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Moodle E-Learning Course Development

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complete guide to e-learning using Moodle

I went to a Moodle training course recently, and the universal cry there was for training manuals or guidance books which would talk you through the program and its features. This new software package is sweeping the world of further and higher education. Just in case you didn’t know, Moodle is an Open Source (that is, free) course management system (CMS). Or if you prefer, a virtual learning environment (VLE) into which tutors can upload their course materials.

Moodle: E-Learning Course Development It’s a sophisticated and complex program which offers all sorts of features to please teachers and students alike. Interactive exercises; journals; email and chat; Wikis; forums; and surveys – all in addition to the basic learning materials, which can be uploaded in any file format. Moodle is built on what’s called a ‘social constructivist’ model.

That is, students are encouraged to build their own learning experiences by engaging with teaching materials, interactive exercises, tutors, and fellow students.

Moodle organises everything for you – from individual student enrolments to databases of complete course results. Students can store drafts of their work, see their quiz results, build learning diaries, or participate in joint project-building. Tutors can set time limits for tests,

First off the block in guidance manuals there was Jason Cole’s book Using Moodle which gave a description of the system. Now comes William Rice’s guide to building courses. The difference between the two is that Rice gets further under the bonnet and shows you the workings of Moodle. More importantly, he tells you in advance what the consequences of your choices will be.

Moodle is so modularised and flexible that you can arrange your course contents however you wish (well, almost). But your choices (which can be made very easily) can also have hidden knock-on effects.

The Moodle interface can also be changed at a single click to work in any one of a number of languages. It offers you the opportunity to add course materials in any format – and to edit your pages and turn them into web pages without having to learn HTML coding.

And if you want to be really adventurous in terms of pedagogy, you can have students assessing their own and other students’ work, voting on the relevance of discussion contributions, and collectively building course-related glossaries and encyclopedias (using a Wiki).

William Rice makes course design clear by breaking down the process into separate elements – for instance, showing the difference between static pages (text and Web pages) and interactive pages (quizzes, journals, and assignments). Most importantly, he explains the advantages and limitations of each.

For the technically minded, there’s an entire chapter on how Moodle is installed and configured to suit your needs. On the other hand, if you want to practice or ‘try before you download’, there’s an excellent demonstration version of Moodle at demo.moodle.org. I actually read the book and had the demo open on screen at the same time, to check each feature for real. But you don’t have to go that far: there are screenshots illustrating every item.

There is extensive coverage of the quizzes, lessons, assignments, and other pedagogic tools available, and a chapter which introduces all the add-ons and plug-in modules which are available for free download. The only thing which struck me as odd was a chapter about welcoming students and making your starting page friendly – which puzzlingly came near the end of the book.

I’m working on a Moodle-based project at the moment, and can vouch for the comprehensiveness of Moodle’s own online documentation – but I imagine most course designers (like me) will feel more confident with a printed manual to hand. This is the one I would suggest you go for.

Moodle E-Learning Course Development   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Moodle E-Learning Course Development   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2006

William H. Rice, Moodle: E-Learning Course Development, Packt Publishing: Birmingham, 2006, pp.236, ISBN: 1904811299

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Moodle Teaching Techniques

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creative ways to use Moodle for online learning courses

William H. Rice is something of a Moodle specialist. This is a follow up to his recent Moodle: E-Learning Course Development in which he seeks to explain the finer points of Moodle’s dizzying array of features and how they can be used to construct ever more sophisticated models of online teaching and learning. Moodle Teaching Techniques looks at the current and the future versions of Moodle. For instance, many tutors want to control the sequence of the student’s progress through a course, so that they need to understand one topic before they pass on to the next.

Moodle Teaching TechniquesThis is called ‘activity locking’, which is not available in the currently popular Moodle 1.8 version, but will be by the time version 2.0 appears. This is a good way of future-proofing the book’s relevance. All the strategies are explained in a perfectly straightforward manner, and illustrated with screenshots from the relevant control panels within Moodle. Those people who are familiar with its interface will have no difficulty in finding their way around.

