From day one, WebDevStudios (WDS) has operated successfully as a 100% distributed company. We know WordPress, and we know remote work. That also means we know where to find the best resources for an online WordPress education. Of course, WDS has always supported and been a part of WordCamps and WordPress Meetups, but when we can’t attend either, here are some ways we attain our WordPress education.

WordPress.tv

WordPress.tv is the go-to spot to watch WordCamp talks from all over the world! It’s a pretty amazing website with a vast amount of WordPress education on topics such as The History of WordPress, How to Troubleshoot Your WordPress Site, and Building Web Applications on WordPress.

YouTube

Not all WordCamp talks are submitted to WordPress.tv. You can always find more on YouTube.

With the cancelation of @WordCampLanc, I went back and found the previously unreleased recording of my WordCamp Lancaster 2017 talk,
“Making WordPress Filters Work for You”.

Of all the talks I’ve given, this is one of my favorites. #WCLanc https://t.co/VHQSFhCZZ5

— Sal Ferrarello (@salcode) March 13, 2020

Additionally, a simple search for WordPress will open a door of WordPress education videos and tutorials, like this one below. (Note: this a no-audio tutorial.)

Podcasts

If audio learning is more your style, WDS Frontend Engineer, Mike England, blogged about his five favorite WordPress podcasts, saying, “With so much excitement surrounding WordPress, it can be difficult to stay current on what’s happening in the community and ecosystem. Podcasts offer an easy solution to accomplish just that.” Read about his recommendations on our blog.
 
 
 

Online Classes

Regardless of a public health scare, WDS team members are always strengthening our skills by taking online classes. Here are just a few of the options out there.

LinkedIn Learning

Who knew that the same place where you network with other like-minded professionals would be an excellent resource for education? In fact, StudioPress recently published an article about some new Genesis courses available at the website. Our project managers at WDS enjoy utilizing the benefits of LinkedIn Learning.

“As a group, we have taken courses covering communication, risk management and leadership,” says Cristina Holt, Director of Project Management. “Additionally, I can customize a professional growth course schedule per project manager that is specific to areas each needs to excel or improve in. The management and leadership courses offered are spot on. When I find an instructor that I like, I will pretty much take all of their courses on a subject. It’s easy to fit into any work schedule!”
 
 
 

Udemy

Like YouTube, a simple search at Udemy will lead one to a multitude of online WordPress education. Udemy is known for offering discount deals on courses, sometimes as low as $10 per course! So, if you don’t see a special offer happening now, just give it some time. It’ll show up unexpectedly at some point.

Tyler McGinnis

Our engineering team relies on courses at TylerMcGinnis.com for extensive education on Modern JavaScript and React Basics.

JavaScript for WordPress

For an advanced education on Gutenberg, our engineering team insists on attaining that through Zac Gordon and JavaScript for WordPress.

WordPress Blogs

There are so many WordPress blogs out there that offer basic WordPress tutorials along with those that offer advanced information. Obviously, we want you to read ours, but we also recommend the following:

• WPBeginner
• MangageWP.org
• Delicious Brains
• Tom McFarlin – Practical WordPress Development
• Sal Ferrarello
• WPLift
• Ahmad Awais

And there are so many more WordPress blogs ready to be discovered and devoured. For a more comprehensive list, take a look at this one.

WordPress Books

We love saying this line, “We literally wrote the books on WordPress,” because it’s true! Our COO, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, is the renowned author of the eighth edition of WordPress for Dummies. Additionally, our CEO, Brad Williams, is among the writers of Professional WordPress Plugin Development. (Note: the second edition is expected to be released soon.)

And if you have little ones at home from school and need to keep them entertained, our Director of Engineering, Greg Rickaby, wrote Creating a Web Site: Design and Build Your First Site! View all of our WordPress books on our Books page.

So don’t allow the current state of the world to interrupt your passion for knowledge. Keep calm and carry on with your WordPress education.

The post Continuing Your WordPress Education from Home appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Tasked with helping someone who knew very little about HTML, JavaScript, CSS, or web programming languages build a university website was a bit daunting. We had a big project ahead of us, but I knew exactly what would help… WordPress!

I had used WordPress for some personal projects in the past because I found it easy to use, build on, and maintain. Back then, WordPress was a content management system (CMS) built just for bloggers and powered very few sites that weren’t blogs. But even back then, I knew WordPress could accomplish more than just blogging.

WordPress now powers over 40% of the web, including more than just your average blog. That’s because the way that WordPress is built, you can do almost anything with it, from blogging, to pages, eCommerce sites—really anything you can dream up. WordPress has continued to power the website I helped build at the previously mentioned educational institution, and that was over 12 years ago! Eventually, WordPress became the university’s primary CMS a few years later. Faculty and staff found it easy to use and IT departments found it easy to maintain. It’s no wonder universities like Wharton University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Boise State, Georgia State, and USC all use WordPress to power their web presence.

Need more convincing? Let me give you 10 great reasons to use WordPress for a university website.

