[OT] Experience with getting participation in school web site by teachers

[Peter Dobratz]

I setup WordPress for a personal blog and for two non-profit
organizations that I'm involved with.  It's designed to work with the
LAMP stack.  In fact, in one case, we ended up switching web hosts
(IIS/Windows/ColdFusion server to Linux/Apache/PHP) just to make it
easier to get WordPress setup.

In any case, I think WordPress would be an excellent fit for your
requirements.  The pages are all editable using a rich text editor in
a modern web browser (like recent versions of Firefox).  For your
case, I think the effort would be minimal enough for each teacher to
edit their static pages and blog posts.  Uploading pictures with
thumbnails is very easy.  You can also upload a bunch of themes to
your server and then each teacher could pick a theme and even fairly
easily switch themes while preserving the underlying content.  One of
the neat things is that a change history is kept for the pages/posts
so you can easily see what changed.

--Peter

If your curious, here's the sites that I've had a hand in creating or
maintaining over the last 6 months or so:

http://www.dobratz.us/blog - baby pictures.  This was my first foray
into WordPress and it was created with a 2-week-old at home and under
the duress of receiving many emails from relatives near and far
complaining about not having enough baby pictures.  The wordpress
instructions claimed that it takes 15 minutes to install.  It took me
30 minutes (file permissions needed modifying, PHP file upload limit
needed and increase).
http://www.litchfieldchurch.org/ - this is a new URL for my church and
new website.  It replaced the old website which was handcrafted using
static HTML pages with updates every 3 months or so.
http://www.nashabitat.org/ - replaced an existing handcrafted site
with ColdFusion.  Updates ot the site were spotty, and sometimes would
take 6 months.  One tricky thing here was a web form, but we found a
WordPress plugin to handle this:
http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin


On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Dan Jenkins <dan at rastech.com> wrote:
> This is totally off-topic (except that we use Linux for all of the
> server infrastructure there), but I figured some of you may have some
> insight on this issue.
>
> We have an elementary school as a client. They want to have a more
> dynamic web site with teachers / classrooms having more up-to-date web
> presence. Web presence defined as any of web page(s), blogs, wiki, etc.
> Each classroom sub-site could be different. They just want to have
> something which teachers would update with minimal effort for those who
> won't/can't expend more effort. As most places, there are a few zealous
> ones, a bulk of if-it's-not-too-much-trouble (or, to be honest,
> I-don't-have-enough-time-as-it-is) ones and a few no-way-no-how ones.
>
> They do not have a clear idea of what they want to present, nor to whom.
> (I know that ought to be the first thing, but they simply don't know
> yet.) This is brain-storming phase.
>
> They tried a website some years ago, with each classroom having a web
> page, but it bogged down. They were using various web editors (Publisher
> mostly), and most people got tied up in the effort of creating web pages
> that looked good to them, versus content that was useful to others.
>
> I am not looking for ways to inspire them (though I will be happy to
> listen to any).
>
> I am looking for tools to make it easy for them to update content
> (broadly defining content) and provide an overarching structure to make
> it easy-to-find.
>
> They have four Linux servers (Mandriva), with the usual LAMP. We are
> planning on overhaul of their Linux servers this summer to address
> performance (on their email server/web filter) and storage issues (they
> are doing much more video editing and space has gotten tight). This
> summer would be a good time to put any new infrastructure for this in place.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions?
> --
> Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, - 603-206-9951
> *** IT support excellence for thirty years
>
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