The central feature of Moodle’s interactivity is the quiz option – and fortunately this is explored in some detail, showing how tutors can give graded levels of feedback on answers. I can tell you from first hand experience that all this is hard work – thinking up questions, correct solutions, and responses to all possible answers – but it does give students something more interactive than just reading flat text on a screen.

It’s certainly true that Moodle gives tutors and administrators an amazing amount of control over what appears and what takes place on a course. Postings to a discussion forum can be rated for their relevance, ordered by priority, and monitored for the participation level. These features are particularly useful for students engaged with online college degree programs where there is less face-to-face contact with other students as well as tutors.

However, some features are explored to the point of Utopianism – such as the ability of tutors to conduct chat sessions with students in a foreign language, with all the keyboard allocations used to type in foreign characters.

It’s good to know that Moodle has these features, but the basics of course construction still need to be explained and promoted – such as how to get more graphics, video, sound, and general animation and interaction into a typical course. Ninety-nine out of every hundred online tutors will still be having problems getting their students to the keyboard and keeping them there.

And some of the suggestions are workarounds bordering on the perverse – such as creating forums and allocating to them single students for what seems no more than what would be possible in a private email exchange. It’s possible, and it’s ingenious – but any tutor who has the time to do this ought to be making better use of it.

His suggestions for using Moodle’s lesson and Wiki features are much more realistic, as well as his assessment of the relative advantages and disadvantages of the forum, blog and journal features. He finishes by showing how the block elements of a Moodle course can be re-arranged on the page – something I think might have been more usefully placed at the start of the book.

So on the whole I think that whilst all Moodle-using course designers will want to get their hands on this well-timed publication – the definitive guide to designing online learning experiences is still to be written.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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William H. Rice IV, Moodle Teaching Techniques, Birmingham UK: Pakt, 2007, pp.172, ISBN: 184719284X

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Using Drupal

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Configuring Modules to Build Dynamic Websites

Drupal is the most powerful, industrial-strength option amongst the open source content management systems (Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress). But it’s notoriously difficult to configure and manipulate. Hence the up-front sub-title to this publication. The answers to the problems have been supplied by designers creating plug-in modules which deliver separate functions. These all sit on top of the Drupal core.

Using DrupalThe user is left with ‘only’ the task of getting these modules to work together. And as anyone who has tried it will tell you, it’s no mean task. That’s where this guidance manual comes in. It takes you through a selection of the most basic add-on modules you’ll need to get a site up and running.

It’s written with the latest version of Drupal in mind (6.0) and you should be warned that modules written for other versions (5.0 and earlier) are not compatible with the latest version, and visa versa.

The other warning which needs to be flagged up as a major hazard and frustration is that configuration settings in one module might have a global effect, affecting your tweakings in another module, or even wiping it out altogether.

Fortunately there’s a very useful introduction which explains how a content management system works and the differences between first, second, and third generation web sites. You need to get used to lots of the specialised terms which are employed in this form of technology – modules, themes, and nodes – and you’ll have to let go of comforting terms such as folders and pages, because they just don’t apply any more.

In my experience of CMS systems, these naming conventions can be very confusing. Articles become stories, and features become modules or blocks. So you need to grit your teeth and just take on the new language.

The good thing about this book is that there are full instructions on adding and configuring modules that add functionality to a site. The creation of basic content is quite a complex business – partly because it’s assumed that a site will be fully interactive, and its materials can be tagged, commented upon, and served up in different forms. That’s why you end up arranging the content from a control panel with lots of options and settings.

There’s another reason why this approach to development by configuring modules is important. That’s because, rather surprisingly, the basic Drupal core does not include such fundamentals as a text editor and image manipulation tools. These have to be bolted on as extras. But free open source solutions are listed at the end of every chapter.

Separate chapters of the book have been written by open source evangelists, and the success of their approach is reflected in several five-star reviews for this book at Amazon. They concentrate on a wide range of third party modules which have been created by the Drupal community. This means the modules have been devised to solve real life problems and requirements.

