WordPress with Code Anywhere

by | Nov 2, 2014

It used to be a real pain to teach students WordPress development, but that is changing.

Code Anywhere

CodeAnywhere.com has completely changed the way I teach HTML and CSS. My students have access to a professional grade, syntax highlighting text editor that is available to them anywhere there’s an internet connection. Their projects are available to view online, not just locally in a browser, and perhaps best of all, CodeAnywhere.com is free and authenticates with Google Accounts. It’s really the perfect tool for students and teachers.

WordPress

WordPress is relatively easy to set up if you’re an experienced “computer person” and have administrative access to your personal computer, but in the context of a school environment (with the heavy IT restrictions that come with that territory), WordPress is almost impossible to set up for yourself let alone for an entire class of students. PortablApps.com provides a solution, but invariably students lose or forget their flashdrives and then can’t really work on their project for an entire class – not to mention local development lacks the pinache  of the real live internet. Recently, CodeAnywhere introduced DevBoxes, and my life changed.

DevBox

A DevBox is essentially a virtual computer that you can set up to run a web application – like WordPress. There are a variety of development environments from which you can choose (most of which I don’t really understand), but among those options includes PHP CentOS – a stack that includes everything you need to run WordPress. View the slide deck below for step by step directions to set up WordPress in CodeAnywhere.

Installation

8 Comments

  1. Dan
    Dan on January 8, 2015 at 4:14 pm

    Fantastic walkthrough – thanks man! Up and running.

    • Mike Macfadden
      Mike Macfadden on February 17, 2015 at 9:34 pm

      I’m glad it worked for you. Thanks for the comment!

  2. Kyrie
    Kyrie on February 17, 2015 at 9:32 pm

    I just wanted to thank you for this – I’m new to Codeanywhere, but following your slides it was super easy to get WP installed and set up. 🙂

    • Mike Macfadden
      Mike Macfadden on February 17, 2015 at 9:36 pm

      Thanks for the comment. I’m glad it helped!

  3. Lee
    Lee on March 2, 2015 at 2:59 pm

    Great walk-through! What I particularly like is that it guarantees a working WordPress environment with all the defaults included – even themes unlike the CodeAnywhere default WordPress install.

    What I think would be a useful addition is if you could integrate BitBucket in to the fold – you would have a test environment in CodeAnywhere, be able to push changes to a live site and have the version control of BitBucket – what do you think?

    • Mike Macfadden
      Mike Macfadden on March 15, 2015 at 9:55 pm

      I’ve never used BitBucket, but feel free to fork this project anyway you see fit.

  4. Bob Emmen
    Bob Emmen on April 17, 2015 at 2:43 pm

    Hello,
    I already have an existing wordpress, Do you know how I can link this with codeanywhere?

    • Mike Macfadden
      Mike Macfadden on April 17, 2015 at 3:12 pm

      If you are self-hosted, then you can connect with FTP and edit your files with CodeAnywhere.com. More information here: https://codeanywhere.net/ftp-client

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