The shared services marketing and communication and IT departments have been working together since summer 2017 on a staged transition to move the seminary off our legacy content management system for web properties. The CMS is a custom-built system that faces stability issues and challenges with adding new functionality (because it doesn’t have access to an ecosystem of compatible components). It is also expensive to maintain.
We are transitioning to WordPress, a CMS used by many colleges, universities, and graduate schools. The system is intuitive for content managers, and extensive training and support materials are available.
The first items to be moved were those needed to ensure continuity of operations in the event of a catastrophic failure of the legacy CMS. Fortunately, Seminary Relations already used a third-party system to accept philanthropic gifts online. Admissions has been moved to WordPress (admissions.luthersem.edu), so we would still have the ability to collect prospective student inquiries and applications as well. Lifelong Learning moved to the new faith+lead site (faithlead.luthersem.edu), which is also hosted in WordPress. The Festival of Homiletics (festivalofhomiletics.org) has transitioned, and a project to move Working Preacher is under way. The new inside.luthersem.edu site is also hosted on the new system.
The time has now come to move the rest of the primary external site, www.luthersem.edu, into the new system. (The admissions site will be re-integrated with the rest of the seminary website as part of this project.) A “test” or staging site has been built, and marketing and communication is currently in the progress of migrating the current content from the existing site onto that platform. We will then connect with each site content manager or department to discuss whether any of that content should be edited or revised before the launch of the new site. Of course, changes and revisions can continue after the new site launches as well. Our goal is to launch the new site in early 2020.
Please reach out to me; Laura Swanson Lindahl, director of marketing; or Joe Mann, web manager, with any questions, concerns, or advice about this effort. Thank you!
Stephen Jendraszak, Associate Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Augsburg University and Luther Seminary