As part of the WPMU implentation I’ve been working on for a year now, it’s time to start training my content contributors (“content managers”? I haven’t come up with the right title for these departmental “please take this responsibility off my plate” types). Simply giving faculty and staff basic software training and sending them on their way would be catastrophic, hence a (hopefully) well-rounded 4 hour training session that includes some elementary yet essential content tips and an overview of 508 and W3C before giving them the power to change a single character of text. The expectation is to offer this comprehensive training on a twice/year basis and provide one-hour lunchtime sessions on specific topics throughout the semester, as well as make refresher materials available online through my department site.
I’ve coordinated training with both our HR department to be counted as staff development, and through our Continuing Education department who will be issuing CEU credits. As such I feel the need to have some sort of assessment in place to gauge the success of the training, beyond just a session evaluation. If anyone has any ideas about assessing this kind of training, I’d love to hear it.
For this first round of training I have a wingman, Brent Passmore (@bpmore) from University of Central Arkansas. Brent has graciously agreed to dedicate some of his post-baby paternity leave time to my little project. Props.
Overview: Four-hour training session for faculty and staff who will be responsible for managing departmental Web content. Sessions will be presented with the aid of step-by-step video and hands-on examples.
Training Outline
Upcoming blog entries will outline in further detail the issues we’ll be touching on along with comprehensive resource listings for existing training materials and content guides. At the end I’ll post our slides and any supplementary materials we generate. Some of these items (like Flickr options, Forms, and the directory profile) are plugin specific and/or highly customized to our site and may not be relevant for you, but I’ll show how we’ll train for it anyway.
Training is scheduled for February 3, 2010.
So I’m going to talk a little more about the overall plan, expected plugin use, and managing some of the known hurdles.
The homepage:
In the last post, I mentioned my homepage issue. The current homepage is housed at www on a Windows box. I currently expect I’ll do a permanent redirect to the default WPMU blog for just the default.php page. One of the reasons is Featured Content Gallery. This plugin gives me an easy way to do something I’ve long been hounded for, linked images and movement, without Flash. I hate Flash. It’s deeply personal. I’ve tried to implement SmoothGallery, the script that spawned FCG, but it’s got javascript errors in IE7 and I just can’t get past it.
An issue I have with FCG and a WPMU homepage is that I’ll need the gallery to show images for and link to various places all over the collective University site. It appears that I’ve found an answer with Redirect, a WP plugin that simply redirects the user to a different URL based on the content of a custom field. This, plus an automatic post expiration plugin such as Post Expirator or Auto Delete Posts could go a long way toward filling my need and making the daily cleanup/maintenance fairly painless.
Calendaring:
I recently implemented Google Calendar campus wide. It’s been a positive experience, but getting upcoming events to display on plain php pages the way I want them has been a challenge. The RSS feeds can be questionable. Luckily, there are WP plugins that do great things with iCal feeds. Specifically, AmR iCal Events List appears to have promise. I’ll be able to widget an upcoming events feed onto the homepage and be done with it.
Additionally, since our Google Calendar setup has included a lot of separate calendars for different departments merged into various configurations, I’ll be able to use the plugin for many lovely department specific feeds. It also merges multiple iCal feeds…very handy indeed.
Misc:
I’m glad it’s been podcast or I’d be in trouble since I was running around like a crazy person pretty much the whole time. Met some really wonderful people…shout out to my peeps.
I just updated to WP 2.6.2. Been using it at work since release, but I tend to be slow to do things with Eironae. I also applied a new theme and installed a Twitter plugin since I’ve now become officially addicted.
ff0000;">Note to self: must remove that default logo and upload some new header photos…in my spare time
Date: Dec 20, 2008
Place: Umsted House B&B, Camden, Ar
Time: 4 p.m.
Site: http://www.mywedding.com/shelleyandchris
Though I successfully upgraded several other sites, my experience on this site hasn’t been pleasant. Issues I’ve faced (with varying levels of success):