The last week has been a tech nightmare.

My university switched its email/calendar provider in the middle of the semester and in the middle of the week. On Tuesday night, IT moved students, administrators, and faculty from Google Apps for Education to Microsoft Office 365. But the move to MS has been limited to email/calendar – for now. The rest of the band-aid comes off at some unspecified future date. After spending nearly a year communicating to the community that we’re moving to Google Apps for Education (from a woefully outdated and undersupported local solution that many still used), the leadership changed course almost instantly.

Impact on me: At least 10 hours of lost productivity as I worked to re-cobble together a unified solution to bring my mail and calendaring together into my mail and calendar clients in a way that enables me to share my availability with my wife. Did I mention this happened in the middle of the week and in the middle of the term!

More important than the email/calendar insanity is the impact of the switch on my department’s student learning and assessment plans. After embracing Google Apps (because we’re a Google Apps university) and planning to launch a major ePortfolio initiative in Google Sites, the whiplash-quick pivot from Google left me holding a bag of, well, nothing. With a colleague requiring ePortfolio in our pilot course, I could NOT in good conscience move forward with a platform I knew would be deprecated once the MS migration was complete. (Goodbye Google Sites template for student ePortfolios!) Result: Two crazy days trying to decide on another solution.

Enter WordPress! After pricing a non-university hosting solution, I was able to work out an arrangement with the university to host student ePortfolios in a WordPress Network installation on site.  This is, frankly, the best solution for us because it keeps the project in a .edu domain, it is a platform with which I’m familiar, and it has real portability for students after they graduate. And WordPress is much more than a blog tool these days. We’re implementing a full-on CMS.  The whole thing would be ideal, but our rollout timeline is, unfortunately, quite compressed since we have ePortfolio running in a class right now!

As if this weren’t enough for a week, today I received a “vulnerable script” warning from my own web host. After some digging, it turns out that my archived WordPress-based course websites now need to be upgraded to close some security loopholes in 2.x versions of WordPress.  This looming upgrade headache and CSS update has me pondering the value of maintaining live, visible course archives in the first place. Nice.

Hopefully, this set of three significant headaches will mean the pox has moved on to someone else.

It’s taken a little while for me to take it up, but I finally broke down and upgraded my WordPress install to the latest version. I’m only just starting to get to know this version. Still, it’s pretty clear that the WP team has made some good additions.

Drag and Drop Media Upload

Right away, I noticed a simplified media upload mechanism. WP is getting smarter. It can now detect the media type you want to upload and sort it appropriately. Even more interesting is the drag-and-drop functionality for media uploads. I gave the tool a quick test drive by uploading a header image, a shot of my backyard pond, below.

Backyard Pond.

Flyout Menus

Anyone who spends time with WP knows that the dashboard sidebar menu structure is a bit long.  On a laptop, it’s not uncommon to see the menu run below the fold, forcing a scroll just to locate the settings options.

Flyout menus changes all that.  It’s easy to see your menu options on hover, saving the extra click and streamlining the look of the text in the dashboard sidebar.

Why Update?

Good question. When is something good enough?  I can’t really answer that question.  There are security issues to consider, of course, and the newest version closes some vulnerabilities. In all honesty, the security concerns weren’t enough to move me to the upgrade.

I needed a little down time on my running sites to feel comfortable with an update.  The semester break created that down time for me.  (I didn’t want to break course websites midstream.) But that wasn’t even enough, really.

In the end, my desire to create an option for users to subscribe to Page updates through RSS led me down a path that required the update. RSS Pages for WordPress 3+ required an update to my WP 3.  That update went well, although the plugin page indicates that it had not yet been tested with 3.3.1.  Consider this a leapfrog moment.  I installed the plugin and it seems to be working just fine.

I just completed the “rough” migration of my website into WordPress 3.0. I’m wrapping the weblog and the pages all in one blog. I’ll post the procedures once I finish tying up all the (very) loose ends on the project. For example, I just realized that I deleted the files that were controlling my CSS-switching experiment, a 4-5 year effort that I’d hate to lose just because I’m moving to WordPress for the site. Repairing the damage will take a little time. (Major ouch!)

What’s good about this move?

• I get Web 2.0 functionality and the database web moving forward.
• My weblog is integrated with the rest of my site.
• With WordPress 3.0 I can roll multiple sites/blogs into a single install, and manage them from one admin panel.
• This enables me to move all my course sites into WordPress (going forward). I experimented with WP-driven course sites in Spring 2010 and I mostly liked it.

What’s not good?

• My focus on content migration took my eye off design. I have a “designed” site, to be sure. But it has a very bloggy (or blocky?) look/feel to it.  In time I’ll push this issue, starting with experiments in course website.
• Lots of up front work to move things.
• Errors will be huge. (Let’s hope I don’t err.)