The Dawson Way of Doing Things

The Way
of Doing Things
A STUDY OF OUR PATH USING WORDPRESS
WORDCAMP MONTREAL 2016
DAWSON COLLEGE
@MYDAWSONCOLLEGE
WWW.DAWSONCOLLEGE.QC.CA
JONATHAN PERLMAN
@JPURPLEMAN
WWW.JPURPLEMAN.CA

Jonathan Perlman
• 14 years web developing at Dawson College
• 9 years teaching for Dawson's CTD
• 6 years using WordPress
• 3 WordCamp talks
• Member of WPCampus
@jpurpleman | jpurpleman.ca WORDCAMP MONTREAL 2016

Dawson College at a glance
• 20,000 applications
• 10,000 students
• 1000+ faculty & staff
• 26 programs of 2 or 3 years
• 4 sectors
• Social Science & Business Technologies
• Creative and Applied Arts
• Science, Medical Studies and Engineering
• Continuing Education

2001 – 2007

The early years
• Academic administration was
responsible for web content
• Web was hosted at Dawson College
• No CMS for main site
• We used Dreamweaver templates
• Users were using SFTP access
• 2,500+ pages on 2 web servers

Joomla!
• Academic departments were all
designed to be unique
• No consistent branding
• Some departments embraced it
• Added content as they saw fit
• Others left content to rot

Joomla!
• 65 separate installs
• No consistent version numbers
• No core and plugins updates
• Server security wasn't enforced
• Users had bad passwords

What we learned
• Infected weeks prior
• Previous backups were useless
• Needed scanners to find unwanted files
• Sites were exploited for bragging rights

2007 – 2013

Changes with new direction
• Communications was made responsible for
web content
• Institutional content and departmental
content was merged into one site
• A unified 3rd party content management
system was purchased
• Main website was moved off-site

The need to switch
• Editing content as wasn't easy
• Wanted every department to update the web
• French characters were hard to display
• Technical support was slow to respond
• Service wasn't reliable
• Support for CMS was dropped

7 Month
Migration

Overall process
• Pull content from 3rd party CMS into a WordPress
site
• Audit and categorize content
• Identify pages to migrate
• Pull content into development WordPress site
• Release with same design
• Reformat in WordPress

Pull content into temporary site
• List of all pages
• Pulled content by web address
• PHP + Curl + Simple Dom
• http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net
• Created posts with wp_insert_post()
• Set meta value with ID of old page

Audit content
• Keep
• Revise
• Trash
• Wtf?!?

Looking back
• Content Audit Plugin by Stephanie Leary
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/content-audit
• Community didn't realize we were on a brand
new platform
• Redirect, redirect, redirect – 1900+
• Edit two sites in parallel

1 Year Redesign

Redesign project
• Looked at various higher education sites
• Redesigned from scratch
• Re-envisioned the navigation and site structure
• Used customizer for header images
• Hired for content and training support
• Helped departments rework their content
• Ported content for all the others

Current Status

Web sites
• www.dawsoncollege.qc.ca
• Center for Training and Development
• Computer Science
• Human Resources
• Nursing
• Registrar's Office
• Student Fees
• athletics.dawsoncollege.qc.ca
• library.dawsoncollege.qc.ca
• peacewall.dawsoncollege.qc.ca
135+
25+

Page views as per Google Analytics
300,000
400,000
500,000
600,000
700,000
800,000
Jun-15 Jul-15 Aug-15 Sep-15 Oct-15 Nov-15 Dec-15 Jan-16 Feb-16 Mar-16 Apr-16 May-16 Jun-16

Web staff
• Web governance is centralized to IT and
Communications
• Full time
• 1 IT
• Part time
• 1 in IT
• 1 in Communications
• Occasional
• 175+ editors spanning all departments

WordPress infrastructure
Development WWW Everything else

Web server environment
• Virtualized web servers
• 16G of ram
• 4 cores
• Nginx & PHP-FPM
• Security rules block common attacks
• Direct access to files within WordPress core
• xmlrpc.php
• /wp-admin/ & wp-login.php restricted to Dawson College network
• SQL Injection
• Unwanted user-agents

