TNT1: Using WordPress MU as a Web Content Management System

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of podcasts from the 2009 HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Sarah Barnes:� My name is Sarah Barnes and this is Alisha Myers.� We used to both work at the WVU Office of Information Technology.� A little over a month ago, I received a job opportunity and had to move on, so I left it to Alisha and I believe I've left it in wonderful hands.

Anyway, we're going to tell you about what we did for our web content management system and choosing WordPress Multiuser.� Choosing a web content management system is a challenging endeavor for any organization and there's not a cookie cutter method for choosing one.� I don�t believe that there ever will be magic bullet Word or WCMS for any organization no matter how big or small or diverse.

So we can't come here today and tell you how it has to be done.� We can only tell you how we made the decisions we did and why.� So how did this come about?� When I started at the Office of Information Technology in 2005, the website was in need of a redesign.� It didn't have a single authority for web content management and oversight.� There are several different units.� They all had their content managers.� There was a single template that they designed in 2003 but that template let people change navigation so users will come to the site and they'd click on a unit and then the navigation would change.

So cleaning up that took up about the first year and a half that I was there.� So we redesigned it.� We still used Dreamweaver templates.� That's what they were using before.� But I was able to use includes for headers, footers, navigation, etc. and I had the content managers use Contribute to publish the files.� That was okay but we didn't spend the money to get the Contribute user manager thingy, whatever it's called, I can't remember now.

But anyway, that caused problems in the long run.� I mean we set up group access.� We had a Unix system so we had groups for the users and a little bit more controlled than we had before but we soon ran into problems with permissions on a regular basis.� When people didn't edit in Contribute kind of on the site, some people really liked Dreamweaver better.� When they didn't use Contribute, it would overwrite the permissions and we'd always have to go in command line and change the permissions.� It was a big hassle.

So knowing that Dreamweaver wasn't a long-term solution, I started looking at different content management systems and first, I have to mention that the WVU web services group which is a separate unit from the Office of Information Technology.� They're actually under marketing.� They were developing a CMS.� And Alisha, I'm not sure what slide you're on but if you could show them the slides with the pictures and the logos, that'll be good.

Alisha Myers:� Okay.

Sarah Barnes:� So their content management system is called Slate and it's one that they were developing in-house using Ruby on Rails.� I really liked their content management system and if any of you are following Dave Olson on Twitter, he's the guy who's involved in that development.� He's been with that project from the beginning.

It's a really nice CMS but the folks in charge that I was reporting to wasn't comfortable with using an in-house solution because they were worried that if it came down to being dependent, the support being dependent on one or two people, they weren't comfortable with that because one of those or both of those people could leave at any time and then where would we be?

So they were kind of pushing and looked at vendor solutions but I didn't feel that there was much point in buying a CMS since I knew that there were so many robust open source solutions.� So first, I looked at Textpattern and then I looked at Joomla.� Textpattern was okay but I was put off by the fact that hardly anybody seemed to be using it.� I mean it looked really nice but I wanted something a lot of people were using.

Joomla looked very promising and from what I understand, the complaints I've had with it have since been changed but I used it on a project probably about two years ago and I was not happy with the fact they used tables as the underlining layout, so I couldn't have complete control over the look and feel.� On the backend, I felt like I was clicking too much back and forth to do simple tasks.� Again, that may have changed in the latest version of Joomla so I can't really say for sure.

In the meantime, our system administrator had recommended we use WordPress for managing our news items.� I looked at it and within like an hour, I had customized WordPress to fit our already established templates, so I was really impressed with it.� But I wasn't sure that it was robust enough to handle the entire Office of Information Technology website.� I mean we had thousands of pages and lots of content managers and I just didn't think that that would work.

So I thought well, maybe we're looking at Drupal.� Maybe that's what I need to do.� For a long time, that's where I thought I was going to have to have.� But in the meantime, I found out about WordPress Multiuser and I started looking at it and at first glance, I was sure that there must be some reason that WordPress Multiuser would not work for managing a large website with multiple units and content managers.� I mean, why hadn't I heard of it being used as a CMS?

Still, I was impressed that WordPress Multiuser was being used in some very large-scale blog systems.� I mean if it's good enough for Harvard for their blog systems, if it's good enough for WordPress.com, surely it can't be that bad.� I mean it seemed to be that the major hang-up with using it was that it uses the word blog and that it's marketed as a blogging tool.

So Alisha, if you want to go to the next slide.

