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  • Date: Thursday, October 09, 2008 Time: 3:14 pm Category: Blogging, Presentations Tagged 2008 WVHETC, cms, higher education, WordPress Discussion: 10 Comments

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Last week I presented at the WV Higher Education Technology Conference.  I thought that I’d go ahead and post my presentation here for those of you who didn’t get to attend.  If anyone else at WVU presented and would like to post their presentations here, just let me know.  I’ll be happy to post other presentations here as well.

How WordPress Changed My Life

Presentation by Sarah R. Barnes at the 2008 West Virginia Higher Education Technology Conference

My name is Sarah Barnes and I work for the WVU Office of Information Technology. Today I am going to talk about WordPress and how it changed my life.

Now this may seem like a rather melodramatic title, but when I was thinking about how I wanted to present on WordPress I started to examine why exactly it is that I have grown so fond of it.
To explain that, I need to put it in perspective.

I got into web design in 1996. I am primarily self-taught and my interest in web development has generally been on the design and usability of websites.  Before I got to know WordPress, my work had been primarily rooted in static html, usually using includes.

About a year and a half ago, I completed a major redesign of the Office of Information Technology website.  Since the site is still mostly static html with php includes right now, I was running into a problem with maintaining the news portion of our site. I was creating new static files for each new news story and saving it in a specific place, uploading it, adding it manually to an XML file (for our RSS feed) to make sure it appeared on the main page. Additionally, if I was not available, my supervisor could not add content.  Also – if both of us were out, no one could post a new story to the main page. Long story short, we had to find a way that we could

1. Update the main news stories easily,
2. When we were off-campus if necessary,
3. Would produce an RSS feed that could be pushed to subscribers and syndicated on our website wherever needed.

I’d known for awhile we needed something database-driven. Unfortunately, I didn’t know anything about creating databases. I’d always relied on “the server guy” to handle that.

Enter WordPress.  What exactly is it?

WordPress was originally designed as a blogging tool competing with other blogging tools like Blogger, Moveable Type, TextPattern, and others. It was created in 2003 and it is currently the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world.

Though one of my colleagues at OIT (Justin) had mentioned WordPress to me before, I didn’t fully explore the option until after attending a presentation about setting up WordPress. The presenter demonstrated how easy it was to set up and use and integrated it into her website.  She even used a press release section of her website as an example.

So initially I asked Justin for help setting up WordPress so I could try it out to serve up press releases.  After I got in and saw what the fuss was about it was really eye opening. I was able, in a matter of a few hours, modify a WordPress theme to look exactly like the OIT website and incorporate it into our existing site structure.

Not Just a Blogging Tool

I realized that this application was extremely versatile and could easily be modified to be used on a variety of websites – not just as a blog tool or a news engine. It could also be used as a content management system.  Soon after that I dove in and tried installing it on my own on my own personal hosting account. I realized I’d been wasting a lot of time by assuming that I couldn’t set up database driven sites on my own.  As it turns out, given the proper tools, it’s pretty durn easy to set it up yourself.  So, this really was a liberating step for me.  I began to see a greater potential for using this platform than just to run press releases or a blog and began to use it to develop other sites.

Its modular nature makes it amenable to different types of websites.  As it turns out, it is an excellent content management system for community organizations, classes, collaboration tools, project updates, diaries, photo galleries, discussion, even ecommerce.

WVU OIT Website

OIT News & Announcements

Dashboard (OIT News & Announcements)

Write New Post (OIT News & Announcements)

Manage Posts (OIT News & Announcements)

Edit Themes (OIT News & Announcements)

General Settings (OIT News & Announcements)

Plugin Manager (OIT News & Announcements)

The Reenactor Post (My dad’s blog)

Arthurdale Heritage, Inc. uses WordPress as a CMS

Arts Council of Preston County uses WordPress as a CMS

ThingsGoneBy.com will soon use WordPress for eCommerce

System requirements and installation (the famous 5 minute install)

Installing WordPress is incredibly easy. WordPress needs 2 things: php and a database like SQL or MySQL.

At first I was incredibly daunted by the prospect of setting up my own database. I’d heard of a great tool called phpMyAdmin which is a kind of graphical interface for setting up databases on servers that use php and SQL/MySQL. I hadn’t actually used it before, but I gave it a try and suddenly I was free.

Once the database is set up all you need to do with Wordpress is edit 1 file. A single file – wp-config.php.

Even then all you need to do with this file is edit the database name, username, password, and location.

Once you upload that and point your browser to the website, it’ll take you through a couple of screens and have you set up the admin account.

After that you are done. It is ridiculously simple.

How does WordPress Work?

