The last few weeks I’ve been working with UMW instructional technologist Shannon Hauser* on some overdue maintenance for the venerable UMW Blogs. Part of that work included a quick coat of paint for the homepage featured above. It has been proudly sporting Martha Burtis‘s design work from 2010 or so, and while that held up well for a decade, it was time for some new digs. I went to the trusty Enfold theme, which we run on most of our Domain of One’s Own schools, which is usually good for a minimalist, responsive theme.
While admittedly biased, I like Shannon’s thinking that it might be a good time for a UMW Blogs revival. It provides both a simpler and more scalable solution for faculty and students that just want WordPress blogs without the over head of a full cPanel instance. Having a more streamlined offering is always nice, and it also gets away from the either/or mentality some folks approach Domains vs. WordPress Multisite from.
Long live UMW Blogs, the open source publishing platform that could!
A couple of notes about the work:
- all mapped domains are now moved over to UMW Domains, so Tim was able to force https across the entire WordPress Multisite instance
- database and WordPress core files upgraded to latest version, 5.4.2
- all plugins and themes updated
- snazzy new homepage theme, as mentioned
And with that, a piece of UMW’s instructional history got a much needed tune-up and is now running like a top with 10,000+ accounts as an open archive and there’s plenty of room for at least 10,000 more 🙂
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*The levels of both awesome and bizarre that Shannon is an instructional technologist at UMW is probably not lost on a few readers of this lowly blog, she started as a student worker with the group back in 2007 or 2008, so there is some solid history there.
