Documentation:CTLT Instructional Technologies/Web Services

About

The Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology’s web development efforts focus on creating sites that enhance teaching and learning, support community engagement and enable resource sharing and content re-use. We use WordPress and MediaWiki frameworks and implement best Web 2.0 practices to deliver user-friendly solutions that are easy to maintain, manage and scale. We partner with UBC IT to integrate with other campus services. Websites that we build are hosted on UBC IT’s VM servers, and have CWL as primary means of authentication. In addition, we have developed ways to pull content from other UBC sites (e.g., UBC Events) or feed (republish) your website content to other sites (e.g., WebCT Vista and/or Connect, department websites).

Process

We work closely with our clients throughout the development process to surface needs, identify requirements, and develop sustainable solutions. During the discovery phase, we thoroughly scope the project, including outlining audiences and inventorying requirements. During this phase we proactively offer different conceptual directions and provide a range of options to help with visualizing needs from different perspectives. This process aligns well with current web development trends that enable rapid exploration and discovery.

Once the requirements are finalized we move through the the rest of the cycle – development, quality assurance, training and finally going “live”. We work with our clients to ensure there is a thorough understanding of the work needed with a mutually agreed upon timeline and and clear milestones.

Development Framework & Solutions

The Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology uses WordPress and MediaWiki as its core development framework. We know that there are many solutions out there, but we focus on these tools to enable us to provide reliable service to our clients. So far, our solutions based on these platforms include providing clients with various web spaces including blogs, courses, CMS powered websites, community portals, project management spaces, resource repositories, RSS aggregation sites, research spaces, photo galleries and others.

Please note that we collaborated with Public Affairs during the development of the new UBC Common Look and Feel (CLF), so we are able to help transition websites to this template when needed.

Hosting

The Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology hosts websites on the UBC IT VMware infrastructure to ensure the highest availability and performance. VM solutions provide outstanding hardware scaling, backup and disaster recovery solutions. Website run on a LAMP platform with content and business logic handled by WordPress Multi-Site server’s administrators and content managers are authenticated by UBC’s single-sign-on application – CWL.

Content & Resource Management

As firm believers of Open Content and community resource sharing, we take pride in our ability to reuse and republish the web content. We pay special attention to providing ways to make web content and resources transportable and easy to republish. There are numerous hooks available to include other websites’ content within ours or push content stored on our servers to different websites and different web platforms.