I think I’ve finally finished all of my Hugo taxonomy-and-template side projects. Time to write up a summary post and then find something else to do as productive procrastination.

I’ve been teaching my department’s class on content management systems since Fall 2019, which means that I’m coming up on my seventh(!) time with the course next August. Every time that I’ve taught it, I’ve used the Hugo static site software and the WordPress CMS as examples of content management concepts. WordPress is the more (most!) popular web CMS out there, and so it’s always been my main area of focus; I think that Hugo does a wonderful job of illustrating some CMS concepts, but it also has a higher technical learning curve, so I’ve always felt conflicted about its role in the classroom. Since the very first time I taught with this combination of software, students have expressed a clear preference for WordPress, and so every time I teach the class, I think that I’m going to give it up and just focus on WordPress the next time around.

Don’t tell my students, but half the reason I have them work with Hugo in my web content management class is because I enjoy working with it so much. Over the past week, I’ve hacked together an author taxonomy for our class site, and I’m super pleased with it.

Fall 2023 will mark my fifth time teaching my department’s class on Content Management Systems. I have really loved taking on this class and making it my own over the past several years. It’s also been fun to see how teaching the class has seeped into the rest of my life: It’s a “cannot unsee” situation (in a good way!) where the concepts I teach work themselves into everyday encounters with the news, my own websites, and other things around the internet.

Setting up a Canvas course gets meta when you’re doing it for a class on web content management.

What a read. Platforms don’t just host content, they manipulate that content.

Bookmarking this for my content management class.

TIL that if you find out your content management students aren’t accessing the LMS course in the way that you told them to (some only check “to do” page, not main course page), you can at least turn it into a review of course material!