We write about WordPress quite a bit at ProfHacker. If you’ve been playing along for awhile, then, you’re probably a WordPress user who could—possibly—benefit from broader engagement with the WordPress user community. Just a few weeks ago, a brand-new community came online: the WordPress Users Association. What is the WPUA? Here’s the blurb from their site:
WPUA is the premier organization dedicated to advancing and advocating WordPress as a complete publishing platform. Gain instant access to extensive training resources and an expansive network of WordPress users to assist you in your development.
Connect with and make new friends, enhance your knowledge of the latest blogging techniques, learn how to build better SEO friendly WordPress sites and become a more effective WordPress user by joining WPUA today.
In short, the WPUA provides basic members with a range of features to help them use WordPress more effectively: free (or discounted) premium themes and plugins, training videos, and access to their expert forums. Eventually basic memberships will cost $99 per year, but they’re free right now. The WPUA provides pricier memberships as well, with additional benefits. I started a basic membership, mainly to poke around and see if this service could benefit ProfHackers.
The site feels very “business-y,” and would likely discomfit many academic visitors. The concerns of the community center around topics like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rather than course websites or the like. I found a few interesting things, though—including the theme I’m now using on my personal website—and I could see others benefiting from joining the WPUA. Whether the Association will provide more benefits that “a few interesting things,” though, is yet to be seen. The forums and training could certainly benefit new or newly serious WordPress users who need some extra assistance tweaking their site to do what they need it to do. Right now a basic membership is free, so if you use WordPress frequently, you should check out the WPUA for yourself.
Follow Profhacker through your favorite RSS reader: 
7 Responses to The WordPress Users Association: Worth Joining?
cogdog - December 15, 2010 at 4:05 pm
Meh, I have a tough time paying to step beyond the velvet ropes around something that has a vibrant user community on the wide open web. You gotta like the icon for Themes on their benefits page, my that looks just like Twentyten stock theme that you get with WordPress. Amazing!
No, I will not pay for that, Sam, I Am.
wpua_org - December 15, 2010 at 10:44 pm
cogdo
I hope to see you inside WPUA.org. There are a number free themes that all members can download. You don’t need a paying level account to access these. There are also Premium themes out there that offer discounts to members of WPUA.org.
You do not need a paid WPUA account to take advantage of these discounts.
The Paid level account offers a number of services that will be a benefit for some people and we have a large number of those accounts but we offer a free level as well.
I hope you come and create a free account and see all the resources that we have for all of our members. It is our goal to help users of WordPress become better at blogging and it’s our hope that we’re on track.
Please feel free to join us and let us know what you think as this organization has one goal….to help all of us members.
~ WPUA.org Staff
22261984 - June 3, 2011 at 3:08 pm
From Roger Clegg, Center for Equal Opportunity: No school should get special funding because of the race or ethnicity of the students attending it. If the idea is to have special funding for schools that have an especially high number of disadvantaged students, or have been underfunded in the past, fine — but don’t use the students’ skin color and national origin as a proxy for disadvantage or for a schools’ past underfunding.
mkt42 - June 3, 2011 at 5:17 pm
“Basically 1 in 10 Asian American or Pacific Islander students attended one of these institutions.”
This is the second time in two days that a Chronicle article has included a statement that, on its face, is very difficult to believe. (The other one was “Chinese students … account for nearly one in five undergraduates in the United States”.) Those eight institutions in Fall 2009 enrolled about 40K AAPI students, based on IPEDS data. IPEDS also reports that there were about 1,200K AAPI students in Fall 2009. Granted, some of those students had previously attended, say Santa Monica College but even so, those eight schools would have to have a revolving door of students quickly passing through with terrifically high transfer rates in order to account for 10% of the AAPI students.
The concept of an AAPI Serving Institution is an interesting one, but the figures (and perhaps the concept) need refinement. The University of Maryland College Park’s student body was 13% AAPI in 2009; there are many universities with much higher AAPI enrollments (San Jose State Univ e.g. is over 30% AAPI; UC Irvine is almost 50%). So what makes UMD an AAPI-Serving Institution? Perhaps its AAPI students tend to come from disadvantaged backgrounds; that’d be a legitimate criterion (ironically, I agree with Roger Clegg on that point), but that sort of criterion requires more detailed data than what we normally get, or were discussed in the article.
rei727887 - June 7, 2011 at 12:46 pm
What determines whether an IHE is Asian-American Pacific Islander serving? Number of students? Percentage of students? The first two paragraphs mention both criteria. UC Berkeley’s undergraduate population is nearly 50% AAPI. Is it excluded because it’s “elite”?
@226194: Amen!
surpassingreach - June 7, 2011 at 5:56 pm
UCI and UC Berkeley 50% AAPI? I don’t know about that. There is a huge difference between Asian American students and Asian American PACIFIC ISLANDER students. The problem in education is that we lump both populations as one conglomorate when in reality they have their own distinct subcultures and different challenges and history. They are two very different populations. We have to make sure that we’re careful not to make assumptions based on both groups “sharing” the Asian American “identity”.
rei727887 - June 9, 2011 at 7:52 pm
@surpassingreach — I don’t dispute your point that Pacific Islander students are vastly different from “Asian-American” students — as are the many groups lumped under the single term “Asian-American” different from one another.
I mistakenly interpreted this commentary as referring to the union of the two categories (i.e., Asian-American OR Pacific Islander OR both) rather than their intersection (BOTH Asian American AND Pacific Islander ONLY). Your interpretation (i.e., Asian-American/Pacific Islander) makes much more sense. I have to say, though, that the author is not very clear on this point. In the very first paragraph, Ms. Gasman states ”Basically 1 in 10 Asian American OR Pacific Islander students attended one of these institutions.” [emphasis mine]; “…this designation [brings] recognition to the growing number of institutions with high percentages of Asian America, Native Alaskan, and Pacific Islander students…” I can’t imagine an individual student fitting into ALL of these categories; I therefore assumed that the author was considering Asian American and Pacific Islander as two distinct groups. Other phrases are equally unclear: …”implies that Asian Americans do not need the support that other minority groups need…”
For these reasons, it never occurred to me that the author was referring only to students who were both Asian American and Pacific Islander. Clearly, such students would constitute a very small percentage of the UC Berkeley student body. Mea culpa.