This talk will cover UW-Milwaukee’s experience evaluating, selecting and implementing WordPress multisite as a platform for hosting and maintaining University websites and blogs for schools, colleges, administrative units, academic centers, research labs and other university-sponsored initiatives, programs and collaborations.

The following topics will be covered in brief, touching on challenges and lessons learned: selection method, phased implementation (alpha, beta and general availability), service policy and guideline development, high-availability hosting architecture design, UWM-branded theme implementation, plugin request and review, plugin catalog curation and long-term management, distributed web developer services, campus learning services, ongoing service management and support, and governance.

The talk will touch in greater depth on challenges encountered and solutions developed to guide reluctant learners, prevent plugin proliferation, manage load balancing, balance security with agility and access, and make the service sustainable in the long term.

The topics will be of benefit to individuals who are considering or actively using WordPress for hosting websites and blogs for medium-to-large organizations with distributed content owners, editors and IT/web development teams.

We’ll also discuss the increased efficiencies we’ve realized since implementing WordPress, and talk briefly about several grant-funded projects that we were able to get back on track by using WordPress as a platform in place of writing custom Web applications as originally planned.

You can read more about WordPress at UW-Milwaukee by visiting the UWM WordPress Guide site at: http://uwm.edu/wordpress