So why WordPress Multiuser?� There were a number of reasons to use WordPress Multiuser but the important thing to remember is that it came to down to why not rather than why.� WordPress is everything we needed but the most important thing was that it was easy to use.� The only thing wrong with it as far as I could tell was the word blog as I mentioned before, and if I ignored that word it still had everything that I needed.

The biggest priority I had was being able to easily customize the web interface and that's a snap in WordPress.� The code is well documented and in a matter of minutes, you can make any web design and plug it into WordPress components and voila, you have a theme.

I also like the fact that it's very extensible.� I mean the plug-ins, there are plug-ins for just about everything we needed to do.� The core is very solid but it doesn't do everything.� So if you find plug-ins to do what you need to do then you can really extend it however you need.

I also really liked the fact that it is an open source platform.� Some in higher ed tend to fear or discredit this aspect simply because they're used to a vendor-driven system and I know I encountered that where I work, but open source technologies have proven themselves time and again to be more reliable, more secure and more easily supported than proprietary vendor solutions.

So one reason WordPress appealed to me was that I knew if I ever left OIT as I ended up doing, it would not be left with a system that only I knew or that used a system that would be difficult to find somebody who was willing to work with it.� Someone who knows CSS, Access, HTML, PHP, MySQL is not nearly as specialized as someone who knows, say, Java or Oracle.� I say that WVU does a lot with Java and Oracle so that would have been very likely a direction that they would have gone.

Okay, so that's fine.� I haven't really talked about why WordPress Multiuser.� Well, the biggest reason that WordPress Multiuser works as a CMS is on the administrative end, the user and site management.� WordPress Multiuser allows you to create unlimited users, unlimited blogs/sites.� This means we're able to convert thousands of pages into 54 blogs/sites and it's managed by us in 18 content managers now.� Updating the permissions and creating new sites is a breeze.� Where previously we relied very heavily on our system administration guys to add users, we can manage those aspects ourselves.

I made a mistake at looking at Twitter while I'm reading here.

We can set up to authenticate against active directory as well so content managers don't need to remember a new user ID or password, so that was really important.

The design administration is also really wonderful.� We could control the design by creating the themes and we can create multiple themes if we want from a single location.� Since we're the only ones managing and creating the themes, the design is consistent throughout the site.� That makes future enhancements to design much more palatable and much less time consuming.� For example, in the old Office of Information Technology website, any template change had to be applied to every single HTML file so when you're dealing with 10,000 to 20,000 pages this is really onerous task.� So that was wonderful to not have to worry about that anymore.

The other thing is site admins, content managers can allow the individual or can approve plug-ins, can add plug-ins to their site.� We have plug-ins that we installed and make use of them or not use them.

So why shouldn't you go with WordPress Multiuser?� Well, some of the things we ran into are that the media library was an issue.� I don't know if you're familiar with WordPress.� It has a media library and all of your attached files, documents, PDFs, images, etc. are all uploaded to the media library.� WordPress by default wants to put those in a folder that is designated by year and month.� That wasn't very practical for a lot of the things that we needed to upload, especially if you're uploading policies or instructions on how to do things.� It was silly.� But we found a plug-in that would fix that for us so that we could tell it where to put things.� So we got rid of that problem.

We ran into an issue with mod rewrites.

Alisha Myers:� We have a question.

Sarah Barnes:� I think it just caused a couple of headaches.� It wasn't a big deal but our sys admin guy had to do some tweaking and unfortunately, I still can't speak as to what exactly he had to do.

Running a PHP -

Alisha Myers:� Just one second, we have a question.� Can you hear me?

Sarah Barnes:� I can't hear the question so Alisha is going to have to type it.

Alisha Myers:� Okay, what was the question?� What's the plug-in that you were talking about for the media library?

Sarah Barnes:� What's the plug-in for the media library?� Actually, Alisha was going to go over some of the plug-ins but the one that we used is called Custom Upload Directory and it's real simple.� Alisha, you can show that to them when you go through your demo, right?

Alisha Myers:� Right.

Sarah Barnes:� I guess you can just type the answer now.

Anyway, let me get back on track here.� The other issue we had was running PHP on a page or a post.� That's not something that we couldn't get past entirely but we did run into some glitches on some pages.� You can run PHP in a page or a post with a plug-in.� There are several like Exec PHP and Run PHP but for some reason, one of the things that we were trying to do right before I left, like literally my last day at WVU, one of the pages had an issue and we couldn't figure out why.� So that was the problem.

And then forms lastly were the last thing that I had an issue with.� I don�t understand why WordPress out of the box doesn�t have a way for people to submit information but there are a few plug-ins that do that.� The one that we like the most was Contact Form 7.� There's also one called cforms II which was fine but it didn't seem to work very well with WordPress Multiuser so we used Contact Form 7 and it was highly customizable and we like that one a lot.

