We've all been there. We kickstart a website service, like a WordPress MultiUser (MU), and provide it to our end users. Glorious days are had, and the web proliferates with easy-to-update, maintained, and university-branded websites.
But then comes the dreaded tick-tock of passed time. Site owners leave the institution and lose access to their sites. Sites are left and forgotten, like the One Ring, to drift in the bog that is Google search results. And over time, our WordPress MU service becomes inundated with unclaimed, unmanaged websites.
We at Georgia Tech's Professional Web Presence piloted a renewal plugin/service for our WordPress MU in Fall 2018 to reclaim our bloated platform. After a semester-long communication, marketing, and programming strategy, we were able to strip over 200 websites from our WordPress installation into purgatory, scheduled for deletion. We want to talk about our experiences, share our code, share our strategy and communications, and talk about what we're doing next.
Attendees will gain knowledge and strategy for auditing their WordPress MU, and build an action plan for auditing, renewing, and archiving websites to ensure that websites have a valid owner. As part of this process, you'll learn the power of collaborative coding, community-focused communications and marketing, professional relationships with subject-matter-experts across your campus and the role it plays in adopting orphaned websites, and more.
This session brought to you in partnership with the HighEdWeb Association.
You can learn more about this session on the WPCampus 2019 website at https://2019.wpcampus.org/schedule/tame-the-wordpress-mu-beast-with-website-renewal-services/.
Speaker:
Eric Sembrat
What is WPCampus?
WPCampus 2019 was the fourth annual in-person conference for the WPCampus community, a gathering of web professionals, educators and people dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education. The event took place July 25-27, 2019 on the campus of Lewis & Clark College. Learn more about the event at https://2019.wpcampus.org.