Session: Connect the dots: bridging silos of information

Date: Friday, July 26, 2019
Time: 1:30 - 2:15 pm (PDT) (UTC-07:00)
Location: Room 2: Stamm East
Format: General Lecture Session

Session description

Institutions often struggle with silos: different offices and departments that work in different buildings and sometimes different campuses; fragmented budgets and grants that are earmarked specifically for one area; and pockets of information that live in different CMSs and are updated at different frequencies. But what good is all that information if we can't connect the dots and present as much or as little as our users need?

What if you could pull in all the campus events from that calendar vendor with a bad UX and display them alongside your WP-specific content? What if you could push employee data straight out of Banner and merge it with WP bios so you always had the latest contact information and publications from faculty? What if you could merge data from the catalog, the schedule (which of course uses a separate CMS), and WordPress, and output the most relevant course and schedule data right on the program page you built in WordPress?

It's not just theoretical. WordPress is very flexible in the inputs it can take and the outputs it can make from them. Come see a variety of ways you, too, can push or pull data, and how you can then combine it all neatly on a single unified website.

Presenter

Elaine Shannon

Headshot of Elaine Shannon
Director of Web Development, St. Mary's University

Elaine is a web developer for St. Mary’s University who loves to look at the whole picture. She specializes in designing and building solutions that work well for both end users and the people who maintain the web.

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