendar

WordPress Mobile Pack

Add Multiple Users for WordPress

Anthologize

Updating plugins

Uninstalling plugins

Summary

4. Enabling a Multisite Network

Before installing

Creating the network

Exploring the Network Admin area

Creating a new site

Installing themes and plugins

Network enabled themes

Network enabled plugins

Network administrator plugins

New Blog Templates

Multisite Plugin Manager

ThreeWP Activity Monitor

Network content

Displaying a list of network sites

Displaying network posts

Summary

5. Creating a Social Network with BuddyPress

WordPress, Multisite, and BuddyPress

Installing BuddyPress

Components

Pages

Permalinks

Theme

Finish

Registering student accounts

Individually registering students

Enabling student self-registration

Activity

Friend connections

Groups

Forums

Group forums

Sitewide forums

Protecting student privacy

Summary

6. BuddyPress Courseware

Installing and configuring BP Courseware

BuddyPress Courseware settings

Global settings

Collaboration settings

Make assignment responses private

Gradebook default grade format

Webservices API integration

Customization

Renaming the groups page

Setting Courses as the site home page

Creating a course

Enabling BP Courseware

Courseware dashboard

Adding course content

Lectures

Assignments

Posting assignments as a teacher

Submitting assignments as a student

Viewing student responses

Gradebook

Bibliography

Schedule and calendar

Teacher and student roles

Help and support

Summary

7. Site Management

Site backups

Site performance

WP Super Cache

Better WP Minify

Site security

Secure WordPress

WP Security Scan

Updating WordPress

Summary

8. WordPress Resources and Plugins

WordPress resources

WordPress Codex

WordPress Support Forum

WordPress Showcase: Education

wp-edu discussion list

Digging into WordPress

Plugin directory

Index

WordPress for Education

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WordPress for Education

Copyright © 2012 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: June 2012

Production Reference: 1010612

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-84951-820-8

www.packtpub.com

Cover Image by Asher Wishkerman ( <[e-mail]> )

Credits

Author

Adam D. Scott

Reviewers

John Eckman

Sam Rose

Acquisition Editor

Sarah Cullington

Lead Technical Editor

Sonali Tharwani

Technical Editor

Felix Vijay

Project Coordinator

Leena Purkait

Proofreader

Lisa Brady

Indexer

Rekha Nair

Production Coordinator

Alwin Roy

Cover Work

Alwin Roy

About the Author

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.

About the Reviewers

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:

WordPress 3 Ultimate Security

WordPress 3 for Business Bloggers

WordPress 3 Cookbook

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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