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New Mexico State University
Accolade
The NMSU theme for WordPress.

About Accolade

Accolade 2 Logo

Accolade is what you’re looking at right now, a WordPress theme designed with NMSU in mind.

Accolade is an unofficial solution for NMSU websites. This solution has been created, by me, an NMSU student, for anyone at NMSU who would like to use WordPress as a CMS on an NMSU website. I have worked for the College of Business and the Honors College, and most recently Human Resources, where this solution was primarily developed and is used. Throughout it’s development, requests by other departments have been made to use this solution on other websites, of which I have been open to sharing, as an employee and a student employee.

This solution is intended to better NMSU and represent NMSU on the web, and that is it’s sole purpose. But, it is a solution that is not associated with NMSU or ICT, other than this WordPress theme conforms to NMSU’s templates and branding.

If you choose to use Accolade, it is without any guarantee from NMSU or ICT. Accolade can be used, as-is, as a theme for WordPress.

Accolade 2, the second version, is no longer in beta and is production ready. It’s powered by WordPress, a powerful and open CMS, and seeks to provide NMSU with an alternative to building webpages from the ground up without using Dreamweaver or complicated webpage publishing tools. With Accolade, all you need to do is install WordPress, install Accolade, and you’re ready to start building pages as “easily as creating a Word document!”

The many features of WordPress and Accolade 2 are:

WordPress?

WordPress is open source and is continually updated to web standards, is secure, and includes powerful and modern features NMSU websites need today. It also means WordPress is well documented; not proprietary software that threatens vendor lock-in, and requires special training. WordPress can be learned easily just by doing some Googling. WordPress is mostly problem free. In the case that something does go wrong, or you want to do something special, in almost all cases someone on the web already brought it up and came up with a solution. WordPress is also extendable and flexible. You can create and use plugins that help your website do more.

Who is using Accolade & WordPress?

Departments that are/or are going to be using Accolade & WordPress

How did all this get started?

In 2007, Renee Brown at the College of Business was asked to perform the daunting task of using the new NMSU template enforced by NMSU. I was called in to help facilitate the transition. Throughout much of our discussion, we came to find WordPress and a suitable CMS, and therefore a theme had to be developed. Much work and decision making went into the process, and by the beginning of 2009 we had a working site using WordPress and a (then not called Accolade) theme we developed. Since then I, as a student employee, have been developing Accolade to assist other departments who expressed a desire to use WordPress with specific features and functions; the solution is now named Accolade.

Let us know what you think!

Published: June 9, 2010 • Updated: October 13, 2011 • Permalink • Comment