Closure Report

Project Summary

This project was completed to ensure that users of the University’s Academic Blogging platform benefit from blogs.ed.ac.uk being on the most up to date and secure version with the latest features available to them. The WordPress system was upgraded to the latest supported version (5.4) and new functionality was delivered to enable email notifications to Instructors when Students publish new posts or reply to Instructor comments. Improvements were also made to enable the Educational Design and Engagement team to provide support to users.

Analysis of Resource* Usage:

Staff Usage Estimate (Project Management): 7 days

Staff Usage Actual (Project Management) : 6.5 days

*DLAM days are not included in resource estimates

Outcome

• www.blogs.ed.ac.uk l was upgraded from WordPress 5.2 to version 5.4 (9 July 2020)
• PHP was upgraded from 7.1 to 7.3 for www.blogs.ed.ac.uk
• Notifications to Instructors when Students publish new posts or reply to Instructor comments were enabled
• User acceptance testing of changes was completed prior to the upgrade
• The new notifications were checked for accessibility, and the accessibility statement was updated
• Information was made available to the Academic blogging user community in advance, and User documentation has been updated to reflect the changes

Objectives and Deliverables

Success Criteria

Key Learning Points

• The scope of this project was limited to high priority changes which helped keep the project simple
• Additional time spent documenting requirements and checking these with stakeholders at the planning stage would have helpful to the development team
• WordPress plugins had been reviewed and updated shortly before the project began, which reduced the time needed for testing
• It may have been helpful having a representative from apps on the project team to help with scheduling the PHP upgrade work
• A list of responsibilities for the deployment plan e.g. who is contacting apps, who is putting up or taking down banners, who is upgrading the WordPress instance, tagging the code, ensuring the team had the relevant access required to upload the code. etc would have been helpful during the implementation itself
• Accessibility checking of custom functionality was helpful to ensure new features are accessible to all users
• Finding staff for User Acceptance Testing was difficult at this time of year as preparations were underway for the new hybrid teaching model and people were being encouraged to take annual leave
• Including the original feature requesters in UAT may have been useful
• Short weekly team meetings were useful as a regular checkpoint
• There are a number of additional features requested by users that will need further development work. These were considered at the planning stage but excluded from this project because of resource and time constraints

Outstanding Issues

None. All Project Risks have been closed.

Project Team