We love it when we are given the opportunity to do things that go against many people’s ideas of what is possible with Wordpress as a CMS. Unikum’s new websites are one such project. Did you know that you can use Wordpress as an extranet with support forums and customer login via SSO?
We certainly didn’t know of anyone who had done anything similar before we started this project. However, we saw it more as a challenge than a deterrent. This is the attitude we adopted in order not to lose our position as one of the best in web development and Wordpress.
To start at the right end, it might be worth telling you a little about our client. Unikum is Sweden’s largest web service for collaboration on goals, plans, documentation and quality in preschool and school. Several hundred thousand people use Unikum regularly, and there are 10,000s of plans and matrices in Unikum Skolbanken. If you work with or are a parent of children who attend preschool or school, chances are you have already heard of Unikum.
The assignment was that the customer wanted both new and updated websites for marketing, news distribution and support of their web service. The support they wanted to offer is what made this case interesting. As a user of their online service, they wanted not only help information such as documentation and questions and answers to be available. There would also be a support forum, partly open and partly restricted to logged-in users only, to which you would be automatically logged in if you logged in to their web service. The forum would also share information with the web service about the logged-in user in order to synchronise the users’ profiles, etc. Furthermore, there was an old forum from which they wanted to migrate users and forum posts.
The whole thing was to be realised through no less than four different websites; unikum.net for marketing, news.unikum.net for news distribution, support.unikum.net for help information and forum.unikum.net for the forum. However, there would be uniform design and the sites would have the possibility to share information with each other to avoid duplication of editorial work.
More concretely, the solution consists of:
- Wordpress Multisite with common main theme for all sites and sub-themes for site-specific customisations
- Editorial content structured and managed by Wordpress using Custom Post Types, Custom Taxonomies and the Simple Fields extension
- Custom widgets for cross-site publishing and/or contextually customised content
- BBPress extension for public forums with customised themes
- Buddypress as an extension for internal forums with customised themes
- Search Everything as an extension for searches with customised search results view
- Customised add-on for authentication against Unikum web application via oAuth
- Custom migration scripts for importing users and forum posts from customer’s previous Jive forums to BBPress
Much of this may say more to us web developers than it does to anyone else, but we hope it still says that it is actually Wordpress that is the basis of it all and that we “only” created a custom theme, extended the functionality with ready-made extensions (plugins) and developed some of our own extension functionality.
However, this is not to say that it has been an easy task. Even with ready-made and open web solutions such as Wordpress, it is a lot of work just to make your own unique template framework for the client. In addition, for this assignment we have had to create two additional template frameworks for the two forum extensions (bbPress & Buddypress), a special information architecture to handle several different types of information, our own oAuth extension for SSO (Single-Sign-On) and migration scripts to import user data and forum posts from the customer’s previous Jive forum.
These are things for which there are no ready-made solutions, whether we are looking at solutions with licence fees or not. However, Wordpress has the advantage of being freely available, open source and made to be customised without having to pay or ask anyone for permission. Therefore, we are not afraid to say that Wordpress can be used for any type of web solution.