Computers in Libraries 2014 - Day 1 - Rock Your Library's Content with WordPress

As my library's website is currently running on WordPress and this is a relatively recent development I thought I'd go to this program where two academic librarians were going to talk about how they were using WordPress at their institutions.  There was a lot of stuff discussed here which I already knew, which I kind of figured would be the case, but there were a couple tidbits of useful information that I was able to glean as well.

The first half of this session was presented by Chad Haefele, the Emerging Technologies Librarian at UNC Chapel Hill and focused on using WordPress on a large scale library website, in this case the UNC Libraries site.

UNC Libraries used to have a site that numbered in the thousands of pages.  After transitioning onto WordPress the number of pages they now need to maintain has dropped drastically to about 250.

Of particular interest to me were the add-ons for WordPress that they used.  To get a responsive website they used the theme named (appropriately) Responsive.  They purchased three plugins: Formidable Pro, Elegant Themes, and Press Permit.  Press Permit sounds to me like something we might want to investigate as it improves the permissions controls in WordPress and allows some very fine control over who can post and edit what where.  Chad specifically recommended Press Permit regardless of the size of an organization's WordPress site.

Chad also talked a little on WordPress security and particularly mentioned a hack that had bit his personal site that was out of date, called the Pharma hack which puts pharmaceutical ads on your website for you.  He strongly recommends doing WordPress updates as soon as they come out.

Chad's talk was followed by a talk from a different Chad, Chad Boeniger, the Head of Reference at Ohio University.  Back in 2006 this Chad had given a presentation in the same room on how he was using Wikimedia to host a research guide for the reference department.  This time he reported on how that Wikimedia implementation had been replaced by a WordPress implementation. Reasons for this were easily summed up by demonstrating that Wikimedia had made few usability improvements over the past few years while WordPress has been in extremely heavy development adding many kinds of usability enhancements and other features.

I particularly found of interest the mention of a book called Trust Agents which proposes this method for developing a website that has answers to many questions:

1. Get an email from someone (presumably who's seen your website, not a friend) with a question
2. Answer the question and post the question and the answer (presumably anonymized) on your website
3. Repeat

This apparently is partly how they have developed an exhaustive collection of questions and answers on their website.

The Ohio Chad also covered a number of features that he found useful in WordPress that are common with most PHP-based CMS platforms (persistent links to dynamic pages based on category ids placed in the URL) and mentioned a variety of plugins that he's found useful for harvesting statistics off of the WordPress site where his site is hosted.