The book is also arranged as a series of projects, showing how Drupal can be used to build a commercial web site; a job postings notice board; a product reviews site; a Wiki; a photo gallery; and an event management site. They explain how to use the most important modules, the content creator’s kit (CCK), categorise materials with Taxonomy, and use the Views module to arrange the display of content in a variety of user-selected forms.

The range and scope of sites built with Drupal in this book is truly impressive – from multi-language sites to eCommerce shopping sites using the Ubercart module. Full details of the all the software used is listed for every chapter, and there’s a very strong sense throughout that you are taking part in a community activity – where ideas, work, and results are shared.

O’Reilly took quite some time getting this, their first Drupal manual onto the shelves, but the wait has been worth it. I wonder when they will do the same thing for Joomla?

© Roy Johnson 2009

Using Drupal   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Using Drupal   Buy the book at Amazon US

Angela Byron et al, Using Drupal, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2008, pp.464, ISBN: 0596515804

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Using Moodle (second edition)

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open source software for online learning courses

Two or three years ago, attempts to put educational courses on line were stuck with using programs such as Blackboard and WebCT, which were costly, cumbersome, and deeply unpopular with the teachers who were being urged to use them. Now these programs are being swept away by the arrival of Moodle, the open source Content Management System (CMS), or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), which has one killer feature: it’s free.

Using MoodleActually, it also has more technical features than its commercial rivals, but that’s not the only reason it’s being taken up by schools, universities, and colleges. In the jargon of educationalists, this is a ‘constructivist’ program. That is, it allows people to learn through building their own experience of learning, possibly in contact with other students. It is student-oriented, rather than teacher-led, and it promotes learning through doing rather than just passive reception. This is the second edition of a basic introduction to Moodle’s features – and it’s a big improvement over the first edition.

Jason Cole and Helen Foster start off quite rightly by taking you on a tour of the user interface – what you see when you start using Moodle. That is – how to log in and edit your user profile; how to navigate through the sections of a course using the breadcrumb trail; and how to explore all the tools and support information buttons which surround the main working area on screen.

Moodle allows you to arrange your courses chronologically, conceptually by topics, or socially according to the people using it. For tutors there is an amazing degree of control over every aspect of a course – its start date, duration, enrolments, course materials, quizzes, email forums, activities, reports, and student grades.

The heart of Moodle is the huge variety of interactive engagements it will support. These range from chatrooms, forums, and discussion boards, to collective activities such as building glossaries, journals, surveys, and (perhaps most novel of all) an option for student peer assessment.

The book’s basic assumption is that you are using what’s called ‘blended learning’ – that is, a combination of face-to-face tuition such as lectures or seminars, plus online course materials and lecture notes, email support, instant messaging – and anything else that will empower the student and enhance the learning process. It is also assuming a fairly mature and serious attitude to eLearning from the student.

From my experience of online teaching, they seem a bit over-optimistic about participation rates in discussion forums, but Moodle certainly does have some sophisticated features to help promote debate. For instance, the latest version allows participants to rate each other’s contributions (though you might have doubts about that being a good thing).

There are many other features that teachers will welcome. Add a news item for your group, and every member of it will automatically be sent an email informing them of the update. There are also handy tips such as reducing file sizes and saving PowerPoint presentations as Rich Text File format to save space.

They confront head on the issue of possible cheating in online tests, and provides a number of strategies for counteracting twisters. The most advanced current feature of Moodle is workshops – which allow students to see good and bad examples of coursework, and to offer critiques of each other’s work prior to formal submission.

That comes with the additional feature of what’s called an exercise. This is a piece of work the student submits along with a self-assessed grade. Their final grade is a combination of the tutor’s score and how well the student’s assessment matches it. This is an example of what struck me as verging on Utopian.

The journals feature is a tool that encourages students to reflect on their own learning process. Glossaries offers a similar property in that they can be created collaboratively. Lessons is a system of developing multiple-choice enquiries. That is, if you answer a question correctly, you move on the next topic; if you do not, you move back to check you understand the course materials.

Moodle even has its own built-in Wiki, so tutor and students can assemble basic information about their subject. Various levels of permissions for editing and access are also available so that the results can be safeguarded.

