doteduguru

APS / 4:15 pm / Monday
Web ManagerRichwalsky, John Carroll University
Jesse Lavery, Allegheny College

Full house for this session — lots of people already using wordpress; lots of interest in role management, ldap auth, caching.

Why wordpress?

• open sources, extendable, scalable and hackable
• robust community of users

Many ways to generate content

• browser
• third party apps (livewrite, marsedit)
• iphone, ipad app

A few different things you can do with wordpress:

• Blog
  • user friendly
  • full control over design, layout, elements
  • free and premium themes
• CMS
  • Running 3.01 multisite (Allegheny has 151 WP sites with 104 users/editors and growing — including administrative, departmental, committees, students)
  • Author note - we’re using WordPress at Vanderbilt for all main news website, our magazines - and released a WordPress theme that any department can download and use (with a full featured control panel that allows them to completely customize their site; it’s so cool to see a completely new site appear that we didn’t have anything to do with other than providing the WP theme!!)
  • Must have plugins
    • Amazon S3 (media not housed on your server) — also Dropbox Plugin works similarly
    • Breadcrumb NavXT
    • User Role Editor
    • WP Super Cache
    • WPTouch (create mobile version of your site)
    • (author note - you can accomplish many plugins functionality without a plugin - which is better for your server… only call functionality on pages its needed on.)
  • Custom Post Types
    • use to change rotating banners
    • use to add specific types of content (videos, reviews, faculty profiles, etc)
• Learning Management Software
  • ScholarPress (integrates with buddypress)
  • features similar to Blackboard, sakai, moodle
    • private courses, groups, forums and blogs
    • classes can be archived, materials reused
  • more user friendly than (insert your LMS here … LOL)
  • extendable
  • CUNY Academic Commons — built in buddypress
• Online Magazine
  • author note - we have almost all our alumni magazines in WP - works perfectly! (Listed under Alumni Publications) Users can follow the feed and automatically will know when a new issue comes out; commenting allows for discussion; these mag websites make it simple for magazine content to be featured and linked to from the homepage and other highly trafficked pages. Before they had WP sites … the mag content wasn’t something we linked to because we didn’t want to dump a user into a 60 page PDF where they have to find the article!
• Social Network
  • buddypress
  • go from zero to social network in 7 minutes.  LOL
• Job Board
  • go from a corkboard of paper … to a quick WP site
  • their HR office uses this for job postings
  • alumni uses it for volunteer opportunities
  • JobPress theme - $79
    • heavy lifting done by the theme
    • features front end submission, filter by category, time stamps, paid submissions, etc.
• Classifieds
  • Uses same theme JobPress
  • Garage Sale on Campus
  • Free for all for students, faculty, staff — post whatever you want
• Event Calendar
  • GigPress
  • easily customized
  • rss and ical feeds
  • good for general events - great for regular performers / groups
• Create a book
  • plugin - Anthologize
  • create a book from your blog / cms content
  • publish in print and digital formats
  • archive student and faculty pages

Other Resources

• wordpress.org
• smashing magazine
• six revisions
• WPMU Dev