How We Converted an Entire State to

by  Rosie  &  Nathan

from Hawaii Information Consortium

How We Converted an Entire State to

Rosie         

Nathan

A look at how Hawaii State Government has been using WordPress to launch

• Cloud-based

• Open-source

• Mobile first 

over  450 websites

since 2013.

    Bringing Government to   the People Since 2000!

Rosie Warfield

Manager of eGovernment Services & Customer Services (and CMS!)

Leader of all things WordPress (on the business side)

9+ years

Nathan Hutchinson

Web Coding & CMS Specialist

Leader of all things WordPress (on the tech side)

3+ years

Rika & Jenly (say hi if you see them!)

The State of Hawaii

A
bit of
history

As of 2015,

• We have over 80 WordPress installs,

• Hosting almost 450 sites,

• And all state agencies are now using WordPress.

• And all are on AWS!

And this is where our story begins...

RFP

In 2012, we responded to a proposal by our 1st CIO to build a common state template for all agency sites. We had < 6 months to build and implement EVERYTHING!!

As of Jan 1, 2013:  28 sites were launched.

So what is this state template?

Establish a consistent look & feel for all government sites.

Goal:

Styleguide

• 1 template
• 3 page layout
• 3 themes

See more at : styleguide.ehawaii.gov

• Home page layout
• Sidebar page layout
• Full-width layout

Before

After

Header

Footer

Body

Sharks

OIMT

Responsive

Fully Featured

ADA Friendly

Partnership

Enforcement

Styleguide + State Authority = Success!

Hosted

Cloud Hosting via AWS

New servers spin up in less than 6 minutes!

Building the

State Template

v 1.0

v1.0 = Fast!

• Paid theme due to time constraints

• Layout modifications for a 12 col grid

• Broke ability to update the parent theme

Multisite

• Infinite WP

• NCloner 

Git

3 devs in the same code?

NO problem!

Need to roll back an update? 

NO problem!

Need to fork the repository?

(kind of a problem)

HIC Repo

Hosting

Instant test environments are a developers best friend.

Enter

v2.0
 

Now that we've caught our breath...it's time to go back and make some improvements...

Improvement #1

Lower the overhead

Improvement #2

Create a framework that has a separation of front end and back end

Improvement #3

Better integration with the Multisite search

Improvement #4

Better commenting

Sharing the Open Source     

Giving back to the community

Hawaiʻi Diacritics

kāne (kaa-nay) = male

kane (ka-nay) = skin disease

Alt Text Checker

Tablepress + Custom Post Types

Pain Points Along the Way

Another Core Update?

(Time to test again)

Multisite Search

(Relevanssi & USA Search)

Font Awesome

Example: Icon Heart

Code Changed... 

What's Next for Hawaii?

Fully Utilized AWS Hosting

Surprisingly Fast Development
 =

Focus on Content