How to set up a basic student portal using WordPress

Abstract

Hibernia College is a blended learning college that offers postgraduate teaching and nursing programmes in Ireland. Two years ago, the College undertook a review of its technology with a primary focus on what teaching and learning will look like in 5 to 10 years. An outcome of that process was the acceptance that we needed to improve the online experience for our students to keep pace with modern, big-budget web interfaces. We wanted to have more control over some of our websites and have less reliance on external development houses so that we could iterate our designs faster to keep up with the demanding needs of our students, faculty and staff. Internal teams at the College have no dedicated developers, but do have a beginner-to-intermediate-level knowledge of WordPress. We decided to migrate our student portal from Drupal to WordPress. This presentation is focused on beginners-to-intermediate-level users of WordPress. It is an informative session describing our journey, the theme we used and selection process, how we designed our screens, the plugins we used, our integration with O365 for SSO and how we managed our custom code to build a private College portal website.