This is an excellently clear user’s guide, and almost every topic is illustrated with a screenshot. Full technical software documentation is available at Moodle, but if you’re anything like me, you will feel far more secure with a book to hand.

In this second edition there’s far more detail on how Moodle tools and features can be used to meet teaching objectives as techniques for the equivalent of classroom activity. This is getting closer to the book on constructing online learning courses which still needs to be written.

There are descriptions of how various IT champions are using Moodle to develop new forms of collaborative, blended and social learning . Some of these will seem rather advanced to even to even the most ambitious elearning tutor. Peer assessment, messaging and chat facilities could easily be seen as distractions for younger learners, but could be more appropriate for adults.

There’s still room for improvement in future editions. I would like to see some examples of course design and structure for instance. But for now, this is still the best guide to Moodle available in book form.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Using Moodle   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Using Moodle   Buy the book at Amazon US

Jason Cole & Helen Foster,Using Moodle, Sebastopo (CA): O’Reilly, 2007, pp.266, ISBN: 059652918X

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WordPress 2.7 Complete

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Create your own web site from scratch with WordPress

WordPress 2.7 Complete. WordPress started out as blogging software, but it has grown rapidly into a fully featured content management system (CMS). That’s partly because it was well designed in the first place, but mainly because it is open source software (OSS), which means that designers and programmers all over the world have contributed to its development and improvement. This effort comes mainly in the form of extra modules for the basic program. These are plugins which increase the range of features and enhance what WordPress can do.

WordPressBut like many other OSS programs WordPress comes without an instruction manual, which means that it’s hard for beginners or new users to get to grips with what’s under the bonnet. There are user forums and FAQs, but most people will feel more confident with an instruction manual, which is why this guide from April Hodge Silver is welcome. She starts out by explaining some basic concepts and parts of WordPress as software. This might appear a little simplistic, but in my experience it’s quite important to grasp some of the fundamentals of a content management system. For instance it’s not immediately apparent that all the parts of what will eventually appear on screen as a unified page are kept separate. That is, the title, sub-title, text, pictures, captions, tags, and meta-data are all stored in different parts of the database – for good reasons. And of course the appearance of this information on screen is controlled separately too – from a style sheet.

She then describes how to make a WordPress installation of your own, and how to set up all the basic configuration of the system. You can get WordPress.com to do all of this for you, by hosting your installation. But they do not give you permission to install the extras with which you can customise your site (and make money from it).

Posting a blog entry is very, very easy, and WordPress also makes it as easy as possible to control and format what you write. But she explains all the options clearly, including the way in which you can add graphics to make your pages more visually interesting.

All of this means getting to know the control panel and its multiple menus, and her explanations are very helpful, because it isn’t always possible to tell what function some item performs simply from its title. What’s the difference between a page and a post for instance? The name alone tells you nothing.

One of the really good things about WordPress is that most of the content of any site is organised using what are called management tables. These are lists of all the basic information known about any item, and because the data is tabulated, it’s much easier to understand and control.

The next part of the book deals with two features which really bring WordPress to life – themes (which is WP jargon for templates) and widgets, which are ‘sidebar accessories’ that allow you to personalise what shows up your sidebars – without having to learn any PHP or HTML code.

In fact the urge to have an individualised site is so universal that she wisely includes instructions for designing your own theme. It’s at this point you’ll need HTML design skills and a knowledge of cascading style sheets (CSS) – but she provides some basic coding to get you started.

And for those readers with a creative bent who have coding skills she also demonstrates how to create your own plugins and widgets. (A widget is just a plugin with extra functions.) But you’ll also have to be prepared to roll up your sleeves and dive into the database at this point.

There’s an interesting chapter on using WordPress as a content management system. This explains in some detail the difference between static pages and normal posts, and it presents a different type of theme which is geared to the construction of a commercial site with product pages. Although they are not covered here, there are now excellent plugins offering fully-featured eCommerce systems.

