I met today with three of the four editors/writers of the teen-produced magazine Tangerine Moon. Maggie, Gina and Athena are all high school sophomores (just finished their freshman year), and have recently taken the reins as the main writers/editors of the magazine. We spent two hours at Maggie’s computer, and went over the basics of how WordPress works, how to create and edit pages and posts, add and format images, work with the menu, and a bit more. They did really well, and said they think they understand it enough to continue to work on it on their own.
The magazine started in a writer’s workshop at Mission Hill Middle School in 2011, when Maggie, Gina and Athena were in 6th grade. They’ve been involved since the beginning. The editors have been high school students, and the baton has now passed to them, as they are now in high school.
I first learned about the magazine project in 2012 when the 4 editors presented a workshop about Tangerine Moon at the 4th annual Student-to-Student Conference (a project that I am involved in). I offered to help them start a website (or maybe update their existing site; I can’t remember now whether they had one already), and I set up a WordPress site for them at that time. After an initial push to get it set up, spearheaded largely by one of the parents, the website then sat and they didn’t keep up with it over the intervening couple of years.
Now there’s a new group of student editors —and new parents doing what they can to support the kids and the project— and Maggie’s dad is the one who contacted the previous parent, who then put him in touch with me. So we moved the site to a new hosting account (at HostMonster, the company I like and use), and I used the plugin WP Clone to backup the old site and “restore” it into a new WP install in the new hosting account. So now the site is in the process of being updated, and hopefully Athena, Gina and Maggie will dive into WP and finish the updating, and continue to keep it up to date.
And by the way, if you can spare $20 to support this wonderful project, please go to www.tangerinemoonmagazine.com and buy a subscription. If you’d like to send a donation and don’t need to receive the magazine itself, use their contact form. (Setting them up with PayPal for online subscriptions and donations is on the To Do list for the website.)