MyVU and Vanderbilt View now powered by WordPress
Earlier last month myVU, the news source for Vanderbilt faculty and staff, and Vanderbilt View, the monthly magazine, merged with the Vanderbilt News web presence. This allows us to greatly simplify how we communicate news at Vanderbilt. Prior to the merge, many news stories would be posted twice, verbatim. Once on the Vanderbilt news website and once on the myVU site. Not great for search engine optimization (duplicate content reduces your page rank), not great for time and resource efficiency either.
Now that myVU is powered by the same backend WordPress installation that runs Vanderbilt News and Research News @ Vanderbilt, stories can be posted once and appear across all of the news sites. Both sites also incorporate a slideshow (the popular Nivo slider) that can feature content from across all of the news presences.
Based on what type of story it is, different headers, footers and sidebars are presented. What we’re calling a “hierarchy of branding” takes place for each individual story:
- If a story is RESEARCH, it will always have the research layout, no matter what other news sources it also is associated with (i.e. a myVU story that is also a research story will look like a research story.)
- If a story is ONLY for myVU, it will have the myVU layout.
- Otherwise, the story will have the default Vanderbilt News layout.
- If a story is from the Vanderbilt View, the myVU layout is used and the Vanderbilt View logo appears in the right column.
All the cool features we’ve built into the backend for the main news presence and research are now available for myVU and Vanderbilt View too. We’re also now supporting just one content management system — and one set of templates — instead of three, which reduces the amount of time we spend posting stories, addressing technical glitches, etc.