After months of work laying the technological foundation for the transition, the eagerly-awaited migration of websites from Reason to WordPress has begun! During fall term the web team has focused our efforts on a handful of pilot websites. These first few sites were relatively simple with no special functionality; they gave us a chance to test and improve our migration tools. Additional pilot sites were selected to give us an opportunity to implement new functionality — such as publications, faculty/staff listings, and forms — with each successive migration.
As of today, in addition to the Admissions website, four pilot sites have been successfully migrated to WordPress, with another three planned for the next few weeks. The completed sites are: About Carleton, Information for Visitors, Carleton’s Japanese Garden, and the Investment Office. Up next are Inside Carleton, Alumni Guest House, and Public Works.
In December we plan to migrate at least ten academic department and related websites. We will try to maintain that same pace of 10–12 sites per month throughout spring term, so that by June we expect to have 50–60 (of Carleton’s 600+) websites up and running in WordPress.
Not all web content is migrating to WordPress at this time. Events, alumni profiles, and video files, for example, will be displayed in the newly migrated WordPress sites, but the source files will remain in Reason until we’ve found an optimal way of handling those content types in the new infrastructure.
The automated migration process has proven to be remarkably thorough so far, with very little post-migration clean-up necessary. We are not expecting that any of our website editors (outside of the web team) will be burdened with additional work as a result of the transition to WordPress. There will be some effort required to learn how to manage sites in the new system, but we are assembling documentation and training materials to help site maintainers with the transition. We are working with a group of website editors from across campus to test and improve the usability of the new editing interface, and we will continue to provide hands-on help to anyone who requests it.
As always, watch the Web2020 website for additional updates, and contact Julie Anderson with any questions.