Coming soon to a cpanel near you (if you are hosted by Reclaim Hosting)
My favorite work over the last few years, spawned by the Open Learning Fellowship at TRU set up for me by Brian Lamb, has been the development of WordPress themes that turn a vanilla bloggy type site into a functional web tool, aka SPLOTs as well as ones developed for workshops like Connected Courses I have called Calling Card Themes.
A number of people have waded through the steps it takes to install one of these via my GitHub sites (see for example the long road just to set up the Big Picture landing page theme)… and still you start with an empty site, setting up plugins, and almost nobody ever updates them.
I just sent our Ontario Extend Domain Camp people scurrying through this obstacle course which more or less says “follow the steps in Github”.
This all changes soon if you are smart enough to host your sites on Reclaim Hosting. See what Tim Owens just announced via App Release: Big Picture Calling Card.
But for users brand new to WordPress even the act of installing themes, activating plugins, and configuring settings in Customizer can be a hell of a learning curve (a great learning opportunity in my opinion, but a curve nonetheless). In the same way that creating an installer for Omeka has opened the doors for many more folks to work with that software we have seen time and again how building applications for our environment can simply the amount of onboarding necessary to build out amazing stuff.
The big bonus to all of this, is, not only is there a one click install to get a WordPress site in your domain with this theme, you get:
- A demo site with filler content and settings, all plugins.
- It will automatically update the WordPress portion of things, but also, when the theme is updated, this too will be automatically updated.
- And if you are one who likes to pop the engine and work, you can still do this the old school way.
This is something Tim talked about (and was likely already testing) when I was at the March 2018 Reclaim Hosting Workshop, and we got going via our conversations in Slack. Tim does all the complex stuff, I just needed to start doing version releases on Github. We have added a WordPress export for demo content which you could use if you were setting up the site by hand.
There’s plans to set up installers like this for a few more themes and SPLOTs, and I’m conjuring too an idea maybe to set up a themed site for a Feed WordPress Syndication hub; imagine getting all that from a one click installer.
More buttons to come soon (I should add that I always have been a massive fan of Reclaim Hosting but they are also supporting me this year with a small fellowship; (here comes the loathed self pimping) I can do more if folks can hit those patreon/paypal links below).
Featured Image:
I Hope to Have This One Day as a Job Title flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
