Meeting Agenda
Introductions
We began the meeting by going around the table and sharing our names, departments and how we use or want to use WordPress. Most people are admins of small to large sites with some development experience. For most of us WordPress is part of our responsibilities. Tabby Chapman is a power WordPress developer with theme and plugin expertise. She develops web applications in PHP to work with Bio Sci’s WordPress website.
Discussion
What do we want to gain from these meetings? Future meeting topics.
- See cool things we can do with WordPress
- How sites are being used on campus.
- UX and web accessibility best practices. A resource for the campus to create more usable and accessible sites.
- How to find new plugins. How to vet plugins and themes.
- Security and hosting. What are the best practices for WordPress admins to secure their sites?
- Password Security. Best practices
- UCI Theme – Strategic Communications is working on a new official WordPress theme. Many were happy to hear this and think it will make it easier to get clients to move their sites to WordPress. (Sylvia will follow up to see if Chris or Todd can come speak at a future meeting.)
- How to migrate another site (other CMS or static html) to a WordPress site. (Tabby offered to talk about this at a future meeting.)
- Today.uci.edu is using WordPress. Would be great to see how they are using it for UCI’s event web site.
- Code repositories – Github and BitBucket. How people are using these services.
- Licensing premium plugins/themes
- Themes – the difference between parent/child themes
- Best practices for converting hard-coded links when using new domain name.
- Permissions and roles
- Trends – where is WordPress headed?
- Publishing Workflows – how to send a draft for review of a published page.
- Is WordPress a good application platform?
How often should we meet?
We all agreed that once per month should be a good start. We will only meet if we have an agenda and cancel when we do not. We do need people who are willing to participate and share with others what they are working on or take some of the topics above to present on or come up with other topics they want to share.
Current challenges or issues using WordPress on campus. Ways we can collaborate to solve.
Authentication is still an issue. OIT has a plugin to use WebAuth for authentication, but it was created in 2009 and needs either a major overhaul or a new solution. Eric Carter talked about his research into this and a possible solution. He’s willing to share what he’s learned at a later meeting and would love to collaborate with others.
WordPress Group Blog (for meeting notes, resources, etc.)
Michele is working on creating a group blog for the group hosted on sites.uci.edu. She is learning WordPress to help support Sites@UCI and Faculty Websites. We’ll share more with the list when it’s ready. This will be a group blog so anyone who wants to join can become an author and participate. We discussed the options of keeping it publicly accessible or locking it down to a private blog. The consensus was to leave it open. We can password protect pages/posts if we have content that needs to remain more private.
Thank you to everyone who braved the rain and made it to the meeting yesterday. I’ll schedule our next meeting for January.
Sylvia