New cloud-based CampusPress to host Rice blogs

By Naoki Shiba     10/1/14 3:52am

The IT department has signed the contract to switch from WordPress to CampusPress, a specialized blogging platform designed for schools, this month. According to Rice University Director of Enterprise Application Andrea Martin, the switch was discussed in October 2013, and will be made later this year. Martin said CampusPress will address student demand for additional plug-ins and custom themes and provide for greater storage and unlimited blogs, users and bandwidth since it’s hosted online instead of Rice’s servers.

“It’s a very good deal for the campus,” Martin said. “[Bloggers] will be getting much more functionality through the cloud offering compared to what we were able to provide on campus.”

In addition to the new features that CampusPress will make available, Martin said using CampusPress’ cloud offering will be less expensive than providing the blog services through Rice. Martin said the change will occur seamlessly by December, after a short three-month test period done by the CampusPress company. 

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“The names of [all the existing blogs] will remain the same and you won’t really know that it is hosted on the cloud versus here at Rice,” Martin said. “We will also keep our old server for a while, so there will be opportunity and time [to fix] any issues that are to come up.” 

Martin said she will send out notifications to administrators of any blog.rice.edu site and ask them for their feedback. She said she hopes CampusPress can be integrated with OwlSpace course blogs to improve learning experiences.

“They have a module that we are going to try once we go into production and see whether it will work with Owlspace,” Martin said. “We are hoping that is the case, but that is something that we will consider in the future.”

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