Shelley Keith

So I’ve been struggling with how to manage our varied user groups when it comes to initial site population and long-term registration rules.

In English, all of our current faculty, staff, students and very recent alumni have @saumag email addresses, so using the built-in WPMU registration restriction based on email domain capability is perfect for that…however, our less recent alumni (obviously the vast majority) do not have SAU email addresses since we only just started offering permanent email in the last year. The problem: either we can restrict registration to @saumag domain emails or we can establish an invitation only community using a plugin.

ITS indicated it would be no problem to give alumni the appropriate email account, but there’s a process involved and I would prefer not to force an additional step when we’re trying to really promote community building. Also, our incoming freshmen don’t get their email addresses until they arrive on campus. The addresses are created in batches as they’re admitted, but not activated until right as the semester starts. We really want easy interaction with both of these groups. A better solution is necessary.

Enter Bulk Import Members. This plugin will allow me to take delimited data from any source and turn it into a pre-registered membership. Essentially, I can import name and email address and the plugin will send an email to the user containing a link to the site and their username/password.

Why is this especially valuable to us? It circumvents the @saumag only restriction without my having to turn it off. It means that current students, faculty, staff, and anyone with a University email can still freely join the community, but I don’t have to put my non-University email address having alumni and admitted students through ANY steps to welcome them into the online community. It’ll also mean that my Alumni director and Admissions staff with admin access can go add their own people as they see fit without needing a lot of help from me.

So I’ve gone into my WPMU project a little and briefly mentioned the BuddyPress university community site currently in process. Now I’d like to touch upon how these projects plus existing social media tools can be used to support online education initiatives at my university.

Today, we’re really just scratching the surface of online/distance education. Last summer we released a completely new distance ed support site that essentially offers some step-by step registration help, links to campus resources, and FAQ info. It’s not a distance learning recruiting tool or a hand-holding retention piece, but it is progress.

The existing distance ed site is in WP, so the migration to WPMU won’t be much of a stretch. The big bonus here is going to be the opportunity to get more of the faculty currently teaching distance classes involved in the day to day distribution of the information given to distance students/prospects. The act of migrating will allow me the chance to sit down with the committee again and pitch the use of Twitter, Google Calendar and the university community site (for starters). I’ll also get to dig into some WPMU only plugins and features that may help bring the University into this century.

The BuddyPress community site could see heavy use as a support/retention tool for the academic side. I’ve already seen incredible interest in using the groups feature to fill gaps in available campus services, specifically for non-traditional students. This group doesn’t operate the way traditional students do, and therefore aren’t able to make a standard campus group work (nobody can nail down a time for meetings). An online group will give this demographic the opportunity to interact and get to know each other on their own time. Similarly, distance learning students are literally all over the map. They get very little interaction from campus outside Blackboard and the generic swarm of student email, so an online group could bring them together for, at very least, moral support.

Another campus initiative I find myself involved with is the Staff Development committee. The purpose is as advertised, to find ways to offer a variety of support and training to the staff. We’re all over-worked, so getting a large group of staff together for regular face-to-face training is impractical. It’s been left to me to find ways to offer online professional development opportunities that don’t cost much anything. The intention is to send a bi-weekly email newsletter containing, among other things, links to a tutorial or video considered helpful to our staff. All hail YouTube.

The combination of the WPMU (with the customizable universal dashboard plugin) and BuddyPress projects will also allow me, as sole web staffer, to support and assist my faculty and distance staff by letting me introduce useful sharing tools like Google docs, Slideshare, Twitter, social bookmarking and a huge list of great YouTube tutorials…all with no budget.

Inspirational links:

• How to create and RSS-enabled micro-blog with Twitter
• How to use Google calendar
• Twitter in plain English
• Social Bookmarking in plain English

I’m working on 2 simultaneous project using WPMU. One is a BuddyPress implementation for the “university community” project. The other is using WPMU as CMS for an entire institution. This is what I’m going to briefly address here… I’ll also be documenting the process along the way.

Where we were:

When I took over 4 years ago the University web presence was 16k+ disjointed static pages using html “templates” with FrontPage as the software of choice. Various departmental staff were occasionally getting online and updating information. The result was a set of template files (images and all) for each department, broken links, and outdated Word and PDF documents where site managers had downloaded copies from another department into their site content rather than just pointing to the appropriate place. Though, in their defense, with every file being named XYZ-form-2005.ext it wouldn’t have mattered if they’d pointed to the right place, so what was the point? Oh yes, and until me there was NO dedicated web staff…nada.

From then until now:

There have been a couple of versions of things since then. I initially brought everything together using .asp includes for a quick and dirty unified template, installed a document repository to organize all of the .doc, .pdf, .xls, etc. documents together in one place, and took content control away from the departments. I needed to get a grasp on what was really out there, what was really needed, and do *something*  while I researched more long-term solutions.

As is usually the situation in reactive institutions like mine, something happened that spurred a change. We had an orientation program come into being that was going to require a LOT of site updates. I chose to put that site in WordPress so I could train the appropriate staff to make the updates and free myself from the day to day responsibility. It worked beautifully…and someone found out. Long story short, I’ve been putting new departmental site builds in WP for a year and it’s been very well accepted. Most of the departmental staff again responsible for their site content have been very happy, easily trained, and not required much additional hand-holding. I’ve done software updates and the occasional support call…not bad. I did this knowing it was an interim step and I was essentially putting our site content in an exportable format for whatever CMS we chose in the future.

The problems:

First, our internal systems weren’t WP friendly for a variety of reasons. We’re a Windows shop with limited resources, pretty crappy bandwidth and no real PHP/MySql expertise available to us. This led me to buy external hosting for testing purposes which ended up hosting the majority of our web presence when the WP wave hit. It wasn’t intended to go that way, but it did. Our IT dept. has been very gracious about it, but the director has always wanted these sites moved back on campus…and back onto the .edu.

Second, I’m running individual WP installs. When I started this WPMU wasn’t ready and couldn’t do what I needed it to do…or at least I wasn’t ready to figure it out completely.

Third, our .edu has to point to our primary Win server for a variety of reasons. There are still legacy .asp apps out there that serve a purpose, as well as a lot of /directories that can’t just disappear. Today the homepage and a few other key pages site on this machine, with links out to the rest of the site. IIS on this machine also does a whole lotta virtual directory redirecting.

The plan:

In the last couple of years significant upgrades have been made to our IT infrastructure. We’ve upgraded our bandwidth, bolstered IT staff, setup virtual servers, and generally improved our ability to adequately serve and support the site(s). Today we’re in process of setting up a Linux virtual server, MySql server, and a duplicate test space upon which to install, test, and manage WMPU as a full CMS for the University.

The install will be on a subdomain, web.saumag.edu, with each site on a directory, web.saumag.edu/communications. I’ve been struggling with the state of the homepage, as there are some things I could much more easily achieve with WP, but a Windows install isn’t really the best option.  I’m seriously thinking of making the primary WPMU blog the homepage, and just setting a permanent redirect on the Win box default.php page. This will only affect the “home” page while allowing the random .asp pages and faculty site directories to function normally.

Next step:

I expect I’ll be installing WPMU in the next week or so, as soon as I get the access and go-ahead from ITS. I’ll post when I know how that goes.