Putting the school site on a blog
Posted by: Rob Wall in WordPress, small pieces, technology in education, generalI’ve had some ideas in the past about using some sort of CMS to run a school web site, but after my recent post about building a school website out of a colony of blogs I’ve been encouraged to consider scaling that project up.
The feedback and ideas that were left by Stephen, James and Christopher were very helpful. My original stated goal was to have a variety of wordpress blogs being used by various staff, students and groups around the school. If a teacher wanted a web site, they could build one themselves or I could set them up with a blog. If a creative writing class wanted a public online writing space, I could set them up with a blog (or a set of blogs). If a team or a club or anyone in the school wanted some way to put stuff online, I could (OK - all together on the chorus please) set them up with a blog. It should be noted that I have a pretty generous view of human nature, and would assume, perhaps naively, that all these sites would not be used for malicious behaviour such as online harassment of others. Whenever I’ve worked with students in a way that involved communicating online, I’ve found that this is generally the case.
Christopher made the terrific suggestion that I could use a more fully featured CMS such as Drupal to power the site. I love Drupal - I think it is such an incredible application, and loaded with functionality. But I’m going to try things a different way, at least for now, for a couple of reasons. First, I think Drupal is too much for what I want to do, and when I show other staff and students how to post and edit material, they will be overwhelmed with information. Well - I think some of the staff would; the students would probably show me some features I didn’t know about. The main reason for going with WordPress instead of Drupal is a much more pragmatic one - its the tool I know best. It also fits with my affinity for a small-technologies-loosely-joined approach to building a learning environment.
I also want to thank Stephen for his suggestion about RSS aggregation in PHP using MagpieRSS (I had forgotten about that) and James for his offer of help with WordPress MultiUser (I still might get ahold of you for that!). The three of you got me thinking about different ways a multiple author web site might be put together. The main issue that I’m trying to work out is whether it is better to have a site in which everyone contributes to one centralized CMS, or if I can let everyone work on their own site (maybe a WP blog, but it could be anything else that squeezes out some kind of RSS or Atom feed) and glue the whole thing together. I’m favouring the latter plan because it gives any potential contributor a choice of content creation tools.
I’m also favouring the latter plan because I’ve shown the prototype of the announcements site to some colleagues, including the school principal, and they’ve encouraged me to use what I’ve done so far to revise the main school web site, and the tools at hand are always the easiest ones to work with!
My revised mental plan, then, is to put the school website together using WordPress. Legacy content can be linked from the main page, which will also be used to display school news, events, deadlines and similar information. As individuals or groups in the school want to get involved in adding content, they can be added as a contributor to the site, or given their own blogging space if they want to create content but not necessarily add it to the main school page. Such content can be linked to from the main page, or aggregated together somewhere on the “core” school site.
I’m going to try getting some more work done on the preview of the site tomorrow. So far, the core is looking good, and I’m just going to assume that there will be some way to route the feeds into the blog once that becomes a necessity. And if there isn’t an existing solution, the school division has a very talented PHP nerd on the technical staff! :^)
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