Blog Posts

A Few Favorite Posts From The Past

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  • New Accessibility Tools Now Free For The WordPress Community
    New Accessibility Tools Now Free For The WordPress Community by Ronnie BurtMay 13, 2020 Today, we are releasing two plugins and a blazing fast theme for free – all on our CampusPress Github for the WordPress community. And of course, all of which are also available on all sites that we host. Here’s a video version of this post with an overview and screencast too. My first paid job on the web was as an undergraduate intern interpreting accessibility scan results of University of Texas websites. That was nearly 20 years ago, and honestly, not much has changed. The same…
  • Best Teacher Websites In Time Of Remote Learning
    Best Teacher Websites In This Time Of Remote Learning by Ronnie Burt and Kathleen Morris Last updated on May 6, 2020 Let’s discuss teacher websites, what they should include, and how to create them. Want to skip right to it? You can jump down to the example teacher blogs and websites here. If you’ve been thrown into teaching remotely due to the global pandemic, you may have quickly realized you need a virtual space to replace your physical classroom. For most educators, it’s essential to have an online hub where you can distribute student learning tasks, share resources, gather feedback,…
  • 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
    Introducing ‘Flex’, Our New School WordPress Theme by Ronnie Burt Last updated on May 6, 2020 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,…
  • Simplify Website Management With Single Sign-On
    Simplify Website Management With Single Sign-On by Ronnie Burt Last updated on May 6, 2020 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…
  • Complete Guide To WordPress Accessibility
    Complete Guide To WordPress Accessibility by Ronnie Burt Last updated on April 30, 2020 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…
  • 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?
    Why Is Sending Emails From WordPress So Hard? by Ronnie Burt Last updated on April 29, 2020 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…