Framework

More than 15 million people from nearly every corner of the globe visited the BU Web in 2015, and those visitors viewed more than 100 million pages. That’s an average of more than 10,000 page views every hour! To say BU needs a stable, secure, and robust framework to accommodate this kind of traffic is an understatement.

BU has been using a multi-site, multi-network WordPress environment since 2008. We selected WordPress because it’s famously easy-to-use for editors with a wide variety of technical backgrounds, and it has the enthusiastic support of a very active developer community dedicated to growing the platform while keeping it stable and secure. And because WordPress is open source, it is an extremely cost-effective option for use as an enterprise content management system.

Responsive Framework takes a new direction in theme design for BU websites. Rather than offering a collection of multiple themes to choose from, Responsive Framework is one theme with expanded design and customization options. This approach allows IS&T and MarCom to be smarter with our resources while supporting the thousands of web editors at BU.

Since WordPress is the most popular content management system on the web, it is also a prominent target for hackers and other online miscreants. And since a framework is only as stable as its weakest link, we continue to maintain BU WordPress as a managed environment. BU WordPress features a growing collection of plugins and widgets for webpage features and functions, but does not permit individual sites to install their own theme or plugins. Read more about this policy.

Website design has grown exponentially more sophisticated with our growing array of connected devices. Responsive Framework abstracts the technical details of supporting all these devices by building the “responsive” heavy lifting into the theme.