While at the ACE-NETC 2013 conference, I had the pleasure of sitting in on Scott McCollum’s and Mike Vysocka’s presentation. They are both from NCSU Cooperative Extension. In this presentation, they explained how they run 160+ websites from a single instance of WordPress, no plug-ins, and a single sign-on system. It was a wicked cool presentation.
Moving to WordPress
They began their presentation by talking about the history of their website.
- In 2004, they added content, news, and events all by hand.
- In 2005, more content was being added. They started using a homegrown CMS, and incorporated news feeds. With the CMS, they could build additional websites.
- From 2007 to 2010, they added social media capability.
- In 2011, they abandoned all previous efforts and went to WordPress.
Instead of relying on the communications department, content providers could now enter content. After 3-4 training sessions, anyone could easily use WordPress.
Customizing WordPress for Extension
When they went with WordPress, they made their own modifications. They did not use plug-ins. For them, WordPress provided these essential features:
- Content management system
- Blogging features
- Updates
However, the standard version did not include the following, so the team made the required changes:
- Single sign-on
- Extension database
- Multiple sites
- Topical sites
- Integrate Google Calendar
- Post multiple content from one site
- Analytics
With their modifications, they can manage 160+ domains with a single instance of WordPress. To make this happen, they added four core types: county, state, portal, and topic. Each domain uses one of these core types and picks up the theme associated with the core type. As a result, the site scales.
They are using fourth level domains, but indicate it will work with third-level domains. They also accomplished this with only 1,800 lines of code, most of which are comments.
On their sites, they have manipulated the WordPress dashboard and created spotlight posts, pulled events from Google Calendar, and shown broken links. Here are some examples of sites being generated from their modifications:
- http://strawberries.ces.ncsu.edu/
- http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/
- http://cumberland.ces.ncsu.edu/
- http://rubus.ces.ncsu.edu/
Maintaining Sites and Tracking Results
Other modifications they have made have helped keep the site clean and active. They automatically check broken links and send emails to the owners once per month. Counties can subscribe to categories from the portal site. Whenever higher-level sites post new content, they update the site.
They have also created a powerful dashboard that lets them see who has access to the site. It is possible for them to see when something was last posted. They can see feedback provided to the site by other users. Their feedback mechanism has replaced post comments.
Perhaps the most important benefit of making all these modifications is that all the data is being poured into one Google Analytics site. They can do substantial drill-down into data, which is useful for making modifications to the site.
This was an inspirational hack of WordPress. I can’t wait to see what they do next, or where we go with our sites.
