Stephanie Leary

Writer and WordPress consultant

Public redesign in progress. Please pardon the mess.

WP Engine

National Work Zone Safety Information Clearinghouse

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The Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s web team offers its services for hire among other state and federal agencies. Among their long-term federal contracts was a library of information related to road construction work zones. The site was approximately ten years old and was running in an outdated and insecure version of Drupal. TTI’s web team had long since moved from Drupal to WordPress as their CMS of choice, and finally received funding from the federal sponsor to migrate this site. The project included a new theme and a migration from TTI’s in-house web servers to WP Engine.

The migration offered the in-house data librarian an opportunity to make some long-overdue changes to the data model. The project therefore involved several phases:

  1. Identify data that did not need to be migrated (including some 10,000 spam user accounts)
  2. Create content model in WordPress and set up custom fields corresponding to Drupal fields
  3. Configure Drupal exports for approximately 8,000 records
  4. Import users and content to WordPress, one post type at a time
  5. Verify imported data
  6. Update the content model and migrate data within WordPress (moving custom fields to taxonomies, etc.)
  7. Re-verify migrated data
  8. Match 404 requests to stored Drupal paths and redirect to new URLs
  9. Configure theme templates and search result views to match (or exceed) the old Drupal site

While the migration process itself was highly idiosyncratic due to the proliferation of user-submitted content and the changes between the Drupal data model and the new WordPress site, the content modeling process was nearly identical to other past projects: IIAD, TVMDL, and Berkeley (which was in development concurrently with this project).

Aside from the data migration, the most challenging part of this project was tweaking the Relevanssi Premium search plugin to gracefully handle the taxonomy-based search filters with shared taxonomies. The search forms look simple, but behind the scenes there are lots of checks ensuring that the filter dropdowns contain only the terms relevant to the post type(s) being searched.

Content Model

The Work Zone content model consists of six custom post types, with several taxonomies shared across post types. The names of organizations, states, agencies, providers, and manufacturers had all been stored as text fields in Drupal, with the typical array of data entry errors as a result. After the data was imported into WordPress custom fields, we wrote a migration plugin to move these fields into taxonomies. This allowed us to merge the duplicates and establish a consistent naming structure that will be assigned to new database entries. This move also let us tap into WordPress’s built-in archive views for taxonomies, making it easy to list, for example, all outreach programs available in a state.

People Training Courses Publications Outreach Programs Best Practices Equipment
Organization
Topics
State/Agency		 Organization
Topics
Format
Provider
State/Agency		 Topics
Provider		 Topics
Provider
State/Agency		 Organization
Topics
Provider
State/Agency		 Topics
Manufacturer

Each post type has its own sorting mechanism, search form, and search result table columns.

Berkeley College of Engineering theme framework and content model

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The University of California at Berkeley’s College of Engineering had a huge demand for WordPress sites and not enough staff to handle each request individually. Their marketing team asked me to build a theme framework that would offer a few color scheme options in compliance with the university’s brand guidelines and WCAG 2.0 AA standards. The project would also include five custom post types that the marketing team had determined were common to most of their departments and research teams. Each post type had a list of options, custom fields, and display guidelines.

The resulting theme and plugin suite is the most flexible site framework I’ve ever built. Starting with the Genesis theme as a base, I created a theme with:

  • 12 color schemes
  • 6 layouts
  • 5 custom post types
  • 8 custom taxonomies
  • a huge set of custom fields
  • 3 loop options: list, grid, or table
  • a stripped-down whitepaper template for long documents
  • a custom editor toolbar button for pull quotes
  • 4 custom widgets with smart post type detection and logic
  • color scheme presets for form, menu, and search widgets
  • a color scheme selector for rich text widgets
  • per-post-type sidebars
  • per-page widget customizations
  • an editable site option for the footer contents
  • smart footer widgets that expand based on the number per row
  • social media icon support in the footer menus
  • support for both SearchWP and Google Custom Search Engines

Admin UI

  • Wayfinding widget for the Dashboard
  • In-dashboard documentation
  • Options to disable unneeded custom post types and taxonomies
  • Option to change URLs for post types
  • Hints and instructions for editors based on post types
  • Screen option defaults that hide seldom-used options

The theme and custom plugins follow WordPress best practices, PHP coding standards, data validation and security guidelines, and the theme review checklist. The theme and plugins are internationalized and ready to translate, should the university wish.

A template site has been set up with all the necessary plugin settings and some preset content. The marketing team plans to use WP Engine‘s cloning tools to quickly deploy new sites.

[Read more…] about Berkeley College of Engineering theme framework and content model

Texas A&M University at Qatar conference network

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I had worked with Texas A&M University at Qatar before to set up last-minute sites for events. We agreed that this was not the ideal process, and they set aside some time for me to create a better solution.

