WordPress In the Enterprise - East Bay WordPress Meetup

East Bay WordPress Meetup Anca Mosoiu,Tech Liminal

July 15, 2012

Enterprise Websites with WordPress Multisite

268 14th Street, Oakland, CA 94612 | Open 9:30 - 7 Monday - Friday | Drop-in co-working space, workshops and technology services | More info: http://www.techliminal.com

Content in this presentation is Copyright (c) 2012 Tech Liminal. CC-Share-Alike. Feel free to use stuff from this presentation, but leave a link to Tech Liminal

Technology Hotspot & Salon

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Introduction

• Web Developer• Information Architect• 15 years of experience in

technology & marketing orgs• Enterprise apps + websites

• Technology Hotspot & Salon• Co-Working• Workshops, Conferences• Expert, friendly help with web &

social media

Anca Tech Liminal

anca@techliminal.com

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Overview

• What do you mean by Enterprise?

• WordPress as a portal

• Case Studies

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Enterprise!

• Lots of people (>150)

• Departments / siloes

• Communication and standards directives

• Ownership and responsibility

• Laws / (Sarbanes Oxley)

• IT

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Siloes...

• Each Department has their own resources / budget

• They might have to use a single IT provider

• But may be allowed to host content (marketing) outside the corporate firewall.

• They don’t want other people in their stuff

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What Enterprise Users Want

• Ability to change their own websites

• Single-Signon

• User-Friendly

• Ownership, permissions, and process

• I don’t want those HR people to touch my stuff!

Control, Process, Support6

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IT Concerns

• Hosting - Most Enterprise-level organizations are not on LAMP, but many have the ability to set it up

• WordPress MultiSite uses a medium amount of resources (must have its own VPS internally)

• Require Robust service contracts, insurance

• Off-site hosting (WordPress VIP, etc)

• Security (sensitive enterprise data)

• Access to corporate data behind the firewall

• People Search

• ERP systems

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Legal

• I am not a lawyer ...

• Sarbanes Oxley - requires well-documented process for handling financial information, makes CEO personally liable for accounting inaccuracies

• Customer data privacy

• Contracts (especially support)

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Why WordPress?

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So Why WordPress?

• Many people in marketing / communication departments like it (and know how to use it)

• Quick “microsites” for product launches, marketing launches

• WordPress Multisite for larger-scale sites where departments want to collaborate

• Each Site can be owned by a department

• Each department can have a different layout, but similar branding (theme framework)

• Aggregate at the top-level site

• Integrate w/ corporate data systems

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Case StudiesWordPress Intranet

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The Solution

Aggregate announcements from

all site areas

Aggregate events postings from all site

areas

Feeds from other tools and areas

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The Intranet

Consistent look for all site areas - This is the

PR Dashboard

Lots of link to internal content

More feeds - useful for PR team

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Site Areas

• Each Site Area = 1 Site

• Specific set of people to update, maintain

• Some have their own blogs (+ pages)

• Same look and feel, standardized widget placement

• Combined through Navigation Menu

Custom Development (Menu Integration)

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This Week’s Events

• Feature is intended to replace weekly emails

• Aggregate content from within site areas

• Custom content type development

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Contributors, Authors

• Employees are assigned roles on sites (subscriber, contributor, author)

• Co-Authors Plus plugin to allow multiple owners for content

• Gravity Forms for custom data collection

• Google Apps / Forms / Calendar

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Things we had to customize

• One Menu made up multiple primary menus

• Retrieve posts from multiple sites (not through RSS)

• switch_to_blog = not good

• Integration w/ People Search functionality (REST API)

• Google Calendar Integration

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Lessons Learned

• Plan for the hosting very early

• Find champions for the WordPress site within the organization

• Train developers to be self-sufficient

• Internal culture that allows development = good

• Nothing that “called home” was allowed inside the firewall (so no automatic upgrades)

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Questions?

• anca@techliminal.com

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