On June 13, 2015, WordCamp Philly scheduled a one hour panel called WordPress in Schools at 11:05 am in the STC Auditorium. Our founder, Brian Messenlehner, sat on the panel alongside Susan Walker, Cameron Barrett, Charlie Reisinger and William Earnhardt, with Doug Stewart moderating. That morning, Brian posted a simple invitation: come hear us talk about WordPress in schools.
Why schools and WordPress
Schools and districts have an unusual set of needs. They publish a lot of content from a lot of people: district offices, principals, teachers, coaches and parent groups. They have strict accessibility obligations and tight budgets. Many were locked into proprietary school website vendors with yearly license fees and limited control over their own content.
WordPress answers most of those problems. It is open source, so there is no per site license. Its roles and capabilities let a district give each school and teacher exactly the access they need. And it can run many schools from one install using WordPress Multisite, with shared design and central management.
A personal angle
Brian's speaker bio for the event noted that when he is not working on WordPress, he is teaching his kids WordPress. That captures why this topic was personal. Better school websites are not an abstract problem when your own kids depend on them for announcements, schedules and homework.
From panel to product
The conversations around this panel turned into real work. Brian went on to co-found SchoolPresser, a WordPress platform built specifically for schools and districts, with content migration scripts for moving off the leading hosted school website vendors. SchoolPresser districts have included Newark Public Schools, where parent and child themes let individual school sites inherit the district design, as well as Delavan-Darien School District and Southside ISD. In 2019, SchoolPresser exhibited at the National School Boards Association conference in Philadelphia, a few blocks from where this panel took place.
What we bring to education clients
At AlphaWeb, education work still follows the ideas from that panel:
- One platform for the district, with a site for each school, built on WordPress Multisite.
- Templates that keep every school on brand while letting staff update their own pages.
- Accessibility built into every build, not added later.
- Clean migrations from hosted school website platforms, with redirects to protect links families have bookmarked.
If your school or district is ready to own its website, AlphaWeb can help you move to WordPress.
At a glance
- Event: WordCamp Philly 2015
- Date: Saturday, June 13, 2015
- Room: STC Auditorium
- Session: WordPress in Schools, one hour panel at 11:05 am
- Panelists: Susan Walker, Brian Messenlehner, Cameron Barrett, Charlie Reisinger and William Earnhardt
- Moderator: Doug Stewart
Related: NSBA 2019: SchoolPresser Brings WordPress for Schools to Philadelphia, WordPress for School Districts: Lessons from Migrating Newark Public Schools, NSBA 2018: SchoolPresser Brings WordPress for Schools to San Antonio and WordCamp Buffalo 2016: A Day of WordPress at the University at Buffalo.
Have a question about this event or a project like the ones mentioned here? Reach out to AlphaWeb and Brian will be glad to talk it through. We are always happy to compare notes on WordPress, mobile apps and migrations.
