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

Mon Aug 13 11:40:24 PDT 2012

This may be a long shot and not practicable at your college, but what about
combining the course with an actual web design project? I can imagine that
there are lots of small businesses, community groups or third-sector
organisations that would appreciate someone building a website for them. If
they pay or raise money for hosting, your students would have the resources
they need to learn and experiment. In addition to the didactic benefit of
working for a "real" project, your class's "clients" would get a free
website design, and your college might even tick off a box on their
community outreach agenda.

Best,
Malte

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Lois Scheidt <lscheidt at indiana.edu> wrote:

> A followup note...which I sent to Alex privately. At this community
> college, and as I understand it possibly most community colleges, I
> can't add materials that would add additional costs to the student
> without approval of the central course committee. So expecting
> students to buy their own sites is out of the question.
>
>  Also I can't add server-side software without that committee's
> approval...and these committees take years to decide on such things.
> They are in their second year of discussions on replacing the nearly
> 10 year old HTML server emulator with something that will support both
> static and dynamic pages and their associated software.
>
> As for desktop emulators...we've had terrible trouble with these tools
> on the current network design.
>
> Yes it's a pain...but it is what it is. Which is why I was hoping
> against hope that this group might know of a resource I was unable to
> find in my searching.
>
> Thanks
>
> Lois
>
> On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 8:21 AM, matt g <matt.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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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> >>
> >> --
> >> --
> >> //
> >> // This email is
> >> // [x] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded.
> >> // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing.
> >> //
> >> // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur
> >> // http://alex.halavais.net
> >> //
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>
> --
> 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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