Using WordPress is also very easy. Let me put it this way. My dad had no concept of what a blog really was or did 2 months ago. Now he has a blog and is managing the content himself (for the most part) posting articles, links, videos, and photos. I occasionally have to explain a thing or two to him about how it works or what he can do with it, but overall I have spent exactly maybe 2-3 hours TOTAL on telling him how to use it.

I would venture to say that adding content to WordPress is as easy as sending an email.
There are several different roles in WordPress: Admin, Editor, Author and Contributor. Admin, has the highest level privileges and can do anything. Editors can’t change settings, but they can manage all posts and pages. Authors can only publish posts. Contributors are only able to send content for review.

Content is divided into Posts and Pages. Pages are not a part of the blog timeline and not added to the RSS feed generated by WordPress. Pages are best for content that is more static. Posts are the way the bulk of your content is generated in Wordpress. Posts are in a timeline and update the RSS feed.

Write – To create a new Post or Page click the Write tab or select either the Write a New Post or Write a New Page buttons on the main WordPress “Dashboard.” You can also add new Links under the Write tab.

Manage lets you go back and edit pages, posts, links, categories, tags, your media library, import or export data, etc.

Design controls which theme you use. Themes are displays based on any that you have uploaded to the themes folder. Select a new theme by clicking on one and applying it. The Widgets link controls your sidebars. This is optional, but it is an easy way to mange certain aspects of WordPress. You can have multiple sidebars.

Comments lets you manage comments made on your Wordpress site.

Administrator Tabs

Administrative management does require you know a little bit more than your average bear, but in comparison to other Content Management Systems it is very user-friendly and uncomplicated.

Users lets you manage all the users of your blog. You can dictate who is an admin, editor, author, contributor or simply a subscriber. You can also change passwords here if you want.
Plugins controls what plugins are active on your website. To add new plugins upload to wp-content>plugins. Then go to Plugins and activate any you want to use.

Settings controls the back end. Turn comments on or off, set Permalinks, edit settings for writing and reading posts, etc. Also options for specific plugins are usually under this tab.

Themes are uploaded to wp-content> themes and activated under the Design tab.

Updating/Upgrading

Right now upgrading WordPress has to be done manually or by installing a plugin called WordPress Automatic Plugin. In WordPress 2.7 (coming out in November) this feature will be added by default.

Updating plugins is also important to keep on top of, and can (as of WP 2.5) be updated easily through the WP interface.

Designing for WordPress (Themes)

Now. After you install WordPress you will want to customize the look and feel of the site. WordPress uses “themes” to customize a basic set of code. The implementation of themes in WordPress is what, in my opinion, makes it stand out from other content management systems. Each theme is self-contained within the wp-content folder. This folder is the only one that stores custom information for your WordPress install. You can modify other parts of Wordpress, but by setting it up this way, they’ve made it so it is unlikely that the average user will ever want or have to.

WordPress is a php application, but it is extremely modular. The application is broken down into several core files which can be modified in limitless ways.

The best way to jump into WordPress, however, is to download a theme and modify it. I feel this is the best way to learn how it works. Once you do this a ew times, you see how different themes are constructed and start to get a better understanding of what is possible. I generally look for a theme that has the overall layout I’m looking for and go from there. However, if you want, you can start your own theme from scratch. A good place to start is with a blank theme (download “Starkers”) and build your own look and feel.

One thing I really like about WordPress is the Theme Editor. You can edit the theme in real time on the website if you want. This is a lot less time consuming that upload it each time you make a change. OTOH, it does require a level of comfort with straight code with no syntax highlighting.

Plugins

Another aspect of WordPress that makes it very attractive and flexible is the plethora of plugins available to extend its capabilities.  Plugins that do everything from improving the backend administrative features to making your WordPress site a full-blown shopping cart.
[In-depth discussion probably not an option due to time constraints.]

…more?

So you may be asking yourself, WordPress sounds great, but can it really manage a large site? What about multiple blogs? Do you have to install it multiple times?

Well, there is another WordPress for those of us who want to run multiple instances of Wordpress and have centralized control over all of them called Wordpress Multiuser or WordPress Mu.

WordPress Mu is a single installation that lets you manage multiple “blogs.” Wordpress.com and Edublogs use it to manage the millions of hosted blogs. This summer we launched a blog for OIT using WPMU (blog.oit.wvu.edu). I can control the available themes and plugins from a central location.  The biggest drawback to WPMU, in my opinion is the lack of a web-based theme editor.

WPMU in iself is a presentation, so I’l go ahead and end here.  I really appreciate your time.  Thank you.

Questions?

Please keep in mind that this was only a 30 minute presentation, so I didn’t really have a lot of time to cover everything in WordPress.

Is anyone else out there using WordPress?  How are you using it?