I work in higher ed, mostly instructional design and Canvas LMS support type stuff. WordPress has been a growing chunk of work for me, and is now solely on my plate following the retirement of my coworker.

I’ve been in my current role for seven years and have gradually picked up some work from a long time colleague who has now retired on short notice. This work is now completely on my shoulders and I worry I’m in over my head. I did get a pay bump to pick up this work, which is great, but I fear I didn’t realize what I was getting into when agreeing to this.

I feel confident with “visual” Wordpress editing but do not have a development background. I’m working through the “Beginner WordPress Developer” course now and it has me freaking out a bit that I have so much to learn in a few weeks. I follow the course content just fine when it’s presented linearly, but I worry that in a troubleshooting scenario I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

Background… Over the years I’ve picked up some WordPress support work from a long time colleague. Essentially, several classes use a WordPress site to publish their work in the class. It’s a learning experience for students and a way to get their work published for awards, portfolios, etc.

In the past my colleague did the setup part (creating site files) and archiving (converting to static sites, migrating sites to new domains). He did this all manually because for him it was easier that way. We use DreamHost shared hosting. I have no problem creating the sites with DreamHost’s installer, but archiving/converting to static/migrating seems much more complex. He was using a tool called Simply Static to convert to static HTML and then manually moving the files around via FTP.

I did everything else, the “soft” stuff — training the students, adding users, first line for troubleshooting issues, customizing design, reviewing plugin/theme requests when students wanted something specific. Rarely if something completely stumped me I’d ask for his help, maybe 1-2 times per year. Frankly I think some of my anxiety around this is because former colleague was a classic old school IT grump (in the same position 35 years) who tended to make mountains out of molehills. I’ve found that several things he would complain and doomsday about didn’t actually take the hours and hours they pretended they did, he just insisted on doing it the manual way he liked rather than using the host tools.

These are pretty simple sites in terms of content, but often have many plugins, sometimes ancient ones (Knight Labs pls update your shit) and I know that’s a security issue but these aren’t exactly high traffic or sensitive sites -- just text, images, and links.

With all the fuss I see about WordPress security problems I’ve never seen any of our sites hacked… but maybe colleague was just doing more than I realized? Or maybe our sites aren't great targets?

There is also just a large quantity of sites and users to manage, so I think the big challenge is scale rather than depth, if that makes sense. I’m looking into setting up a custom role for the students and faculty that lock them out of most functionalities to prevent issues in the first place.

Before this next school year starts, can someone either walk me back from this ledge or tell me if I need to just abandon ship and tell my department we can’t sustain this and classes need to transition to using Google Sites? Obviously that's much less flexible and doesn't give students CMS experience.

Or... if I keep everything basic, set expectations low, can I build this plane as I fly it? (i.e. tell everyone we’re sticking with Twenty Twenty Five, standard theme, restricted roles, no outdated plugins, while I upskill?)

For this fall semester I only need to worry about four new sites for one course. I can keep hand updating themes and plugins from last semester while I figure out how archiving works I guess. I did one archive test successfully but the second failed and I just had to throw in the towel to get back to the rest of my “main” job after wasting half a day. Bleh.

This work really does interest me but I don't want to let the students or faculty down with my ignorance.