The University of Edinburgh’s popular Teaching Matters blog was successfully migrated from a standalone WordPress instance created in 2016 to the Academic Blogging Service’s WordPress service. This blog post focuses on the technical challenges, new features and support/security benefits.
Digital Learning Applications and Media (DLAM) colleagues (Stewart Lamb Cromar, James Slack, Mark Findlay and Karen Howie) have worked with Dr Jenny Scoles from the Institute for Academic Development (IAD) to design, test and build a new long-term home for their Teaching Matters blog.
Jenny’s blog post about this migration
Technical challenges
Large image bank
The Teaching Matters blog has been publishing high-quality articles since January 2016. Migrating eight years’ worth of media-rich content was quite the challenge with: 1,200 posts and 3,600 images totaling almost 4 GB.
Security concerns
Both the WordPress platform (6.2.6 and theme (Apostrophe 1) were upgraded to newer, safer and regularly maintained options (6.5.5 and Apostrophe 2 respectively).
Preserving bookmarks
URL redirections have been enabled for the old domain name (www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk), so all pre-existing bookmarks and pages indexed by search engines will successfully redirect to the new URL:
blogs.ed.ac.uk/teaching-matters
Redirection rules
Due to the large number of high-resolution photographs, not all images could be migrated and hosted within their new home. Amendments were made to the previous ‘htaccess’ file so URL requests to the WordPress ‘Uploads’ directory were exempt from redirection.
# Redirect all traffic to new hosting platform
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wp-content/uploads/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)teaching-matters-blog\.ed\.ac\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/teaching-matters%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]New features
Student and staff contributions
A new WordPress plugin ‘User Submitted Posts (USP)’ was tested and configured especially for Teaching Matters. This new addition allows IAD to receive article submissions via a dedicated webform and have them stored automatically as draft Posts within WordPress.
Editorial workflow
Having a bespoke webform for staff and students to submit blog posts for consideration has greatly improved the editorial workflow for the IAD team. Previously they would accept requests via email and manually enter the content as a new WordPress post. The USP plugin now automatically converts a valid webform entry into a draft Post, that can be quickly reviewed and published.
Submit a Teaching Matters post
HTML newsletters
Since 2021, the IAD have offered a popular Teaching Matters newsletter – a round-up of the best of teaching at The University of Edinburgh and beyond.
Teaching Matters LinkedIn newsletter
In addition to the LinkedIn monthly ‘5 Things’ newsletter, visitors can now sign up to receive automated email notifications whenever a new blog post is published. This functionality is achieved by the ‘Icegram Express’ plugin that is available to all users of the University’s WordPress service.
The plugin is configured with a double opt-in setting, so that visitors must confirm their subscription via email. This avoids any potential spam requests.
Improved analytics
IAD were keen to have better insights into how many visits the blog received, what articles visitors were looking at, and how long they spent reading them.
The transition between Universal Analytics (UA) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) in 2023 has meant access to historic records is challenging, if not impossible (UA records were all automatically deleted by Google in July 2024).
However, if you don’t have a manual backup of that historic UA data you can always review some basic server statistics via cPanel.
- Log in to your cPanel
- Scroll down to the Metrics section
- Select the AWstats icon
- Click View to open the report for each domain
Manually collating data for each year allowed us to discover the following lifetime statistics before the migration.
Lifetime statistics (2016-2024)
- 581,256 visitors
- 1,110,716 visits
- 4,467,771 page views
Site Kit plugin
The blog’s new home makes good use of the ‘Site Kit by Google’ plugin.
Connect your blog to Google Site Kit (UoE only)
When successfully configured, you have direct and convenient access to Google Analytics from within the WordPress admin dashboard.
Google Analytics training
If you want to learn more about Google Analytics the LinkedIn Learning course ‘Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Essential Training’ is designed to help you track, analyse, and report on website traffic, conversions, and ad performance using GA4.
Logging into LinkedIn Learning with UoE email (UoE only)
Better accessibility compliance
University websites are required to be compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standard.
Full guidelines (2.2)
Several CSS amendments were made to the WordPress theme to improve accessibility compliance:
- Improved colour contrast ratios for headers and buttons.
- Hyperlinks are no longer solely reliant on colour coding; they are now underlined too.
- Reduction in number of menu items from 8 to 6. This helps cognitive processing, but also avoids line wrapping on narrower screens.
Support / security benefits
A new home
Blogs.ed.ac.uk is a free University-hosted and supported WordPress platform for all staff and postgraduate research students.
View over 9,800 blogs or request your own:
Dedicated resources
For WordPress resources please visit the blogs.ed SharePoint site for support on creating your first blog along with videos and ‘How to’ documentation which we recommend viewing if you are new to WordPress.
Blogs.ed SharePoint site (UoE only)
Find out what training and workshops are available to expand your blogging skills.
Training and workshops (UoE only)
Copyright
Header image is part of the Online Learning 2022 collection and was downloaded from the University of Edinburgh’s image gallery:
UoE photography and video resources (UoE only)
This collection was managed by Ari Badlishah (Digital Engagement Officer), and focused on improving the diversity in photography used in the University’s online courses.
Copyright © The University of Edinburgh 2024. All rights reserved.
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