[wp-edu] Making the Case for WP in University Setting

[Jess Planck]

The Showcase shows some simply awesome samples of WordPress in education for a variety of projects. 

http://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/education/

And no, ironically you won't find nicholls.edu in the showcase. Although I've been using WordPress to maintain the public portion of the website since 2006, the front of nicholls.edu was only just converted to WordPress in early June. I've personally been in and out of WordPress for a little while longer ;)

I suppose you could say it crawled in there and just assimilated like some kinda Borg, but that backend migration to WordPress was thoughtful and based on the growth of the software especially with the WPMU > WP merge. It also became a philosophical need to create a collaborative editing environment since I don't have a staff and budgets are really tight. I introduced tools and talked to vendors for a while, but Nicholls really had to do something or suffer extremely slow content updates and poor quality of information. WordPress won when my users made it work for THEM as they needed it for their students and audience. 

The upside is that my departments own their content. Sure I have administrative power, but I rarely use it. Many folks here realize that they need to welcome students to Nicholls for an education, and (to be blunt ) that is the job. It also doesn't hurt when upgrades to administrative systems come at $$ with many 0000000's, and I occasionally have to ask for money for a contractor or plugin, or one of those fancy web-app-in-the-cloud things that we're all supposed to be embracing anyway. ;) The budget side of it and the ease of finding quality contractors for projects and support is also easy to point at. These days, folks around here aren't impressed by expensive budget items.

I could go on. It's the web, so my last major issue I have with many closed content tools is "lock in". If WordPress the project ends tomorrow, I start looking for a replacement and Grok a migration script when necessary. WordPress is not alone as a solutions, but it "works for me". 

You are also welcome to contact me off list if you have any other questions.

Jess


On Jul 6, 2011, at 9:45 AM, Joseph Ugoretz wrote:

> It's a really good question and I think the idea of collecting experiences to compare and contrast and maybe find some common lessons is a terrific idea.