Developing an University Website on WordPress

Hi kcatt. I’m currently contracted to a large University (roughly the same enrolment as yours) as a Senior Business Analyst.

You didn’t mention the requirements of the site in your post. Do you have a clear idea of what the stakeholders want? That would be my first step.

Once I knew what was required (and at a large university that in itself is a huge piece of work), I would then start my research on what platforms can deliver the requirements you’ve identified. At this stage I’d keep an open mind about which ones I look at, although of course there may be limiting factors such as whether you’re purely Microsoft etc.

What is your role at the University and what have you been asked to provide exactly? Do they want a business case for switching from SP to WP or have you been tasked to just investigate what options are out there?

In my organisation this decision would go right up to the CIO due to its influence on budgets and of course being external facing.

It depends on the capability of the WordPress theme that you going to have. Also, what specific requirement do you need for the site? Is it just for news and updates or you include some more features like viewing grades online?

WordPress is really capable and I strongly recommend it.

I’m the lead developer of ITS Web Services at UNC Chapel Hill. We run two WordPress multisite networks that serve our ~30,000 students and ~10,000 faculty and staff.

One network is open in the style of WordPress.com. Anyone with a valid university login can go create a site at web.unc.edu. We now have almost 10,000 sites on this network.

The other network houses many of our larger university websites (ex: http://www.unc.edu/, http://events.unc.edu/, http://its.unc.edu/, http://hr.unc.edu/, http://registrar.unc.edu/, http://advising.unc.edu/) as well as numerous departments (example: http://cs.unc.edu/, http://marine.unc.edu/, etc) and even schools (http://sph.unc.edu/).

So if the question is can you use WordPress for a site that serves thousands of students and staff? Absolutely!

Strictly talking pros/cons…here’s a couple I can think of offhand.
Pros of WP over Sharepoint:

• WordPress will have a shallower learning curve for your authors/editors/publishers of content.
• It will be significantly easier to do custom theming/development for WordPress.(having done both, it’s not even a comparison)

Cons:

• User permissions in WordPress are pretty rudimentary. They are fine for many use cases, but if you need fine granular control over specific groups of content, then Sharepoint will win any day of the week.
• As a file repository, WP is just ok. Again, Sharepoint gives you lots of granular controls that would make it better for that purpose.

I find that Sharepoint tends to be better for internal facing intranet type sites where you need a very particular permissions scheme and integration with Active Directory.

WordPress excels in web publishing, but it can be used for any number of things.

If you have any specific questions, I’m happy to answer them. Feel free to email me at earnhardt at unc dot edu.

hi..

I want to create multiple login & password for school students , where they can login and see their home work ,assignments,attendance, achievements , ratings and
other things .can you please guide me , which plugin can support .