So I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Alisha so that she can demo the website and the plug-ins.� Hopefully, I can hear her.

Alisha Myers:� Can you hear me?

Alisha Myers:� Can you hear me now?

Sarah Barnes:� Alisha, I can see you now but I can't hear you but that's okay.

Alisha Myers:� Okay.� I'm not sure why but I'll go ahead and move on here.

I'll just go ahead and explain.� I'll keep her in line and use an IM here.

So what we did is we met with the content managers and we wanted to train them on how to use WordPress Multiuser.� So we met with them.� We have online documentation for them that's referred to for help.� I want to show you what we showed them so I'm going to bring up our website here.

I'm just going to move her over here right now.

So let me resize this.� It's a little too big.

So we started with showing them how to log in and we set it up to where they use their master ID login and password which is a very common password that they use for many other systems.

So the dashboard, this is the backend for them to use, the administration area.� They can actually rearrange all of these panels for their needs, for their administration needs.� So any of these panels, if they want to click for us here, they could just click and drag it.

Sorry about that.

Then we went on and showed them the plug-ins which is very important for their long-term use.� And we found a few plug-ins that would be very useful for them to use throughout their management.

The cross reference that was the one she was mentioning.� This allows you to easily cross reference any internal links using less code.� So it's very useful if you have a lot of internal links.� It's called cross reference.

I'm sorry?

Yes, I can show you how you do that in just a minute.� It's short code.

We have the Contact Form 7 so this allows you to create basic email forms.� It's very versatile and very easily customized.� It also offers the ability to attach files and capture for security.� So this is just a screenshot part of that.

Now, we have the custom upload path and this allows you to modify where your media files are kept and how they're organized.

So I think she explained to you that each blog is given an ID so this particular blog is 54.� Can you guys hear me okay?� They're all stored under the files directory.

By default, it'll be pretty much the timestamp so if you want to change that to just be the post flag, you can do that right here unless we change that area.

The cross reference, I think I went over this but it allows you to easily cross reference internal links with less code.� Again, it's very useful if you have a lot of internal links.

Do you guys want to see examples of these or you want me to move on to the next part?� Examples?� Okay.

Well, how about I do this.� Let's move on in case we run low on time and then I'll come back and show you examples of how we did that for the content managers, okay?

So we also customized by using widgets.� We offered numerous widget options for the content managers.� It allows them to customize their front page for each site, for their site.� So I'm going to show you some of that.

We're going to take a look at our wireless blog.� I'll show you the front page.� This front page is controlled by widgets.� This is the left area, content area.� This area is the right which shows something up for this particular blog and then this would be the right area.� This would be the sidebar.� Then, I'm going to show you the backend to this.

You can see where the available widgets are.� For them, they can choose and pick, and what they decided to use, what we pretty much got them started using.� This is the sidebar, as I said, at the very right.� They used the text widget.� You can actually put in any code you want for this so if you're not pleased with any of the available widgets, you can customize this particularly how you want to.

That's where you put the code.� It's very simple.

They can use the available widgets that are activated and then it'll come up with the front page.

They also use the text widget for the left column and more text with it for the right, for the sidebar.� But you can see if you use the pages, it'll automatically feed and link to all of your pages that you have published.

We also showed them the media library and it was pretty much a how-to.� It's pretty easy to use also.� So it will give you a list of all your PDFs, Flash files, JPGs, anything that you want to upload to use.� And you can also insert this to any of your pages and each of your pages can have their end gallery but they're all sort under the media library.

Any questions so far?

This is standard.

Yes, we have it activated but for this site, let me ask if she knows on top of her head of anybody is actually using that.

Yes, it's activated but no one is actually currently using that.� We do have pageMash.� This is really useful if you have a lot of pages.� We had converted particularly our unit c tech and they had thousands of pages and actually, I think we better move on to questions.

Sorry about all the issues here.� But it's pretty much a tree structure so you can rearrange your pages how you want.� So if you want a subdirectory with DB common directory, you can do that there.

I had some questions from managers this past week.� They had content up.� It was outdated but they did not want to delete that page so using pageMash, it's really convenient, you can just hide the page so then they can go back in.� It won't be live but it's still there.

I'll repeat it.� How did we serve the master ID to the content managers?� Use that to log in.� We used a WordPress direct authority.� It's actually right here.� Each of the blogs will have general backends.� Use this, so you can go to the directory authority here.� That's where you set that up.

Yes, and you can contact us through Twitter also.