A little background on the current state of affairs. During the move to stabilize our sites (see Rebuilding a university website. Step one.) we moved legacy content to WordPress and didn’t take time to do a redesign. We just used the content and design we already had. The design isn’t responsive and there’s old code for a mobile site that’s so outdated I’m rather ashamed it’s still there. I haven’t pulled the code because frankly I’m a tad nervous about what might happen if I do. Been there, done that, broke things.
The hodge podge of code, static HTML, and custom CMS pages that was our web infrastructure slowed us down and was choking our ability to let our clients work with their websites. And without a programmer on staff dedicated to it, would have continued to be a time suck for us to had we continued down that path. This is one of the biggest reasons I chose to go with WordPress. I know WordPress and so do several million others. I know I can find out what I don’t know pretty quickly. All of the functions that come with the default install of WordPress are well documented. That’s about 90% of the documentation work that will be needed. And it has an active support forum. WordPress will help us pass the bus test so the next guy or gal that takes my place should be able to pick up where I left off without much fuss (you’re welcome).
I love this part of my job
While team member Mark Peal finishes up moving lingering websites, I’ve been focused on solving a problem. Our media relations person, Daphne Larkin, has wanted a way to identify faculty members that are willing to speak with the media when an expert is needed. This will save her time because media people contact her directly whenever they want an expert and she spends a lot of time figuring out who they should speak with. Having our pool of speakers and their professional bios online will allow the media to do this research work on their own. It will also help us showcase our experts.
I actually took Daphne’s idea one step further. If I’m going to build a tool to showcase profiles for our experts, why not build it so it can include our faculty too? Here are my requirements:
- Faculty can fill out a single intake form online.
- Data goes into a database.
- We get an email notification on initial submission and on any updates.
- Profile is on hold until reviewed and approved.
- No uploads of CVs or Photos. I didn’t want this ability on the public side. We’ll do it through the admin side when we review the profile.
- Profile data must be editable by my team as well as by Editors.
- College Editors must be able to manage their faculty from within the Admin area but not be able to edit faculty from other Colleges.
- Code must be modular and be able to implement on any WordPress website within our network.
I decided I wanted to build a plugin. It took me a few weeks to plan and build but it’s mostly done and am beta testing with some of the staff from our College of Science and Mathematics. I wrote a short code function that pulls the faculty listings from the database based on parameters passed to it. The available parameters are:
- First name
- Last name
- College
- Major/Minor
- Course name
- If they’re a speaker or not.
This allows us to display faculty names in the different academic sections of the website. For example, if a user is looking at our Mathematics department, I can set the plugin to display the faculty in that department in the sidebar or right on a Page/Post. The faculty names are linked to their full profiles so the user can simply click and learn all about the faculty member. I’ll publish another post with notes and screen shots after it’s finished and I’ve tightened up the code.