Database server environment
• Virtualized database servers
• 16G of ram
• 4 cores
• MariaDB
• Every WordPress install has a unique
username and password in wp-config.php

Backups
• Daily file snapshots
• MySQL Auto Backup
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly

WordPress installs
4.5, 52
4.4, 5
4.3, 1
4.2, 3
4.1, 3

WordPress updates
• Auto-update disabled
• Everything is version controlled
• We never push out X.X
• We always wait for X.X.1
• Reasons for waiting
• Stability
• Bug fixes for the major release

Site Build

Site environments
• Every website has minimum two copies
• Every developer has their own install
• Example: www.dawsoncollege.qc.ca
• Chris, Elisabeth, Jonathan
• Staging
• Production

Before site launch
Development
Production

After site launch
Development
Production

Tools
• WP-CLI
• WP Awesome Config
• Git
• WP Migrate DB Pro

WP-CLI
wp core download
wp core config --dbname="wp" --dbuser="wp" --dbpass="pass"
wp core install
--url="http://wpcourse.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/"
--title="WordCamp Montreal Website"
--admin_user="wordcamp"
--admin_password="password"
--admin_email="wc@dawsoncollege.qc.ca"

WP Awesome Config
• https://gist.github.com/ashfame/1923821

Git
• We track
• Core
• Plugins
• Themes
• We don't track
• local-config.php
• dev-config.php
• staging-config.php
• production-config.php
• .DS_STORE
• *.log
• .htaccess
• sitemap.xml
• sitemap.xml.gz
• wc-logs/*
• wp-content/blogs.dir/
• wp-content/cache/
• wp-content/upgrade/
• wp-content/uploads/

Committing plugins
123438b Adding plugin: WordPress Importer at version 0.6.2
449e092 Updating plugin: Print Friendly and PDF to version 3.4.6
8d2d7e3 Updating plugin: WP Migrate DB Pro Media Files to version 1.4.4
ce0181e Updating plugin: WP Migrate DB Pro to version 1.6
3a37bd6 Updating plugin: Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types to version 3.1.3
91e2560 Updating plugin: jQuery Responsive Select Menu to version 1.5.0
83af679 Updating plugin: Gravity Forms to version 1.9.19
git-wp-commit-object()
https://github.com/jpurpleman/WordPress-Stuff/blob/master/.bashrc

WP Migrate DB Pro

Themes and
Plugins

Themes
• Underscores
• Canvas by WooCommerce
• Twenty Sixteen
• Twenty Fifteen
• Twenty Fourteen

Plugins
• Active Directory
Integration
• Advanced Custom
Fields
• CMB2
• Google Analytics by
Monster Insights
• Gravity Forms
• Responsive Menu
• TinyMCE Advanced
• WP Migrate DB Pro
• User Switching

Multi-site

Multi-site
www.dawsoncollege.qc.ca 135+
Various departments
Segregated content
Athletics 10 1 site per sport
E-Learning 2 Multi-lingual
Confucius Institute 3 Multi-lingual

Multi-site
• All multi-sites run one theme each
• Each install is a cohesive site with one goal
• Easy to update core, plugins, theme
• We're not doing domain mapping

We use
WordPress for…

Administrative information
Human Resources
Payroll
Student Fees
IT services

Program promotion
• Admissions
• Course list
• Faculty list
• Student work

Conference sites
• TedX • NetBeans Day

Specialty sites
Athletics Library

Research grant projects
• Dawson Oral History Project
• Allows students to archive audio interviews and assign
meta-data about the interview
• SALTISE
• Writing in Disciplines
• Allows faculty to communicate and share ideas

Web-based applications
• Timetable and
Registration Guide
• Admissions Status

Blogs

Show and tell!

Dawson College Dashboard

Contact blocks with Shortcode UI

IT HelpDesk articles

Athletics team pages

Looking Forward

Looking forward
• Iterative improvements pushed more
frequently
• More web application development on
WordPress
• Connecting sites and sharing data with
REST API

Thank you!
Questions?
DAWSON COLLEGE
@MYDAWSONCOLLEGE
WWW.DAWSONCOLLEGE.QC.CA
JONATHAN PERLMAN
@JPURPLEMAN
WWW.JPURPLEMAN.CA

The Dawson Way of Doing Things

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