We set up a new multisite network and created a sample site with the basic content outline every event would need: a schedule, travel and lodging information, a sponsors page, and information on how to register for the event. Then we set up the Blog Copier plugin so that new sites could be deployed using this base outline with a couple of clicks.

The network has all the Genesis child themes available, plus Design Palette Pro and Web Fonts to let the conference organizers customize their designs. The network also includes the Genesis Extender plugin to allow the network administrators to add per-site customizations using Genesis’s hooks. The site also includes the Soliloquy plugin for gorgeous, responsive photo slideshows that can be placed anywhere on the site.

The conference organizers have the choice of using Events Calendar Pro, which is fantastic for big multi-day conferences, or simply entering a single day’s schedule in TablePress. Gravity Forms lets them add contact forms or even simple, no-fee registration forms. They can also use Event Calendar Pro’s various ticket sales add-ons (like EventBrite) or the very simple CampTix plugin if they are not using the university’s in-house event registration system.

The site includes speaker profile pages that can be linked to events. Session descriptions therefore include an automatically generated list of linked speakers’ bios, and speaker pages include links to that person’s sessions. In previous conference sites, these interconnections had to be maintained by hand.

Since placing sponsors’ logos on the site was a common problem, I created an option using Advanced Custom Fields. On this page, event planners can upload and arrange logos just as they would in the text of a page. They can then place the logos in the site footer, in a sidebar widget, or in a page using the custom [[sponsors]] shortcode.

I wrote extensive documentation for this site in WP Help, so that event planners have a complete guide to setting up their sites on the network. The network also includes WP101 video tutorials and a custom wayfinding Dashboard widget that walks the event planner through the site setup process. They wayfinding widget can be edited on a per-site basis to accommodate future changes to the network.

Like all of the Qatar campus’s sites, the conference network is hosted on WP Engine, which provides daily backups, automatic software upgrades, and guaranteed security and hack recovery.

Screenshot Gallery

FirstCall

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FirstCall is the helpdesk site for the AgriLife division of the Texas A&M University System. I worked with the in-house team to rewrite the content, reorganize the home page and the site navigation, and design a WordPress theme that reflected the organization’s new, streamlined philosophy. We chose Glyphicons to give each helpdesk topic a little personality.

For this site, I used my own lightweight theme framework, Craftory.

Institute for Infectious Animal Diseases

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The Institute for Infectious Animal Diseases, a part of Texas A&M’s AgriLife division, is a research center focusing on animal disease. In addition to the usual news and informational pages, the site needed to showcase the Center’s research projects, tools (the finished results of past research projects, like diagnostic tests or software packages), and the people involved in them. These used to be listed by hand on standard WordPress pages, but the group wanted a more interconnected site, with links added between projects and people automatically.

The content model for this site is more complex than most, involving three custom post types — research projects, tools, people — each with a set of custom fields. People are connected to their research projects and tools via the Posts 2 Posts plugin.

There are several custom taxonomies shared across the post types, including topics, diseases, and institutions. Institutions partnering with IIAD on a research project are added to the project when a user tags them in the Edit Project screen.

The institutions taxonomy is also used for People, to indicate which one a person works for. An individual’s bio page shows their connected institutions as well as a list of the research projects they’re working on.

fazd-content-model

 

The staff directory lists the people associated with IIAD using custom fields for the contact information. This table has microformats built in, allowing modern browsers and other tools to convert this data to a downloadable vCard. On mobile phone browsers, the phone numbers become clickable links. The order of people in the directory is controlled using WordPress’s built-in page ordering system.

iiad-directory
The site design is very closely based on the Genesis Education theme, which was so similar to the ideal site described and sketched in our kickoff meeting that we used it almost as-is, aside from gutting the archive templates to handle the site’s complex post types and taxonomy system.

(IIAD was formerly known as FAZD: National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense.)

Month of Letters

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I worked with Mary Robinette Kowal to set up the Achievements plugin for the Month of Letters BuddyPress site. Members earned badges for sending various kinds of mail, and cumulative points for the number of letters or packages they sent. These were reported via a Gravity Form tied to a custom post type, with a taxonomy that provided the checkboxes for the types of mail (parcel, Valentine, overseas).

lettermo-achievements

Because Achievements was in between versions when the event started on February first — 2.x was deprecated, but 3.0 was not quite out yet — I wrote several custom tools and widgets for the site. The code for each badge also had to be done by hand, since they were tied to a custom post type.

lettermo-admin

When the site’s traffic overwhelmed its shared host a few days into the event, I did an emergency migration to WP Engine, where it’s been stable (and much faster) ever since.