WPCampus 2018: Where WordPress Meets Higher Education

Over the last five years at Washington State University, we have built a single multi-network WordPress Multisite installation into the university's primary content management system. All six campus locations, 11 colleges and hundreds of departments between have at least some presence on WordPress.

In this talk I'll cover assumptions I had when starting in higher ed—and how many were wrong. I'll go through successes and failures—and what I would change the next time around. And I'll go through some of the specific tools that have been invaluable to us in building our platform. You'll walk away with a practical framework that can be applied to dozens, hundreds or thousands of sites.

You can learn more about this session on the WPCampus 2018 website at https://2018.wpcampus.org/schedule/what-ive-learned-from-wordpress-at-a-public-university/.

Speaker:
Jeremy Felt

What is WPCampus?
WPCampus 2018 was the third annual in-person conference for the WPCampus community, a gathering of web professionals, educators and people dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The event took place July 12-14 on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about the event at https://2018.wpcampus.org.

Do you want to do development on multiple sites with different setups concurrently, but do not have to update core in each install every time a new version is released? Are you developing for a single site environment, but don not want to spin up a new development server for every site so you do not have to worry about multisite quirks?

If you answered yes to either of these questions, a multi-tenant WordPress install is just what you need!

Come learn how I adapted Cliff Seal's talk from WPCampus 2016 into a simple VVV site that allows you to develop for as many sites as you want while still maintaining the flexibility of having a separate directory structure and separate databases (not just tables) and still only have to update plugins/themes/core once for all of your sites.

You can learn more about this session on the WPCampus 2018 website at https://2018.wpcampus.org/schedule/using-multi-tenant-wordpress-to-simplify-development/.

Speaker:
Aaron Graham

What is WPCampus?
WPCampus 2018 was the third annual in-person conference for the WPCampus community, a gathering of web professionals, educators and people dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The event took place July 12-14 on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about the event at https://2018.wpcampus.org.

Managing 600 single site installs is about as much fun as it sounds.

At Carleton University our CMS and Framework service allows departments, faculty members (and sometimes students) to create and manage their own content.

We’ll take a look at the history and evolution of our service, our network architecture, and the processes and tools that we use to deploy code, test, monitor, manage, and upgrade sites.

You can learn more about this session on the WPCampus 2018 website at https://2018.wpcampus.org/schedule/carleton-university-case-study/.

Speaker:
Mike Corkum

What is WPCampus?
WPCampus 2018 was the third annual in-person conference for the WPCampus community, a gathering of web professionals, educators and people dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The event took place July 12-14 on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about the event at https://2018.wpcampus.org.

When Matt Mullenweg announced in December 2017 that Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0 would be ready in just a few short months, we sat up and took notice. Knowing the landscape of our institution - and higher ed’s proclivity for denying change - we started making plans.

From the beginning we were thinking about the full spectrum of WordPress experience: from developers to the one-off content editors. We set to work learning as much as we could about Gutenberg, the user experience, the transition options, and eventually, arrived at our own examination of how Gutenberg could/should/would work at North Carolina State University (NC State).

Join us as we recap our adventure so far into the world of user testing, communication strategies, site assessments, and overcoming resistance. This is a story of change management as we safely navigate our campus to the other side of the Gutenpocalypse.

You can learn more about this session on the WPCampus 2018 website at https://2018.wpcampus.org/schedule/gutenready-for-the-gutenpocalypse/.

Speakers:
Brian DeConinck
Jennifer McFarland

What is WPCampus?
WPCampus 2018 was the third annual in-person conference for the WPCampus community, a gathering of web professionals, educators and people dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The event took place July 12-14 on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about the event at https://2018.wpcampus.org.

No matter how users get to your sites, they deserve an inclusive, accessible experience. A main navigation component built with accessibility in mind goes a long way towards this goal. Fortunately, WordPress leaves the implementation of accessibility best practices up to theme and plugin developers. This means that by carefully thinking about how to build a menu from the 'ground up', we can help all of our users use our sites better. Instead of relying on the default WordPress navigation menu functions, this presentation will demonstrate:

- The basics of menu accessibility
- How custom a WordPress Walker class can be used to create accessible markup
- How to write flexible and extensible CSS to ensure that the menus are usable even without javascript
- How to implement Javascript that enhances the user’s experience

You can learn more about this session on the WPCampus 2018 website at https://2018.wpcampus.org/schedule/create-accessible-navigation-with-wordpress/.

Speaker:
Adam Berkowitz

What is WPCampus?
WPCampus 2018 was the third annual in-person conference for the WPCampus community, a gathering of web professionals, educators and people dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The event took place July 12-14 on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about the event at https://2018.wpcampus.org.

A few years ago, everyone had to overhaul all of their websites to become 'responsive' and now we're overhauling everything to be 'accessible'. As we plan for Gutenberg and GDPR, we have to ask ourselves: What are the next big changes up ahead and how do we better anticipate them to get prepared before the mad scramble? Join a panel of higher ed strategists and technologists in a very participatory session aimed at bringing the best ideas to the table.

