WordPress Migration Update

At this phase of the migration, it has become increasingly difficult to create and follow an accurate migration timeline since many of the upcoming site migrations in the queue are for the largest and most complex sites. A Web Services team member will email you as soon as your migration is ready to begin.

Web Services will migrate all content in the background without any disruption to the live Drupal site. Once the content migration is complete, Web Services will email your site's primary contact and provide your team ample time to review the WordPress staging site before it's scheduled to go live.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email WebServices-group@uncc.edu.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to migrate sites as quickly and as accurately as possible.

Managing Access

WordPress has two types of content manager roles: Site Managers and Site Editors. This is a change from Drupal where there was only one Site Manager role.

Your site's primary contact will receive Site Manager access and all other content managers will receive Site Editor access. Site Managers will be able to add and remove Site Editors without having to contact Web Services. We hope this will help your group more easily manage site access.

Events

Events will no longer be added directly on individual sites and have been deprecated in favor of using the campus-wide Campus Events service. The Campus Events service offers a widget you can embed on your site to list your events. This change will allow for a more consistent event experience across campus.

A few examples of how to think about events going forward:

  • If you want to maintain a historical accounting of your on-site Drupal events in WordPress, we will import those events into the Posts section and give these items a category of "Events" or maintain their current category if there's one in use. We'll set the post date in WordPress as the event date, so it'll maintain your sort for historical purposes. Then we can either let them flow in the News page or create a separate Events Archive type page depending on preference.
  • If you want to continue to maintain a historical account of events on your site, we recommend creating a news release (Post) on the site with a teaser about the event that then links off to the event details on the Campus Events site.
  • If you prefer using a calendar for events, we recommend adding your events to a public Google Calendar and embedding the calendar in a page on your site.

Feeding Content Between Sites

Feeding content (news, images, directories, etc.) between sites has been deprecated. If you want content to appear on multiple sites, please add it to those sites individually.

A few examples of how to think about previously fed content:

  • Instead of feeding directory items across sites, consider choosing a single site to house the directory and then link to that site from your other sites. Or separate your directory and place the relevant people on your individual sites.
  • Instead of feeding news across sites, consider categorizing your news on a single site and link to the relevant news category listing pages from your other sites. Or separate your news and place the relevant news articles on each individual site.
  • Instead of feeding image slider content across sites, please add image sliders to each of your sites individually.

Managing Content

The WordPress block editor is more robust and flexible than the Drupal editor. You will be able to choose from a myriad of blocks to add content in a way that best reaches your visitors. You can add blocks for your directory, faqs via accordions, news, image sliders, video embeds, multi-column layouts, and much more.

Managing Files/Media

The WordPress media library is much more capable than the Drupal file browser. During the Drupal to WordPress migration, the links to your files will change and no redirects will be added automatically. If you have hot-linked to files that only exist in the Drupal file browser and need those files and URLs to transition, please let us know when we notify you that your site's migration has begun.

Menus

We are discouraging the use of dropdowns on the main menu for sites where the menu is more than two levels deep. These sites should take advantage of the parent and child page relationship instead.

Linking to external sites from the submenu has been deprecated. If you find you want to link externally from a submenu, please rework your content and create a page with a call to action that encourages users to visit the external link instead.

Getting Help

Help resources are built inline directly into the block editor. Simply click on a block to view related help resources in the settings sidebar (look for the "Help ?" panel) on the right side of the block editor screen. Additional help resources will be available in this Knowledge Base. If you need assistance for items not found in these help resources, please submit a ticket and a member of Web Services will be happy to assist.