WordPress for UKOER resources

Overview: WordPress is an open source blogging and content management platform available in three varieties: there is the standard software which may be downloaded and installed at any site and supports a single blog (which may have several contributors), there is a multi-user version of this software (WordPress MU), which can be used to host several blogs, and there is WordPress.com for hosted shared blogs. WordPress allows classification of resources in hierarchical categories and tagging by keyword, with links to information about authors. As with any blog WordPress may be used to distribute text and image resources, with plugins available for embedding other content (for example Flash players can be used to present video or animations or representations of office documents generated by services such as scribd) so that, for example, all the content for a course could be put onto a single blog. It may also be used to provide a front end to collections of other content types, i.e. to present page providing a description and (in many cases) preview of resources in a collection.

RSS feeds are available listing all content or all content in a specific category, or for the content and discussion of a individual post. Also the contents of the entire blog may be exported in an XML format that is essentially extended RSS.

Formats and Standards
Wordpress itself supports text and some media files such as images; plugins, such as flash players are available for other media types (though it should be noted that the hosted wordpress.com is more limited in which plugins are available than would be the case for an independent installation). The only file size limits that would apply would be those from the service provider on which the software was installed.

API
Wordpress supports the Atom Publish Protocol (AtomPub or APP) to enable publishing editing and deleting posts through a third-party client. AtomPub is a RESTful protocol allowing HTTP GET, PUT and DELETE requests to be made with content and messages exchanged in XML. AtomPub is used by many tools to allow publishing to Wordpress from a desktop or smart phone client or from other applications. It is also the basis for the SWORD API.

Feeds
A wide choice of feeds can be made available in RSS and ATOM, either sumamrising all the content, summarising the content by category or user or summarising the content and comments for a single post. Plugins are available to extend these feeds, for example: to control whether the full text of a blog post is provided in the feeds, to embed copyright statements in the feed , to provide OAI-ORE resource maps , etc.

Other metadata
Plugins are available to allow Dublin Core metadata to be added to posts and for RDFa to be embedded in posts, as well various options for microformats and geotags.

Collections and Grouping
Wordpress allows for categorization of posts (the categories may be nested) and for arbitrary tagging which can support a level of formal classification or an informal "folksonomy". Posts can then be displayed by category or tag. Also it is possible to show all the posts from an individual user-account.

Content export & embedding
As well as full-text feeds, Wordpress supports export of the entire contents of a blog (or a subsection limited by category or author) as WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR so that it can be reproduced in another Wordpress install.

Visibility on Search Engines
The use of mechanisms such as "blog rolls" (links to similar blogs), syndication, automatically generated links to "similar posts" (especially on wordpress mu), and a culture of linking to other blog posts means that blog postings can be very highly visible on search engines such as Google.

Usage stats for resources
The control panel for the blog gives information on the number of page views and feed subscriptions for the blog, though other approaches to monitoring web use statistics may also be appropriate.

If the author wishes, readers may comment on blog posts, and the number and text of these comments is available through both the control panel interface and as an RSS feed. Wordpress supports the pingback mechanism for automatically creating comments with text excerpts with links when other blogs link to a post.

Use by OER projects
NB: most projects have a blog, often in wordpress; what we are interested in here is the use of wordpress to host or present the materials produced by the project not just the use of a blog to provide information about project activity.

UKOER

 * The OpenLearn importer extension allows OpenLearn content to be imported into WordPress mu.

Others

 * Pencils and Pixels at the University of Lincoln, storing OERs in an ePrints repository by re-publishing through Wordpress

Notes and comments
Wordpress seems well suited to publishing OER materials: it is based on web standards and there is an abundance of plugins providing for many extensions to more esoteric requirements. One caveat applies: the emphasis is on publishing, i.e. getting content into wordpress, there is little support for moving it on to other platforms except through syndication feeds: so Wordpress is an excellent end point or show case for presenting materials, but perhaps less good as a repository for managed distribution of OERs for presentation elsewhere.

Some care is required when choosing the version of Wordpress to use: for example the Wordpress.com hosted solution is very easy to set up and maintain making it an attractive option, but it is limited in the plugins that can be used and media that can be stored.