Differences between operative systems is a major challenge when you teach WordPress. Experiences from a real life classroom session in a second semester multimedia designer class.

Yesterday I introduced WP to a second semester class. So these notes are based on my own reflections after the session.

First a strategic overview:

The class used XAMPP as a local development environment during their first semester. 32 students were present. 22 had a Windows PC.  10 students or so used a Mac. That is: as far as I remember.

I had a PC, but decided to demonstrate the installation on a system with Windows 10.

In XAMPP a database was created. We used PhpMyAdmin. All created a database named wordpress with utf8. So far so good.

Then the class downloaded the latest version of WordPress, from WordPress.org > latest. That was the easy part. No problems whatsoever here. They unzipped the files to ../htdocs/wordpress/..

In theory they had to edit these lines in wp-config.php:

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'root');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', ' ');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

Here the differences between the operative systems proved a major challenge.

• Most students had WP up and running with no problems.
• Around five Windows users had problems with XAMPP. The cure was: reinstall.

Mac challenges

So far so good. But the Macs was the real problem. They had to use a password. But: what is the password?

A workaround was used: give a password to root. That was a bad idea. Don’t do it at home, please. XAMPP worked all right, but now the users could not enter PhpMyAdmin from the administration panel!

A better workaround was this: create a new user for the database wordpress and grant all privileges to that user.

Didactic challenge

As a teacher it’s allways a challenge, when 1/3 of a class has to do one type of work – while 2/3 of the class is waiting. To this add some 5-6 students, where XAMPP crashed half a year ago or so. While these studens were fighting with XAMPP-related challenges the ones with WordPress up and running grew impatient.

That’s natural I guess.

Introducing WordPress features

Most of the systems were up and running around 10:30. However a few still had problems, so they were advised follow introductions to posts, pages, menus, themes etc. from 10:30 – 11:30.

During that session, they also tried to personalize the theme with costumize.

Themes and child themes

After lunch I gave an introduction to themes. First I introduced the “sandwich” concept of:

• header.php ( and get_header() in index.php )
• footer.php ( and get_footer()  in index.php )

I had developed a minimum viable skeleton theme with as little markup as I felt possible. So I demonstrated:

• The index page.
• A very simple loop.

During this part of the class I downloaded the zip from git and instlled the petj-mvp theme on the fly from a downloaded zip.

I hope that this demo gave an idea of the inner workings of a theme. But skeleton themes are ugly. The last part was an introduction to Twenty Seventeen.

We made a child theme. As far as I could see most of the students had no problems making a child theme of Twenty Seventeen. I demonstrated how to change the footer.php in the child theme:

• Copy footer.php to the child theme folder.
• Add a h1 tag (or similar) and add a message.

The last session

So most of the class had WordPress up and running. But still 4-5 students had problems. I decided to focus on these students, and let the rest of the class prepare for the next day .. that is somewhere else.

I had to go through the computers, and look at strange XAMPP problems. Some installations refused to work even though everything seemed fine.

As a workaround these students installed WordPress via Bitnami. This installation works like a charm. But I knew that the files are saved in another location.

C:\xampp\apps\wordpress\htdocs

On a Mac the files are in a similar folder, but of course in:

/Applications/XAMPP/apps/wordpress/htdocs/

Again the Mac users had to unlock the folders in order to upload images etc.

14:20 Leaving the classroom

The last student had his WordPress up and running @14:20. So much for the famous “Five minutes install”. WordPress is not the problem here. It’s XAMPP and the differences between the operative systems. Here’s a huge stumbling block for WordPress teachers.

As a teacher I need a local development platform, where WordPress just works out of the box on any platform – be it Mac, Windows or Linux.

Reflow to the business academy

Friday: on a meeting we prepared for the upcoming semester.

I told the 2nd semester team about the ideas behind Twenty Seventeen. In many ways the theme for our first project and Twenty Seventeen are similar.

It’s interesting to note, that topics we’ve worked on for the last two -three years find its way to official WordPress themes. For instance Twenty Seventeen is defined as immersive.

Why you should know WordPress?

Have a look at the statistics. WordPress powers 25% of the web.

Why should you know anything about WordPress? Because it powers 25% of the web. In a not so far future WordPress may power more web pages than the home-hacked ones.

The illustration above demonstrates the present power of WordPress. The green line shows websites that don’t have a CMS. Perhaps they’ve hacked their own system. Who knows what they did.

The rising red line at the bottom of the graph is WordPress. You can see, that the line rises. The red line is what is happening out there. WordPress powers more and more web pages.

The many lines at the bottom of the image are all the other CMSs. As you can see the competition is almost nil. WordPress may not be the best CMS out there. Perhaps one of the geeky CMSs used by 0.00001% may be far better.

Knowing WordPress equals knowing content management. So here you have the statistic argument for knowing WordPress.