The Yale Academic Commons was originally an initiative to bring a variety of online tools to teaching at Yale University. WordPress, because of its flexibility and large plugin development community, quickly became the tool most frequently used.

The Academic Commons has since evolved into a major undertaking due for launch in December 2011. When fully implemented, any member of the Yale community will be able to use a self-service system to create their own site. A variety of tools have been built to make administration as easy as possible, while ensuring that the end user’s experience is as positive and straight forward as possible.