[Air-L] Looking for a free Wordpress site that allows template programming

[matt g]

I agree with Alex here -- most hosts of multisite WP installs won't allow
users to upload PHP files. One bit of middle ground you might explore is a
WP platform that has the Custom UserCSS plugin and/or Atahualpa theme
installed. Custom UserCSS (
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-user-css/ ) allows users to
override theme stylesheets with their own CSS, and Atahualpa (
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/atahualpa ) allows a great deal of
flexibility in layout and design from the dashboard.

If you want to go further than that and have students edit PHP files and/or
design themes from scratch, it's probably best to have students sign up for
their own hosting accounts, as Alex suggests. Doing so may have many
unintended benefits, such as teaching students to assume control over their
own web-based digital identities; see UMW's "A Domain of One's Own"
initiative for more on that:
http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/07/a-domain-of-ones-own/

Best,

Matt
--
Matthew K. Gold, Ph.D.
http://mkgold.net | @mkgold



On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 1:37 AM, Alexander Halavais <halavais at gmail.com>wrote:

> I don't know of one. From my perspective, for a course with a name like
> "advanced web site design" it isn't unreasonable to ask students to get
> their own accounts on something like BlueHost. Because of the expense of
> this, I got together with friends and set up a reseller to get students an
> account for $36 a year (others can match this, but then up it considerably
> after the first year). Contact me if you are interested, this already
> starts to sound somewhat spammy ;). It ends up costing the same or less
> than a text book.
>
> The other host I've had students use is called NearlyFreeSpeech It lives up
> to the name. The only difficulty is that it is set up in a somewhat
> idiosyncratic way, and so students end up learning to use that particular
> host--knowledge that doesn't translate so well to later projects...
>
> Alex
>
>
>
>
> On Sunday, August 12, 2012, Lois Scheidt <lscheidt at indiana.edu> wrote:
> > I teach an Advanced Web Site Design course for undergraduates at the
> > community college level. I would like to give my students some
> > experience designing for dynamic websites but I do not have that
> > option on the college server system.
> >
> > To that end I am asking if anyone on the list knows of a free online
> > Wordpress host that allows users to design their own templates? The
> > ones I have found only allow access to a limited family of predesigned
> > templates and do not allow editing the templates.
> >
> > Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > Lois
> >
> > --
> > Lois Ann Scheidt
> > Doctoral Candidate - School of Library and Information Science,
> > Indiana University, Bloomington IN USA
> > Webpage:  http://www.loisscheidt.com
> > CV:  http://www.loisscheidt.com/cv.html
> > Blog:  http://www.professional-lurker.com
> > _______________________________________________
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> --
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> // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur
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