Our 1000+ websites are powered by WordPress Multisite and are hosted by Pantheon. Because we are in a large multi-tenant environment and we are a small team, we try to offer the best compromise between flexibility, cost and long-term sustainability and therefore we have some recommendations and restrictions on what can be done and installed.

Technical references for designers and developers

This is a living repository of development resources for the HSPH web and apps team.

• If you are not very familiar with WordPress, please start by reading our WordPress 101.
• We ask external developers to follow our theme and plugin file structure as well as to comply with the official WordPress coding conventions and standards (more details about this here).
• You can find a list of available plugins here.
• WordPress updates are usually installed within 48h/72h of publication and plugins are updated at least once a week so you can safely assume that we are using the latest version of everything.
• We will usually not allow handmade or marketplace themes. Instead we ask you to create a child theme of either our own Main Theme or Affiliate Template.
• We recommend that you follow our JS and CSS versioning guidelines lines to avoid caching issues.
• While most of our websites are currently only available in English, all our themes and plugins must be i18n/l10n ready.
• Your plugins and themes should be well documented and thoroughly commented so they are easily maintainable by our team once your contract with the School is over. In addition you should follow our guidelines regarding PHPDocs in WordPress projects.
• For both technical and security reasons we do not allow plugins and themes that allow users to upload files outside of the standard WordPress media library.

Before you open a PR

Important: Please read our guide on how to /wiki/spaces/HSPHWebAppsArchive/pages/46925460.

Other resources

• HSPH Design System
• JS and CSS assets caching guidelines
• [Outdated] 3rd party plugins available to developers
• [Outdated] Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
• [Outdated] WordPress Developement Stack and Tools
• PHPDocs in HSPH WordPress projects
• SPH Prefered Web Vendors
• Using SASS/SCSS
• Versions and release numbers
• WordPress 101
• WordPress boilerplates