WordPress in Higher Ed

I just got home from nearly two-weeks of conference travel, and although I’m still trying to dissect all of experiences I have a few thoughts I wanted to share.

First, the context of my travels:

Montreal -> Portland for WordCamp US 2024!

Portland -> NYC for EvolveDrupal NYC (Unfortunately, I missed the last day of WCUS, but thankfully nothing interesting or controversial happened on that day…)

NYC -> Albuquerque for HighEdWeb

Albuquerque -> Montreal, arriving home at 4:30am on Friday, narrowly missing the worst of the hurricane after a change of both plane and pilots.

If I had to summarize all these experiences, it’s: WordPress is doing well in the higher ed space, but we still have room to grow.

Talking to folks at WCUS, my partner-in-crime Ankrish (no crimes were actually committed) and I realized HighEdWeb was not well known, even amongst some of the most prominent WP agencies! And once we arrived in Albuquerque we confirmed this; no representation from the WP community, aside from another agency or two and our friends at Pantheon. Would have been great to see Automattic and WP VIP there – but there’s always next year!

Given the number of folks I talked to that were either using WordPress, or looking to move off a legacy platform (some mentioned Joomla!) to WP, we should have a better presence there. The Drupal Association had a dedicated booth staffed by volunteers (including some of my Evolving Web colleagues), why not have a WP booth next door? Sounds like some fun competition! (we love each other anyway)

At the end of the day what’s important is that open source continues to grow and our communities can share their work and best practises to the benefit of everyone – developers, content editors, citizens, etc. Nothing hurts more (ok, a lot hurts more, but…) than seeing our public funds go into private companies with proprietary platforms that fail to offer the community and extensibility of WordPress and Drupal. It was encouraging to see so many institutions embracing one – more WordPress than I expected – but was also heart breaking to hear institutions locked into a SaaS because because they had a single bad experience or think they can’t get managed hosting (mainly, automatic updates) elsewhere.

We need a better WP representation in the higher ed community, and HighEdWeb is a great place to start! I’m happy to have been there to help.