WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on a customised version of Wordpress for educators. It’s going to be called EduPress and is about a week away from completion. The question is, what features would you like to see in it?
The impetus for this project came as I could see that teachers were stuck between two stools: not having the expertise to know what they’re doing with fully-fledged Wordpress, and free blogs (e.g. Blogger) which either had adverts or ‘go to a random blog’ links.
EduPress is essentially the latest version of Wordpress plus some plugins, images and customization, together with a step-by-step guide on how to install, configure and use it. Here’s some of the features I’ve included so far:
- Automatic hyperlinking
- Integrated audio player
- Easy-to-use admin interface
- Option to make whole or parts of blog password-protected
- Comment spam protection
- Compatibility with mobile devices
- Contact form
- Email encoder to prevent spamming
- Header images related to education
- ‘Asides’ category to show mini-posts on sidebar (e.g. for homework)
What other features of EduPress would be useful to you and to other teachers? 
Popularity: 3% [?]
I suppose one might be the inclusion of a wiki for collaborative purposes. However, this may come several versions down the line…
Doug, if you can pull this off then hats off to you!
Well I shall certainly try my best, but need more suggestions!
Well done for getting your gravatar sorted out Ed…
I thought the best way to answer this question was to have a play around with WordPress and see what I could do and what I wanted to be able to do. Initally I planned to spend an hour messing around with it. 7 hours later and the whole of my history website has been moved over and is running on WordPress!
So what did I find?
Fairly easy to use (although that is says through several stiffcits of geekdom).
I was aiming for more of what Ed and Simon have done with ilovehistory and found it was surprisingly easy to set up pages of content outside the main ‘blog’ element
It was pretty easy to customise, although I did end up rummaging around in the coding which I know many people won’t want to do. To that end, the ability to easily add skins, and make it as customisable as possible, as easily as possible is probably going to to a bonus for lots of people. I also don’t seem to be able to get my links list into the order I want it, so the ability to do that would be good!
Let me know when it’s done and I’ll happily guinnea-pig it for you. Have you thought about asking people who’ve used WP (or haven’t because it looked a bit scary) over on the schoolhistory forum?
Nice one Doug - hat’s off to you. Again!
Coolhistory’s looking good Dave - nice work! I agree that Wordpress is ideal for teachers - it makes new content obvious whilst being able to create ’static’ content. Marvellous stuff. I’m hoping that EduPress will mean that even more teachers get on board…