Arlington Public Schools
Forty-plus school sites and 200,000 pages, brought into one accessible platform that teachers across the district can run themselves.
- Engaged
- 2022
- Relationship
- Ongoing
- Platform
- WordPress Multisite
- Sector
- K-12 Education
The Brief
Forty schools, two hundred thousand pages, and no way out of the old system.
Arlington Public Schools had outgrown its digital infrastructure. The district's content lived inside a proprietary CMS with no standard export, and every school needed an identity of its own without breaking the district's shared voice. The people who would run it day to day were teachers and staff, not web developers, so whatever replaced it had to be something they could actually use. Accessibility was not negotiable.
The Solution
One platform that holds every school, run by the people inside each one.
We built a WordPress multisite where each school inherits a shared, accessible design system and keeps its own colors, logo, and identity. Custom scripts moved every page out of the closed CMS. A block-based editor lets teachers build pages without touching code, and single sign-on ties it into the district's existing login. We have hosted and cared for it since launch, and we still do.
Discovery
We started with the teachers who would actually run it.
Before any design, we ran stakeholder sessions and testing with the people who live in the site: teachers, staff, parents, students, and district communications. The clearest signal was that the editors would be teachers with full-time jobs that are not web management. That shaped everything downstream, from the navigation to how the page editor needed to feel.
Design
Forty school identities, one connected system.
Every school wanted to look like itself, and the district needed it all to feel like one place. We designed an accessible system where each school sets its own colors, logo, and identity on top of shared templates and components. Each template was worked out as wireframes across desktop, tablet, and mobile before moving into full design, so the system held up everywhere before a line of it was built.
Architecture
A WordPress multisite that scales to the whole district.
Forty-plus schools run on a single WordPress multisite. One platform to maintain, one place to ship an update or a fix, and every school still independent within it. Single sign-on ties the platform into the district's existing Rapid Identity system, so staff log in with the credentials they already have instead of one more password to forget.
Editing experience
A block builder a teacher can use without training.
The editors are teachers, not web staff, so the page builder had to be obvious. We built a block-based editor where building a page means stacking ready-made pieces, no code and no markup. A teacher can update a page between classes and trust it will look right and stay accessible. Ease of use was not a nice-to-have here. It was the difference between a site that stays current and one that goes stale.
Migration
Two hundred thousand pages, moved off a system with no exit.
The old CMS did not support standard exports, so we wrote custom scripts to migrate all 200,000-plus pages of content into the new platform. Alongside the move we built the pieces a district runs on: calendaring with district-to-school event push, staff directories, a detailed permissions structure, and an emergency alert system.
Managed infrastructure
Hosted, patched, and looked after since launch.
The platform runs in a secure cloud environment we manage, with backups, monitoring, and WordPress updates handled on a regular cadence so the district never has to think about it. We trained staff at launch and keep building new templates and features as the district needs them. The same team that built it still cares for it.
Figures
40+
Schools online
Every elementary, middle, and high school in the district on one platform.
200K+
Pages migrated
Full content move from a closed CMS to WordPress, run from custom scripts.
AA
WCAG 2.1 compliance
Audited at launch and re-audited each year of the engagement.
Services Provided
What we shipped.
Tech Stack
What it runs on.
A WordPress multisite running on Google Cloud, indexed with ElasticSearch, gated by Rapid Identity SSO, and translated by gTranslate across every school in the district.
Next Project
George Mason University
Managed cloud hosting and WordPress care for one of the country's largest university WordPress ecosystems, so GMU's IT team can stay focused on the work only they can do.
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