URL Policy

This document describes the naming policy for the Faculty WordPress Site pilot project. It applies to all WordPress sites on the sites.lsa.umich.edu server.

Purpose

Review Condition

Policy

Conflicts

Exceptions

Approval

Purpose

This policy exists to clarify the standards for naming faculty, lab, and minor program web sites in the WordPress pilot project.

Review Conditions

If any of these conditions are true, a review of this policy may be necessary:

  • The policy has gone at least a year without review.
  • The service moves from pilot to production.

Policy

URLs are of the form protocol: //hostname/uri.

The policy for WordPress site URLs is:

  • The protocol can be either http or https as the user prefers. Both will work.
  • The hostname is “sites.lsa.umich.edu.” This cannot be changed.
  • The URI (or site name) depends on the nature of the site:
    • For faculty sites, the URI must be the uniqname or first name last name. If a given faculty member requires multiple faculty sites, a suffix will be allowed, be it numeric (uniqname, uniqname2) or department-based (uniqname-dept1, uniqname-dept2).
    • For lab sites, the URI must be the uniqname (preferred), the surname, or the first and last name, followed by the suffix “-lab” (preferred) or “lab.” Examples: jsmith-lab, joneslab, chuckjoneslab. If someone has multiple lab sites, the use of a department-specific infix or suffix is recommended, as in “jsmith-mcdb-lab and jsmith-eeb-lab” or “wjones-lab-french and wjones-lab-german.” Using a uniqname is preferred to avoid surname-based conflicts (such as Dr. A. Smith and Dr. B. Smith both wanting “smithlab”). Using the hyphen with the suffix (“-lab”) is preferred to avoid conflicts with a uniqname ending in “lab;” there are currently 138 uniqnames ending with “lab,” 90 of which appear to be group accounts (of which 51 have their home directories in Academic Affairs’ space).
    • For research project or conference sites, the URI could be the unique abbreviation of the project or the project title and it should not include dates or the year.

Conflicts

In the event of a conflict, such as Dr. B. Smith asking for “smith-lab” when Dr. A. Smith already has that URI assigned, the support team is officially empowered to change the URI of both (for example, to asmith-lab and bsmith-lab) and, solely at their discretion, to put a small disambiguation site in place (as smith-lab with a single article that directs users to the relevant other pages).

Exceptions

The support team is allowed but not required to grant exceptions to this policy.

Approval

This policy was approved on 2013-10-14 by Pat Belden, Web Services Director.