Readers,

Some of you have noticed the new version of Chapman Happenings.  This has been made possible by a local instance of “WordPress,” a popular open source blogging solution.  We are also excited to announce that more blogs are on the way.  Over the years Chapman has created a variety of blogs on a variety of platforms and there are many reasons to consolidate these blogs into one central area.  For more information, please see my previous post on this matter.

Happenings Screenshot

These blogs will be located at https://blogs.chapman.edu which will serve as a central place for Chapman blogs to be listed.  This should make our campus news easily discoverable to our website visitors.  In addition, WordPress will power the ‘news’ sections of Chapman’s new website.  If you would like to see an example blog, check out ASBE.  Take a moment to view the blog on your phone, and tablet.  If you don’t have a smartphone or tablet, just click the bottom right corner of the browser and shrink the window until the blog adjusts.  The design of the school / college blog responds to the size of the screen making it readily viewable on a variety of platforms.  Chapman’s new website will do this as well.

Our current project is school/college blogs, and while (at this point) we can’t offer maximum customization, there is a bit of influence that the schools / colleges will have.  We have already utilized the colors selected for the school / college landing pages in the blog design.  We’d now like to ask each school / college what imagery they would like to appear in the top (or sometimes top right) area of the blog.  In the ASBE example, this is the ‘globe’ imagery.

ASBE blog Screenshot

Mobile mode of ASBE blog

Finally, I’d like to take a quick minute to thank Meghan Farrington, Jorge Pinto and Rory Reiff in SMC, and Zubin in IS&T for all of their hard work on this project.  As always, SMC likes to involve students in our process.  In this case, Miles Zimmerman also deserves thanks as he has helped with our WordPress instance and provided feedback along the way.  We truly have wonderful people here at Chapman!

As the blog project moves forward, I will post more updates here.  Thanks for reading!

-David May