Accessibility is a hot-button issue in higher ed. In many cases, the Web team is passionate about ensuring equal access for everyone, but no one knows quite how to go about it, and the administration isn’t willing to provide the necessary financial resources to make it a priority. At that point, the question becomes “What […]
Some Cool JetPack Tools To Play With
July 1, 2013 by 6 Comments
One of the greatest plugins you can find for WordPress is JetPack. Basically, the ultimate goal of JetPack is to eventually implement all of the cool features that WordPress.com has that you don’t normally get in a WP.org site. There are a few things to know about JetPack before diving in, though. JetPack and Multisite […]
Some Recommended WordPress Plugins
June 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Last year, Eric Juden, Jesse Lavery and I hosted an open discussion at HighEdWeb on using WordPress as a content management system. As part of that presentation, the three of us prepared a Google spreadsheet listing some of our favorite plugins. Keep in mind that this spreadsheet is currently almost a year old, but much […]
Quick Tip: Caching and Site Maps
June 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Earlier this week, I discovered that some of the XML site maps being generated by various WordPress installations were sending 404 headers, making them basically useless to Google. After some digging, I found that the culprit was my implementation of W3 Total Cache on those sites. Basically, I had W3 Total Cache configured in the […]
Quick Tip: Finding Shortcode Usage In Your Site
May 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
We’ve all had those days when we’ve decided that we needed to remove an old plugin, but we need to figure out where that plugin might be in use before we can figure out how to solve the issues that were supposed to be solved by that old plugin. In a lot of cases, this […]
Parsing RSS With WordPress
May 10, 2013 by 3 Comments
While fewer and fewer people may be subscribing to RSS feeds (I don’t know if the data actually bear that out yet or not), they are still extremely useful tools in the Web development arsenal. Parsing and using them within a PHP application can be a bit of headache for some, though. Thankfully, WordPress includes […]
New Multisite Plugin Beta: Plugin Activation Status
May 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Tonight, I sat down and modified an old script I’d written, turning it into a real WordPress plugin. The plugin is tentatively known as “Plugin Activation Status”, and it’s developed specifically for multisite and multi-network installations of WordPress. What It Does This plugin first retrieves a full list of all of the plugins that are […]
How Nginx & WordPress Are Configured at UMW
May 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment
At the University of Mary Washington, we are using a unique implementation of WordPress in more ways than one. On top of the fact that we are running a “multi-network” install of WordPress — allowing us to set up multiple multisite instances in a single installation — we are also running WordPress on a LAMP stack, then […]
University of Mary Washington Website
May 3, 2013 by Leave a Comment
At the University of Mary Washington, we are using a unique implementation of WordPress that allows us to run 50 separate “multisite” instances on a single WordPress installation. Across those 50 networks, we have close to 300 separate WordPress sites. All of the sites and networks share a common code base, a common user base, and common plugins and themes. As of May 2013, there are close to 26,000 published pieces of content on the site, with more than 14,000 of those being pages spread across the site.