Preface

In the summer of 2008, I began a personal blog powered by WordPress and quickly fell for the ease and extensibility of the platform. As an educator, I had tried a number of tools to power course websites, but had to be satisfied with the results. With the fall semester approaching, I decided to try WordPress in the classroom. As the academic year progressed, I found that I was able to effectively mold WordPress to fit the needs of my students.

In recent years the popularity of WordPress has exploded. It is estimated that nearly 15 percent of the top million websites and 22 percent of all new websites are powered by WordPress (http://wordpress.org/news/2011/08/state-of-the-word/). These staggering numbers can be attributed to the WordPress community, which has built thousands of useful plugins atop of the already impressive WordPress core. As an increasing number of educators use WordPress in the classroom, the education-specific plugin library grows, making WordPress an ideal solution for educators.