Policy on Providing Wordpress Installations and Virtual Domains for Student Organizations
Williams OIT will provide an install of Wordpress and a virtual domain for student organizations, with the following provisions, caveats, and limitations:
- The organization must be officially recognized by College Council and Campus Life
- The organization must have a site sponsor who's a long-term employee of the college (i.e. non-temporary Faculty or Staff)
- The sponsor must make the request, and sign a form acknowledging understanding of these conditions
- The sponsor will always be an administrator of the site
- Typically one or more students will also be administrators
- Williams OIT is a service provider
- Williams OIT provides an installation of Wordpress
- There will be a number of themes and plugins available in the installation provided.
- (list themes here)
- (list plu gins here)
- Williams OIT provides a virtual domain in the williams.edu space (e.g. ephclub.williams.edu)
- Williams OIT may at its discretion disallow certain names
- Williams OIT has no responsibility to review, filter, or otherwise police any content on the site
- Although Williams OIT will make every effort to keep this service running, this service has a lower priority than most other services and projects it supports
- Williams OIT may take down a site in some circumstances
- In the event of a legal request to remove content from the site, the site will be taken down
- In the event a site causes problems with bandwidth, security, or any other realms of concern it will be taken down
- A site will be taken down at the request of one or more of the sites administrators
- The site will occasionally be unavailable as work is done on the underlying systems
- When a site is taken down
- The administrators (sponsor and students) will be contacted via email with a reason for the take down
- Williams OIT will, at its earliest convenience, make available to the site administrators a private copy of the site in which they can work to resolve any issues, and/or get a copy of all the content in the site
- The site will be put back up once all issues have been resolved
- Williams OIT provides NO technical support or other help for Wordpress nor for all themes and plugins
- No file-level access will be provided, only the web-based administrative access via Wordpress itself
- The sponsor or organization member may request the installation of particular themes and/or plugins, but there are no guarantees as to when, or even if, they will be installed
- The sponsor is responsible for making sure the site has the latest version of Wordpress installed on it
- It is expected that the sponsor will delegate this task to a member of the organization
- The Wordpress installation includes a plugin that allows 1-click upgrading by any designated site administrator
- Keeping a site up-to-date has priority over keeping it available
- Updates must be done even if that breaks certain themes, plugins, or other customizations