You can learn more about this session on the WPCampus 2018 website at https://2018.wpcampus.org/schedule/future-proofing-against-the-next-big-change/.

Speaker:
Jeremy Felt
Shelley Keith
Malik Singleton
Robin Smail
Donna Talarico

What is WPCampus?
WPCampus 2018 was the third annual in-person conference for the WPCampus community, a gathering of web professionals, educators and people dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The event took place July 12-14 on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about the event at https://2018.wpcampus.org.

TEL Library is a public, non-profit learning library dedicated to building a scalable and sustainable library of openly licensed, free, and affordable content solutions. We also re-package and re-use that content to offer curriculum solutions (courses, media books, etc.) that enable our partners to offer affordable education. Two things make this possible:

1. Our content design model which is informed by software development models and information science, and
2. WordPress, which we leverage to package and publish, and re-package and re-publish our content.

This presentation will dive into our content design model, and how we use WordPress and an ecosystem of plugins to offer multiple types of content - mediabooks, courses, lessons - to the public and to educational partners. The audience will learn how to develop flexible content around the idea of reusable objects (software development) and taxonomies (information science), how WordPress as a CMS allows for modular content and finally how we deploy the content through WordPress (and plugins!) in multiple ways.

You can learn more about this session on the WPCampus 2018 website at https://2018.wpcampus.org/schedule/taxonomies-tagging-and-plugins-for-modular-lesson-content/.

Speaker:
Kate Reynolds

What is WPCampus?
WPCampus 2018 was the third annual in-person conference for the WPCampus community, a gathering of web professionals, educators and people dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The event took place July 12-14 on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about the event at https://2018.wpcampus.org.

Higher-education and research are synonymous: educating the next genius and engineering the future. However, the two areas in universities are, in many campuses, leagues apart in how they create, consume, and distribute web applications. Research utilizing web applications, from custom PHP applications to content management system customizations and plugins, are commonly built as stand-alone, narrow applications gate-walled from the rest of the world. These one-off web projects dilute the community knowledge for our researchers, our students and faculty, and even ourselves.

Let’s consider a field of study ripe with web application development: educational technology. I’ll discuss the ‘state of the field’ for reusability and development design, and where we as web experts in higher-education can break the mold and engineer design principles and best-practices for everyone working with the web. It’s not just code - it’s building community, documentation, inclusive environments, and above all - collaborating. It’s the dare to share, from faculty to staff—assistants to vendors—project to project.

I'll discuss what makes an inclusive web environment for extending into research, and help craft a map to meeting this need.

You can learn more about this session on the WPCampus 2018 website at https://2018.wpcampus.org/schedule/lightning-talks/design-principles-for-using-cms-in-academic-research/.

Speaker:
Eric Sembrat

What is WPCampus?
WPCampus 2018 was the third annual in-person conference for the WPCampus community, a gathering of web professionals, educators and people dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The event took place July 12-14 on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about the event at https://2018.wpcampus.org.

OU Create is a Domain of One's Own initiative in which any faculty, staff member or student at the University of Oklahoma can sign up for a free domain and web hosting. We now have more than 4,000 users, but creating a community is an ongoing challenge.

In this presentation, I will detail the design and implementation of an award ceremony called the Creaties that we have hosted annually for the last three years. The nomination process, ceremony and artifacts from this event have allowed us to identify and celebrate creativity and innovation within our WordPress community. They provide a set of examples and best practices as we continue to onboard new users.

Takeaways from this session will include suggestions for onboarding and encouraging users in a campus wide web system.

You can learn more about this session on the WPCampus 2018 website at https://2018.wpcampus.org/schedule/accessibility-and-life-beyond-the-alt-tag/.

Speaker:
John Stewart

What is WPCampus?
WPCampus 2018 was the third annual in-person conference for the WPCampus community, a gathering of web professionals, educators and people dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The event took place July 12-14 on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about the event at https://2018.wpcampus.org.

When we talk about design and the web, for some reason we don't believe we can have our beautiful cake and access it too. Sometimes, the idea of accessibility seems like a bucket of water on a campfire—not the kind of sizzle we are want for our website. And yet I tell you, there’s hope. We’ll explore the human aspect of our work and discover how to approach accessibility in a practical manner (and with less pain that you thought possible). Learn how to create digital content that anyone can access, no matter how they do it. See a real world example of an accessible course offering, and why it works. Let’s leave behind the idea of accessibility as an afterthought, and bring it into the forethought where it belongs.

You can learn more about this session on the WPCampus 2018 website at https://2018.wpcampus.org/schedule/delivering-great-presentations/.

Speaker:
David Needham

What is WPCampus?
WPCampus 2018 was the third annual in-person conference for the WPCampus community, a gathering of web professionals, educators and people dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The event took place July 12-14 on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about the event at https://2018.wpcampus.org.