I think over here at the Eastman School of Music (part of the University of Rochester), we are fortunate to have some very forward-minded in-house IT people, our own web server setup, and a very budget-conscious upper administration. We are a little strange in that web was moved out of Communications into Computing Services (aka IT) some years ago, before I was here, and our roles as web people are a little blended. We also had a solid precedent in that the main campus allowed the Memorial Art Gallery (also a part of the UR) to move to WP as their CMS. That said, it still took a good bit of "strategery" and creative explanations to get over those common humps of "if it's free, it can't be good" and "I've heard that WordPress gets hacked all the time". Here are the things I think sold our particular case:<br>
<br>- WordPress is free, is under constant development, has a large (and friendly!) community, and provides a strong base for rapid development<br>- The use of a web-based CMS would help to start cutting back the number of Adobe licenses needed and save money (Dreamweaver, Contribute, and even Photoshop for image resizing)<br>
- The ease of editing and focus on content allows for more editors to be trained more efficiently and help keep site content current and accurate<br>- Having a central Eastman theme would promote branding and identity, allowing us to transition older, individually-designed sites back into the fold<br>
- Using network sites and role management plugins allow us to easily assign users to specific sites or pages (or even faculty to their own faculty custom post type entry) without having to create more web server accounts<br>
- Being able to easily add media helps our cause as a music school, especially for prospective students looking to hear or see recent performances of ensembles, faculty members, or students<br>- Having theme/template files be completely separate from the content helps prevent non-technical editors from "breaking" pages (no more trailing </div>s!)<br>
- Having the content in a database will allow for a mobile site to be developed much more readily and thoroughly<br>- BuddyPress will allow for us to much more easily realize the Dean's dream of a "student underground" whenever we might get there<br>
<br>We also promoted a couple of specific plugins in terms of saving time and resources for our very very limited web people: there are just 1.5 of us here, and our duties include server and software management and training in addition to content, development, and even things like photography and social media, all for a school of 900+ collegiate students, 160 music faculty, and who-knows-how-many staff members, community music students, concert goers, etc. So for instance, Gravity Forms has already saved us countless hours of form development. For anybody who's ever had to write a form and/or validation, you'll appreciate the time it saves, and presenting on how you can create a form with validation in a few clicks as opposed to a few hours makes even non-tech types go "ooooo". They also really liked that you could view entries in the Dashboard and leave internal notes, etc. To have that kind of tool already available within the framework of WP definitely helped us promote the project, even internally.<br>
<br>One dean also particularly liked that we were easily able to add homepage alerts that auto-expire. It sounds like a small thing, but I've found that administrative-types really, really like it when you address their specific concerns very quickly. I'd hate to think about how we'd have to create a new table for entries and set up the logic for it on our old homepage - not difficult by any means, but it was definitely much faster and more robust to add a content scheduling plugin and create a new category for announcements to be displayed in an area on the homepage. I think that might be biggest point, actually; that really honing in on some features that the bigwigs are looking for will help ply them and make them receptive to the rest of the case.<br>
<br>Our ed tech guy is also really interested in how WordPress is working out as an LMS, and our IT people are all for not paying for/supporting Blackboard; as a few of you have heard me mention before, we actually have a licensing agreement with the main UR campus and pay for things like Blackboard. It's all fair and well enough, but of course the school would like to spend less. I've been using WP as a course site in teaching summer session courses on web construction for musicians after spending the academic year slogging through Bb and it's been wonderful, even just as a site/forums without the use of BuddyPress or a plugin like Courseware. I imagine it only gets better and better for those of you who are really heavy on the LMS thing. My guess is that administration and faculty/staff will love the idea that once they're trained to use WordPress and maybe a couple specific plugins, they'll be able to accomplish even more, instead of having to be taught to use Blackboard as something completely separate. We'll also have more ownership of our own content, as Blackboard is not hosted on our own servers and the ed tech guy has to play liaison to get courses copied or users added, that sort of thing.<br>
<br>I know that since I'm a developer-type more than an educator (though I do enjoy teaching), this is definitely heavily biased toward the developer side, but I think it's all part of one very big, very strong case for WordPress in schools and universities.<br>
<br clear="all">--<br>Helen Hou-Sandi<br><div><a href="http://www.helenhousandi.com/" target="_blank">http://www.helenhousandi.com</a></div>