1. Ease of Use

If you’ve ever managed web content before, the first thing you’ll notice is how easy WordPress is to use. It feels natural, makes sense, and simply put: it just works. Want to create something? Just hit the Add New button, add a title, write your content, and hit Publish. It’s that easy. Want to edit later? Just click Edit and save your changes. WordPress is open-source, and despite what you might have heard about open-source software, all that really means is that lots of very professional, highly-skilled people have helped build it. That makes it the best and most capable CMS in use today on the web.

2. Easy to Learn

WordPress is used everywhere, from bloggers to small and even enterprise businesses. So many different kinds of people have used it to do so many different things that you can almost figure out how to do anything with WordPress with a few keystrokes on Google.

Through tools like the WordPress.org Support Forums (where you can get free support on just about anything), WordPress.tv, and many more resources available on the web, you won’t ever feel lost trying to do something amazing with WordPress. WordPress is an open and inviting community, not a locked down company where you have to dial up support, wait on hold, and jump through hoops to get assistance. WordPress lets you help yourself.

Want to learn even more? WordPress hosts annual conferences (usually at very low cost) around the world called WordCamps. Every WordPress user, no matter level of experience, is invited and welcomed to attend.

3. Roles, Capabilities, and Security

WordPress comes with a simple-to-understand role system that gives you complete control. This is especially helpful in educational and university settings where multiple people may be logging in to work on different areas of the website. Because every user has a role and fine-grained capabilities, you can ensure that there isn’t content chaos happening on your higher education website.

These roles and capabilities are also highly customizable. Just because it’s simple to start off with doesn’t mean you can’t also get very detailed and customize every facet of what your users have control over and what they do not.

WordPress is also very secure because it’s open-source. Aaron Campbell of the WordPress Security team has a great presentation that explains exactly how and why WordPress is as secure as it is.

4. Branding Consistency

One thing you’ll find useful right away is that you are more in control of branding consistency. Because WordPress has a de-coupled theming system, you can distribute easily downloadable and installable themes that can be used at multiple department sites. Or, if you use Multisite (see reason number seven), branding can be even more consistent. This also means that faculty and staff don’t have to muck around with HTML and CSS anymore, helping you keep web pages properly branded and well-built.

(Branding consistency was one of the biggest challenges at my university, but out of all the sites I built, they were always the most brand compliant because the various departments all used the same theme.)

5. Freedom and Customization

WordPress was built to be highly customized. With its hook and filter system, you can get WordPress (and any site built with it) to change and do just about anything you want when and where you want it. And, since you aren’t locked behind proprietary NDAs or some other company code, you can make changes when you want, done by whomever you want (like us), the way you want, and when you want it. (Oh yeah, and no waiting!) Because WordPress is the most popular open-source CMS, you’re also never bottle necked or locked into any one company for hire (but we’d love if you hired us!).

6. LMS vs CMS

WordPress has come a long way since my last class in college. It used to be that you would maintain your Learning Management System (LMS) or eLearning system separate from your CMS system. Your content and your learning materials were in totally different environments, and often sharing resources between the two got really messy. Not to mention the same issues that came from using proprietary LMS systems (usually some mess built on Java) couldn’t be customized and tweaked to your unique needs.

Those days are behind us. Today your learning materials and content can live under the same house in WordPress. With tools like LearnDash, LearnPress, Sensei, and CoursePress (just to name a few), creating learning content is a breeze and works in-tandem with your content and users, since they all work within the same system. Plus, any of these tools can easily be customized and added by our highly knowledgeable team, given that all these solutions are also as highly customizable as WordPress itself.

7. Multisite

WordPress has a unique feature that lets you run multiple sites on one install called (you guessed it) Multisite. This allows you to set up multiple departments and multiple sites, while having a single library of users. This also allows full customizations on each site (if you want it), and even lets you control them all with administrative users.

Using Multisite also has the benefit of using a single environment for your install and reducing maintenance responsibilities since all your sites run on one stack (one hosting environment). University administrators that have had an employee leave their educational institution know how much work goes into removing them from multiple environments, websites, etc. With Multisite, you can control a single user across your entire network of sites with ease. Lastly, Multisite really shines when it comes to code. Since all your sites are using themes and plugins that you control in one simple location, you can count on all of your websites working seamlessly.

8. School Directories, Profiles, and Groups

Every user has a profile they can edit in WordPress. Adding custom fields are limitless and aren’t controlled by some limitation that you would normally encounter with a proprietary platform. You can control who can edit what fields because WordPress has roles and capabilities built in. This makes building a directory of users quite simple since all your users are right there in a single place, and it’s all super easy to manage.

Want to go a step further? Tools like BuddyPress can extend WordPress into a private (and even public) social media experience with groups, discussion boards, private messaging, and more.

9. News and Social Media

As mentioned before, WordPress was originally built for blogging and news. That means WordPress comes complete with RSS feeds, post scheduling, and commenting all built in. WordPress is full of plugins you can use to connect your content to your social media. At WebDevStudios, we can even customize these tools and build custom plugins that communicate with social media APIs to do even more.

