Aug 12 2011
Creating A WordCampus
14.08
Dan Brown the technical wizardry that developed the WordCampus sites #wcsf
14.15
Legacy vs. WordPress wordpress did not have a licensing cost. #wcsf
What they had to convince upper management to move to WP
- had to convince of open source
- community support is strong
First year they bought support from Automattic
This helped to get them started
They have a content management service for Carleton College. Needed to get the same language across all departments. The roll out was a process.
First two years of the project built 40 sites with the legacy system. With WordPress they built 130 sites in <1 year.
14.16
In two years they built 24o sites in 2 years. WordPress is an out of the box CMS made it possible #wcsf
14.25
They use a single template for all sites and then adapt it to each site. #wcsf Business school always wants something different from the rest.
Included is the varsity teams and they all have a different sites. School Alumni
Now updating the template again after two years
Looking ahead:
- ecommerce
- mobile
- giving back to education
- adding buddypress for faculty and staff
Don’t be afraid to go open source for enterprise. Due to cost savings could spend more time with clients. By adding WP they were able to move two magazines from paper to online. It has taken forms out of the paper realm.
14.36
Q&A WordPress University Site #wcsf
The sites are not multi site. Reason it was a plugin not a part of core. they are going to move to it in the future. Now they have to do everything individually instead of once with multi-site
What kind of CMS for teachers / classroom info ? Different for teacher information. All wordpress is what the public wants to see
How are you handling domains for all these sites and pulling into multi site? With Multi-site will split up into more servers.
Portal stuff is separate all not WP. He went to school before internet so doesn’t have experience. He has a great dry sense of humor.
Custom Fields – they just try to eliminate fields that they won’t use. Less distraction. They love it they see what they want.
How did you get buy in to a centralized theme? They were burnt out with having to figure out how to update the site. Users were worn down with the legacy site.