WordPress is now up to version 2.9 – but I checked all the basic concepts outlined in this book, and they still hold good. Even the copious screen shots illustrating the guidance show exactly what you’ll see when you start using the latest version. This is an excellent guidance manual which I could have done with a year ago when I first started learning how to use WordPress. It would have saved me lots of time and speeded up the process enormously.

© Roy Johnson 2010

April Hodge Silver, WordPress 2.7 Complete, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2009, pp.277, ISBN 184719656X

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WordPress 3.0 Complete

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a blog, web site, and content management system

WordPress 3.0 (WP) started out as a blogging software program in 2003, but it has grown rapidly into a fully featured content management system (CMS). That’s partly because it was well designed in the first place, but mainly because it’s open source software (OSS), which means that designers and programmers all over the world have contributed to its development and improvement. This effort comes mainly in the form of extra plugins which increase the range of features and enhance what WordPress can do. But like many other OSS programs WP comes without an instruction manual, which means that it’s hard for beginners or new users to get to grips with what’s under the bonnet. There are user forums and FAQs, but most people will feel more confident with an instruction manual, which is why this guide is welcome.

WordPress 3.0April Hodge Silver establishes from the start that WP is now a fully developed publishing platform and can be used for running a blog, a commercial web site, or even used as a CMS. You can run WP on your own computer using it as a server (that’s the better option for advanced users) or you can let WordPress.com do it all for you, which means you have less control but is probably the better option for beginners or those who simply want their own blog. The ‘completeness’ of this guidance manual is that it covers all that’s required for both options.

The advantages and disadvantages of each choice are explained clearly. But in either case you will need the features and the configuration settings fully explained. They can be learned through trial and error, but the benefit of a guidance manual is that it will shorten the time involved and flatten the learning curve.

My advice in brief is this: if all you need is a blog, choose WordPress.com, but if you want to customise your site, have advertising, and take advantage of plugins and widgets – go for your own installation.

Once you reach the user-friendly WP control panel, the principles are the same for both users. Silver explains how to create a post (WP jargon for a page that you see on screen) and how to add graphics which will make it look more attractive.

The huge advantage of a program such as WP is that everything you upload is stored in a database, but you can control how it is summoned into your pages. A single graphic for instance can be presented at thumbnail, medium, or large size.

WP offers two editors in which you generate your content – one a ‘visual’ editor which requires very few skills or technical knowledge, and an HTML editor for those who know a little about coding. As soon as you start posting you’ll also start getting comment spam, but WP comes with a powerful tool called Akismet that deals with it automatically.

The control panel in WP makes all your work as easy as possible, but if you are not used to a CMS it can be difficult to conceptualise the relation between what you put in to the system and how it will appear on screen as the finished article. This guide does a good job at overcoming this problem by generous use of full scale screen shots, so you will know exactly what you should be looking at.

WP 3.0 now includes automatic menu creation. This can be used in conjunction with ‘categories’ to create the structure and the navigational system for your content. Silver then moves on to show how (free) widgets and plugins can be deployed to enhance a site. The great thing about these is that they are enhanced regularly, and can be updated with a single mouse click. And if you are really feeling ambitious you can even download a plugin to render your site ready for iPhone and iPod touch.

The central part of the book deals with the most important element of a WP site – the ‘theme’, which you lift off the shelf or develop yourself. This provides the basic structure of what your site will look like, it’s style, features, and behaviour.

Then comes the issue of developing your own plugins and widgets. As you can probably tell from this description, these issues are becoming more technically demanding, but you don’t need to know these techniques in order to create a successful site.

Silver finishes in the same technical vein – giving explanations for setting up an eCommerce site, then giving instructions for upgrading a WP installation. If you have opted for hosting on your own server, this will be invaluable, because WP is updated quite frequently, with new features and functions at every new version.

I spent a long time learning much of this the hard way – before WP manuals became available. And I certainly wish I’d had something like WordPress 3.0 Complete to hand at the time. It would have made my life a lot easier, and I would have known to get hold of the best online backup to save all my files whilst I was learning WordPress.