WordPress also loves embedded content from social media and other platforms. Want to embed a tweet? Just paste the link. A YouTube video? Just paste the link. Instagram post… I think you get the point. WordPress will take care of all the rest. Say goodbye to copying HTML codes that fail to work years down the road due to changes in embedding codes. WordPress automatically figures things out and makes sure your social media content shows correctly on your site.

10. Maintenance Is Easier

Easy maintenance is probably the biggest reason to rely on WordPress for a university website. By running all your sites on WordPress (especially with features like Multisite), the time and resources you put toward maintaining your site will decrease. WordPress continually releases new updates with enhanced features, security fixes, and keeps users updated. Many administrators can perform updates themselves, but for those who need assistance, our WordPress maintenance company is designed to do it for you. So, instead of maintaining multiple CMS platforms (and even custom code), multiple hosting environments, supporting multiple faculty and staff using different platforms (requiring many tiers of training and support), just use WordPress! It’s that easy.

Let’s talk about WordPress!

Seven years ago, I chose to pursue a career in WordPress because I knew it was the future, and it has been, and it still is. If you would like to talk about how WordPress can help your university, school, or higher education institution, contact us to start a discussion about how we might be able to help. If you’re already using WordPress, WebDevStudios is one of the top enterprise level WordPress shops. We’ve done enterprise level work with companies like Microsoft, Discovery Channel, and the YMCA. We’d love to partner with you!

The post 10 Reasons to Use WordPress for a University Website appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Although I find it hard to believe that any of our regular readers are unfamiliar with WordCamp (come on, now!), for those of you that are completely green: WordCamps are events held all over the world! The events are an awesome place where WordPress nerds unite to share their skills, insights, and learn a whole lot from a bunch of other smarties.

WordCamp Maui is on February 13-14th; it’s the first WordCamp Maui to take place, although it has been long in the works, and thanks to Jon Brown, it’s finally taking place.

The WDS team will have one of our own in attendance: Developer lead Ben Lobaugh will be speaking! Details on the when and what are still to be determined, and we will update with more information once we have it (you can also always keep an eye on our Twitter feed for updates).

UPDATE:  

Interacting with External APIs – Saturday, February 14th, 9 AM 

Ben will be speaking on tapping into the resources available through external APIs (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc). Much of the functionality needed to interact with APIs is already included in the core through the HTTP class. In this session, attendees will learn the concepts behind pulling data from an external API, sending data to an external API, how to utilize WordPress caching to increase speed and functionality, and more!

Ben will be the first speaker Saturday morning, and you won’t want to miss it!

Other than that, though, we wanted to highlight a few other people and sessions that you won’t want to miss:

Friday Notables

Gregg Franklin is a WordPress Developer, team member at ServerPress, LLC. (the creators of DesktopServer), and co-facilitator of the Inland Empire WordPress meetup group. He will be with a team that is presenting two workshops–one for beginners, and one for business. Gregg will be the “opening act” with the beginner workshop, so go see his song and dance and get your beginner knowledge on!

The Intro to WordPress workshop will be on Friday from 9:00 AM – 10:35 AM, and will focus on helping attendees understand WordPress while building and managing their website(s). Gregg will cover everything from initially setting up your WordPress site to managing and publishing posts (including adding categories and tagging content). Attendees can expect to learn the entire Dashboard, as well as handy tricks and tips.

Throughout the rest of the day, there will also be the following workshops:

• 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM – Intro to WordPress Themes – Instructor: Adam Silver
• 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM – Passionate About Plugins & Wild For Widgets – Instructor: Kathryn Presner
• 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM – Hosting and Security – Instructor: Ben Howard
• 3:25 PM – 4:00 PM – Panel discussion/Q&A – Guided by YOUR questions after a day full of WP goodness!

Saturday Notables

Session descriptions from the WC Maui website

These have been picked out by a few of our developers as sessions that piqued their interest, so make room in your schedule:

9:00 AM – How To Not Design Like A Developer – Speaker: Tracy Apps

Have you developed enough WordPress skills to make your own custom themes, but they still look like crap? Don’t worry, there’s some simple steps and tools that can help you design less like a developer. Come with your questions, leave with concrete examples and tools to use right away… and designers everywhere will thank you.

9:50 AM – Building themes with the WP REST API – Speaker: Jack Lenox

With the REST API shortly due to be merged into WordPress core, it’s about time developers started thinking about building themes that use it. The REST API allows developers to create much more engaging user experiences. This will be a talk that covers the challenges one faces when working with the REST API, how to extend the REST API itself from within your theme, and suggested ways that themes can be built to use it.

Lastly…

For those of you who will be there, the WordCamp Maui folks shared a wonderful post on how to make the most of the event. There’s some excellent advice in there that isn’t only applicable to WC Maui; if you’re a regular conference/event goer (or would like to become one), I bet you’ll find something good to take away from it.

Unfortunately, if you haven’t already scored yourself a ticket, you might have to miss this one; it seems that this WC Maui is sold out. You can always keep an eye on their Twitter, though, for any updates on tickets that are being resold.

Make sure to say hi to Ben, and tell us how it went when it’s over!

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