Blog Posts

A Few Favorite Posts From The Past

Latest Posts

  • What We Learned From Building An Accessible Gutenberg Friendly Theme
    The team here at WPMU DEV is also the same team behind CampusPress, which provides hosting and WordPress services for schools and universities. Yesterday, we released our latest product, a flexible and accessible WordPress theme for schools and education. This is the first theme that our team has created that truly incorporates everything that the Gutenberg block editor has to offer – such as reusable blocks, editor styles, content groups, and customizing default blocks. No use in sugarcoating it, it wasn’t as fast or as easy of a project as we hoped. But the end result was well worth it….
  • Introducing ‘Flex’, Our New School WordPress Theme
    We are thrilled to share CampusPress Flex – a brand new flexible theme designed for school, district, and department websites. It’s never been easier and more affordable to have an accessible, fast, and easy-to-navigate website that you can take pride in. Interested in trying it for free? Apply for the Free Pilot program here. Let’s get into the details. The New ‘CampusPress Flex’ Theme This theme is powerful. As its name of ‘Flex’ describes, it’s ideal for all sorts of sites – schools, departments, districts, organizations, and more. We have 15 years of experience working with schools and WordPress. We…
  • Simplify Website Management With Single Sign-On
    One of the best advantages of using a CampusPress network is the ease at which you can create new user accounts, sites, and blogs. By setting up Single Sign-On (SSO) for your network, you can simplify many of these creation and management processes. SSO enables users to log in to multiple online resources with a single username and password. Your school or place of work is probably already using it, and we require it for all sites that we host. So what qualifies as SSO? Shibboleth, CAS, Active Directory/LDAP, G Suire (Google Apps) and others are common single sign-on solutions that our CampusPress…
  • Complete Guide To WordPress Accessibility
    Web accessibility is a huge and complex topic. You might be interested in accessibility because you are wanting to avoid a lawsuit or a fine. Or, let’s be less cynical, maybe you already appreciate that web accessibility is morally the right thing to do and you are looking for ways to make your site better. Whatever the reason, we are glad you are here.  Here’s the deal. Too often we see those working on making their sites more accessible miss important context and understanding of the bigger picture. This leads to easily avoidable mistakes or wastes time and resources unnecessarily….
  • The Year 2020 And Remembering Why We Do What We Do
    The beginning of a new decade also marks 10 years for me personally since I left the classroom and joined the team here at Edublogs and CampusPress. I’d like to take this opportunity to reflect back on where we’ve been and actively define what our next 10+ years together might look like. In 2010, we were still regularly using the term ‘Web 2.0’ to describe applications and websites like Edublogs, WordPress, and social media platforms where users create and publish content. 2010 was the year that the first iPad came out but mobile traffic was still a tiny portion of…
  • Why Is Sending Emails From WordPress So Hard?
    We send and process millions of emails from WordPress each month. There are times when there may be 10s of thousands of emails in the send queue at once. These include emails like: new site or user welcome emails password reset requests new comment notifications subscription emails when new posts are published moderation notifications for reviews and notifications from contact forms. So many contact forms. Y’all, it turns out, sending system emails from WordPress is hard. For example, send a few too many email notifications when spammers fill out your contact form and your host or email service provider may…
  • Our Continued Support Of WPCampus
    We’re honored to support the WPCampus community by sponsoring the Annual Conference – with this year’s event taking place July 25-27 in Portland, Oregon. For those that can’t attend in person, all sessions will be live-streamed, for free, as well! You can also check out the recordings of previous conference sessions too. There’s a treasure trove of professional development on all areas of WordPress, the web, and higher ed. In addition to the conference, the WPCampus group hangs out in an active and helpful Slack community that anyone interested in the use of WordPress in Higher Education should join. And…
  • Democratizing Education With WordPress
    This is a companion post to a talk I gave yesterday at WordCamp Europe 2019 – the largest conference of its kind for the web and WordPress community. What follows is somewhere between a transcript of the presentation and a blog post.  You can see the video of this talk here.   Let’s get started by taking a look at a few photographs… Photo Number 1. Photo Number 2. Credit: Kansas Historical Society. Photograph Number 3. What do we all immediately notice? Besides the interesting clothes and the first two photos being in black and white, all three are very…