I just met with some folks from College Relations to talk about how they could use WordPress for faculty bios, which got me totally amped! They want to make faculty responsible for updating their own bios, which was being done with Adobe Contribute, with much resistance from the faculty.
We discussed what the best strategy would be to get faculty to write their own bios and how to make it easy for them to actually get in there and get their hands dirty without it all being too intimidating. (As I told them, I’ve never had trouble teaching someone who wants to use WordPress how to do it, but I’ve yet to try to force someone to use it…) We settled on this for a plan: College Relations folks will administer a Faculty blog with one page for each faculty member with a bio. The Faculty members will be added as Contributors/Editors and given a link to …/wp-admin/edit-pages.php where they will find their own page and hack away at it. All of this occuring on a theme that uses the college styleguide & standard links.
Faculty members can also update their personal pages/blogs and link back to them from their bio’s on the Faculty blog if they’re into that sort of thing. We also discussed ways to get the RSS feed from their personal blog to show up on the bio page, which I know is do-able but don’t know exactly how it would be accomplished yet. (Thinking of a plugin that would incorporate a custom field for the feed url then print out the last few posts under the page.)
All in all, I think this is a great start for using WordPress on campus to do non-blogging and more-than-blogging. (Shout out to Jim Groom, Ten ways to use UMW blogs)
I just met with some folks from College Relations to talk about how they could use WordPress for faculty bios, which got me totally amped! They want to make faculty responsible for updating their own bios, which was being done with Adobe Contribute, with much resistance from the faculty.
We discussed what the best strategy would be to get faculty to write their own bios and how to make it easy for them to actually get in there and get their hands dirty without it all being too intimidating. (As I told them, I’ve never had trouble teaching someone who wants to use WordPress how to do it, but I’ve yet to try to force someone to use it…) We settled on this for a plan: College Relations folks will administer a Faculty blog with one page for each faculty member with a bio. The Faculty members will be added as Contributors/Editors and given a link to …/wp-admin/edit-pages.php where they will find their own page and hack away at it. All of this occuring on a theme that uses the college styleguide & standard links.
Faculty members can also update their personal pages/blogs and link back to them from their bio’s on the Faculty blog if they’re into that sort of thing. We also discussed ways to get the RSS feed from their personal blog to show up on the bio page, which I know is do-able but don’t know exactly how it would be accomplished yet. (Thinking of a plugin that would incorporate a custom field for the feed url then print out the last few posts under the page.)
All in all, I think this is a great start for using WordPress on campus to do non-blogging and more-than-blogging. (Shout out to Jim Groom, Ten ways to use UMW blogs)