Profiles

I am Wolfgang Wiese, an Academic Senior Councillor and Head of Department for Website Management, Public Relations and Education at the Regional Computer Center Erlangen (RRZE), the IT service provider of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). In this role, I am responsible for the management, development, and consultation of several hundred web offerings for the university and other higher education institutions in the region.

Working with WordPress since 2010

I started working with WordPress back in 2010. In work we run several WordPress multisite networks for the FAU and also for other universities in the region. Currently we are hosting up to 1.500 websites with more than 5.000 administrators and authors there.
The biggest site is from the FAU. This single multisite instance in our network contains about 7.600 posts, 840 pages, 14.000 media files, 1.400 event posts (from our calendar plugin) and is maintained by 14 administrators, 18 editors, 166 authors. The single website makes up to 5 million pageviews daily.

At the university we startet with WordPress in 2010 with a blog service for all students and staff members. WordPress was introduced at that time as a successor system to the previous blog system Apache Antville.
After the good experiences and because many users were convinced of the ease of use and the flat learning curve of WordPress, we introduced it in 2013 as a centrally managed CMS for the university’s websites.
With its relaunch in 2013, FAU was one of the first large universities in Germany to switch to the CMS WordPress. Since our switch and due to our open communication and lectures at conferences and other events, as well as our free plugins and themes, we have been able to convince many other universities to also switch to WordPress.

Giving back

At our GitHub repo (https://github.com/RRZE-Webteam) we published and maintain more than 60 WordPress plugins and themes unter the GPL licence. Most plugins were created by my team and myself.
But some plugins were made for us by agencies. When we hire an agency to create a WordPress plugin, we specify that the code must be published on GitHub. We define this as a prerequisite for placing an order.
We also do this as a contribution to giving back our part to the WordPress community.

In 2017, during the federal election year, I served as the team leader responsible for the online presence of the Pirate Party Germany. A few years ago I maintained the WordPress theme Piratenkleider there and later developed the WordPress theme Pirate Rogue. The themes Piratenkleider and Pirate Rogue are still used today on many websites of the Pirate Party Germany and parties worldwide. Both themes are published via GitHub.

From 2006 to 2018, I have been organizing the Webkongress Erlangen (webkongress.fau.de), a professional conference for web developers and decision-makers from the German-speaking world.