I do wonder if people think that wordpress is just a blogging tool and do not realise the power that it has over developing and maintaining content. I for one have used it for portal pages, so it is easy for people to put up content, inform about house points, develop specific pages on teaching and learning. Looking at the showcase on wordpress gives students a idea on what the power of this platform has available.
A number of years ago I attended a presentation on silverstripe and saw the development of the platform. One thing I think is people install it and see just a basic page, its not until you start working through the themes that you start seeing what can be done. I would love to find a resource on developing wordpress for high school students.
Doing some research tonight, I found http://www.wpyogi.com/ which looks to have some good tutorials on it, free to download. It is in a git hub format, which is awesome, simple to download and get working.
Now moving into server environment at school, ready to download and see whats available
I found this thread on developing wordpress in schools, some good ideas http://wordpress.org/support/topic/teaching-wordpress-in-highschool
There is this curriculum pack for wordpress http://highschoolwebdesign.com/introduction-to-wordpress-course/
An interesting discussion on presenting wordpress to students http://tommcfarlin.com/wordpress-in-high-school/
But then is it worth going down the wordpress line, I realise that there are other CMS systems and that they should be explored for there advantages and disadvantages.
Silverstripe - a New Zealand based CMS http://www.silverstripe.org/
1 comment:
Yes the design is important as you have found out recently but its coming into the stage of technology that we do not need to worry as such about the front end as there is so much responsive stuff available and premade scripts for client side validation that this can be slipped on in front of any working system. When they are learning to develop a PHP/MYSQL website it should be that they are learning it from the ground up maybe a week or two just general PHP OOP class's SQL injection prevention etc and then they pick up and develop a site based on a framework - Symfony or CI. When the students develop a "project" they should take their idea - or pick them out of a hat develop a scope about of what they are going to need interms of DB structure models views controllers functions and key design points about what device is this site going to work on what do I need to implement in my design for it to work.
Then they can proceed with the front end one thing that I found with other peers when I did my DIP is that they focused to much on the looks even within the scope stage and by the time it was getting close to the hand it they were still making structure changes writing code and implementing functions - the design should be left into the Gannet chart until the last week or less as this is not the hard point. By doing it from the ground up they get a taste of what its like really.
I got talking to a person from a recruitment agency not that long ago - he came from about 20 years in the GD industry and recommended this book series http://www.abookapart.com/products/
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