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© Roy Johnson 2011

April Hodge Silver, WordPress 3.0 Complete, Birmingham: Pakt, 2011, pp.322, ISBN: 1849514100

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WordPress for Business Bloggers

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promote your WordPress blog with advanced plugins, analytics, advertising, and SEO

WordPress for Business Bloggers When blogging first took off in the mid 1990s the mainstream media viewed bloggers with lofty contempt. I can remember both the BBC and the Guardian making sneering ‘get a life’ comments about bloggers daring to report their own version of news. They all said it was a self-indulgent short-term gimmick. Now, there isn’t a newspaper or broadcast organisation which doesn’t boast its own bloggers and doesn’t welcome the contribution of user-generated content.

WordPress for BusinessAt the same time, some individual blogs have become phenomenally successful. Arianne Huffington’s The Huffington Post became an instant hit as an Internet newspaper, and one-man-band UK political blogger Paul Staines proudly displays his end-of-month site visitor statistics which outstrip those of national newspapers. This sort of popularity has attracted advertising revenue, and there are now individuals whose blogs are now a full time business.

WordPress is one blogging platform which has kept pace with this development by making it easy for non-programmers to add all sorts of interactive functions via plugins which increase the range of features and enhance what WordPress can do. But like many other open source software programs, WordPress comes without an instruction manual, which means that it’s hard for beginners or new users to get to grips with what’s under the bonnet. There are user forums and FAQs, but most people will feel more confident with an instruction manual, which is why this guide from Paul Thewlis is welcome.

It’s aimed specifically at people who want to use a blog for business purposes – which means coming to grips with eCommerce, advertising, and site promotion via search engine optimization (SEO). The first part of his guide offers an upbeat account of the business possibilities for business bloggers – increased sales, contact with clients, news updates, company promotion, and so on. He makes the good point that there are now any number of different models for a successful business blog. And WordPress has all the tools you will require, from analysing your performance, promoting your blog, and managing your content, to monetizing your site with advertising revenue and affiliate programmes.

Next comes the making of a strategic blog plan, which means setting out your business objectives. The first part of this will probably be easy: you will want more visitors, more business, and more sales. But the next crucially important part is that he shows you a corresponding list of the WordPress features or plugins you will need to implement these goals.

This is followed by the technical requirements for installing WordPress on your own server, and even learning the rudiments of HTML and style sheets (CSS) in order to design your own theme. This strikes me as rather over-ambitious for beginners, who will probably be much better served by using ready-made templates (called ‘themes’ in WP jargon).

In fact he even goes further and has his aspiring eCommerce merchant editing the style sheet coding to produce an original three-column page design. I must say that it’s difficult to imagine any would-be business person who would be capable of or prepared to do this. There’s nothing wrong with someone learning a bit of coding, but a much more realistic strategy would have been to use templates.

There’s a chapter on uploading graphics which usefully explains the difference between a library and a gallery. This is another instance where the naming of functions is not quite so straightforward as it might seem. He uses the NextGEN Gallery plugin for this and video display – another example of the free add-ons which make life easier for the non-programming user.

After this fairly technical interlude, he then switches to the actual content of your site or blog – which is likely to be text. Writing for online consumption is much more skilled than most people realise, and he’s right to emphasise the need for brevity, structure, and engagement.

Yet this soft skills section too requires an explanation of a technical nicety – the difference between categories and tags, both of which are used to give taxonomy to your content. He uses the comparisons of categories being like a navigation system and tags being like index entries, which is reasonable enough.

Next he covers the arcane science of search engine optimization (SEO). Fortunately, WordPress has been designed with this in mind, but even so there’s room for a couple more plugins to make the job easier.

I’m a little bit circumspect about the social networking side of business promotion where proper, commercial sites are concerned. Sure, I can see people Twittering and Facebooking if your site is closely allied to the sort of hot, gossipy interaction that goes on in political and newspaper blogs – but I can’t see it happening if you’re selling pharmaceuticals or heavy machine engineering equipment.

He also assumes that his target business blogger is going to be engaged with all the trappings of site-linking, comments moderation, pings, and trackbacks which is another doubtful supposition – but it’s useful that he explains how to do it all, as well as how to set up a contact form using another popular plugin – cforms II.

