In the beginning was the command line.
This command line was capable of doing quite a lot, and after it was connected to a series of tubes some people began writing messages to each other. This was pretty fun too, but it had some problems. For example, what if you wanted to write some things in black Times New Roman, and some others in green letters with swirls that blinked like neon lights, but didn’t know how?
Fast forward…and so WordPress was created to help people write exactly what they wanted, for exactly who they wanted. As time went on, people kept coming up with great ideas: what if you wrote things with pictures in them? What if you wrote about all the places you’ve been to, and pinned them to a map?
What if you took all this and applied it towards teaching and learning for the world’s first global network university?
Introducing Web Publishing
Fundementally, Web Publishing is a platform for building websites and blogs. It was first conceived as a flexible and modular solution for serving new and unique gaps in today’s digital classrooms. After identifying key user requirements, it underwent a year-long pilot with a diverse user group ranging from Biology to Photography professors, from Gallatin to Steinhardt, from ITS to the English Department. In order to fulfill their diverse needs, the Web Publishing team continuously iterated based on the feedback of the pilot users.
In the process we crafted a platform uniquely tailored to the needs of faculty, staff and students at NYU. We were able to identify many of the most common problems of our pilot users and ways to resolve them with Web Publishing, squashing countless bugs in the meantime.
Throughout the pilot our users were generous with their time and effort in helping us serve their use-cases, and as a result they told us we were able to create a tangible difference in their instruction. Students were more engaged, as Web Publishing gave them ownership over their work and created a more dynamic classroom.
Today, Web Publishing is a tested and full-featured platform, and it’s ready to be rolled out to the rest of the university.
Flexible, powerful and secure
Web Publishing was built with the unique needs of the end-user always in mind. It was never meant to do everything. Instead, a user can pick and choose what they need to make Web Publishing work for them. To this end, Web Publishing boasts over 100 themes and over 40 plugins, with another thirty running under the hood. These can be configured into an almost endless amount of combinations, allowing Web Publishing to service a number of unique use-cases.
Web Publishing is also built on a high standard of security and compatibility. Each of the many pieces that make up Web Publishing have been put through a rigorous testing and vetting process, that ensure they protect the information and privacy of the NYU community, and can work reliably even under the most stressful conditions.
Due to its decentralized nature, Web Publishing leaves a great amount of autonomy to the end-user. Users can work at their own pace and build the software to meet their needs, instead of squeezing their intentions into the software. Even our site creation process is automated!
Web Publishing was designed to be easy to use. We provide a quick-start guide here that gives a high-level overview of the service, as well as more fine grained documentation here. We also provide an interactive, step-by-step walkthrough service with Sidekick, comprehensive video tutorials on Lynda.com and through WPMU. Finally, we love to listen and can always be contacted here with any request, bugs, or for a consultation for your unique use-case.
Get started with Web Publishing!
We had a blast building Web Publishing, but we’re not stopping any time soon. We’re always looking for ways to make it more robust, more flexible, and even more user friendly. And if that sounds interesting to you, click here to make a site and get started!