Bad photo — great crowd of WordPress-in-higher-ed-users at a lunchtime roundtable as the annual Nercomp conference. Don’t forget to join us for the upcoming day-long WordPress University workshop on April 8. Details at nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=5938
I wrote early last month on an employee workplace feedback tool we launched using our WordPress MU installation and the Survey plug-in. Overall the plugin worked well. Here is a screen shot of one of our forms:
Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey. So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting. As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system. So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there. And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.
Jay Collier at Bates ponders the strengths of Drupal and WordPress MU. In my experience WordPress is quicker to get going with, and for most web sites it can rise to most any challenge. And it is the king of multi-site installations. Drupal has a steeper learning curve, but can better support needs such as a work flow-content approval path, or something less traditional, like a content repository system. In meeting a business need the technology is normally the least important element — what are your goals, who is the audience, what do they need, etc. — those are the important questions. Once you have those answers you go looking for a technology. My advice? Look at WordPress first — if it doesn’t do what you want, in a quick straightforward way, keep looking. But in my experience that won’t happen very often.
Client asks “can I list multiple authors on an article in our CMS?” After a quick search and a little playing around I could give my standard WordPress answer “it turns out there is a plug-in for that!” The Co-Authors Plus plug-in nicely met our needs. We list both the author’s display name and the Biographical Description in the author tag line with the meta information at the head of the post. And based on the suggestions in the plug-in’s readme.txt file I created the following function to generate the display:
Kind of a fun little hack from WordPress Recipes…
How to define your own dashboard logo Read the rest of this entry »
Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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