There’s a chapter on using analytic tools to assess the performance of your blog, and another showing you how to monetize it by linking in to affiliate programs such as Google AdSense and Amazon

Almost everyone starting off a business site is likely to do so with a WordPress installation using a cheap shared hosting account. But if the business is successful, you will need to move your installation onto dedicated servers. This is a useful and intelligent inclusion in a book of this type.

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© Roy Johnson 2010

Paul Thewlis, WordPress for Business Bloggers, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2008, pp.337, ISBN 1847195326

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WordPress for Dummies

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from blogging platform to content management system

WordPress was first launched in 2003 as open source software designed for blogging – and it is still used as such. But as its popularity has suddenly grown exponentially, enormous numbers of add-ons and plug-ins have been developed to provide extra features. Because it’s built on a solid base of MySQL and PHP, these extra features have transformed it from an individualist tool into a major communication platform. So much so that it’s now become a content management system (CMS) which offers an alternative to Joomla and Drupal. Releases of the software are named after jazz musicians. WordPress for Dummies is a guidance manual on how to use it.

WordPress for DummiesIf you want to see the sorts of web sites which use this combination of WP + templates – look here, here, and here. This is the best of the current guides to using WordPress. The strongest point in its favour – apart from the very direct ‘for Dummies’ approach – is that it gives instructions for would-be bloggers , but also explains the more sophisticated uses of WP for those who want to build a web site using a content management system. The beauty of WordPress is that it can do both.

In fact WordPress is pretty thoughtful software – which is what’s made it so popular. All blog posts can be drafted, auto-saved, spell-checked, and stored prior to publication. The options for interacting with site visitors are endless – which is presumably why WP has overtaken Blogger. It really does have the heavy-duty functionalities of a full-scale content management system combined with the ease of use of a simple blogging platform.

Basically, this guide covers the three main options for WordPress users – the hosted service where you have a blog at WordPress.com; the free software which you download from WordPress.org; and the multi-user version. And the author, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, now makes her living designing WordPress templates – so she knows what she’s talking about.

I set up a test blog at WordPress recently [here] and can confirm that it took me less than five minutes from start to finish – and that includes uploading a picture and editing my profile.

WordPress successfully combines ease of use with a range of powerful features, so if you’re thinking of starting your own blog, WP seems to be the way to go. So the first option, of using WP for blogging, couldn’t be simpler.

Just in case you’re worried, WordPress has got nothing to do with Microsoft Word. It’s an Open Source program, and therefor free. You access the program without payment, and updates are available to you at any time without charge.

The second option of hosting the software on your own machine gives you scope to make use of lots of extra features. Many of these are free plug-ins which add extra functionality to the system. But even more important than the trimmings, this guide explains in detail the crucial installation and configuration of WordPress. This is the part most people are likely to find find difficult.

Ambitious bloggers and web designers will know that everybody wants to have an individualised theme – that’s the style and layout of what appears on screen. How to do that is explained here as well – including some rudiments of style sheets and PHP coding.

The third option is to use the most advanced, multi-user version of WordPress. This is for people who want a community of users and contributors. I came across one recently – a football enthusiasts’ site where fans email their reviews of matches directly from the game. Post-match reports are available even before they’re on the national news channels. There are three whole chapters on how to set up and administer this version of the software.

Lisa Wilson finishes with recommendations for free WordPress themes and plug-ins. All of these allow you to customise your site or blog, and add functionalities that only a professional designer could have dreamed about only a couple of years ago.

It’s almost impossible for these printed guides to keep up with the pace of software development. New features are being added whilst the book is with the printer. Just get the latest edition, and recognise that there may be differences in what appears on screen. Of course, you can always read the complete documentation at codex.wordpress.org – but if like me you prefer a proper book to consult, rather than reading off screen, then it’s all here. This book not only showed me how to use WordPress: it helped me to understand some of the fundamental structures of content management systems.

© Roy Johnson 2010

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Lisa Sabin-Wilson, WordPress for Dummies, New York: Wiley, 3rd edition 2010, pp.408, ISBN: 0470592745

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