Within the College of Liberal Arts there are faculty and staff that work with multiple departments and thus need to be listed as a contact on multiple department and center website people directories. Thankfully, our WordPress Multisite system allows us to create a user profile for someone once and share that data across multiple sites. This allows the person to update their profile in one location and have it automatically update every site on which they're listed. The only complication is that the person must be a member of each site they need to be listed on, and making someone a member of a site can only be done by an administrator.
Until now Site Managers needing to add someone (who already had an account on Multisite) to their website's people directory needed to notify us and we could add them. This adds work for Site Managers and us, and though it may be small every little bit counts so yesterday we created a new page in the Users section of the WordPress dashboard called "Add Existing". This page allows Site Managers to type in an email address or eName of anyone who already has an account on Multisite, select a role, and add them as a member of their website. Once added they can be listed on people directory pages and their profile can be viewed in the host website design.
It's not a huge change but it's one more step towards our mission, with the WordPress Multisite system, of empowering our departments and centers with control over their own websites.
Tech note: WordPress technically has this functionality built in, but only super-administrators can add an existing user as a member of a site without sending an invitation email to a person, which requires action on said persons part. The new "Add Existing" page allows Site Managers to add existing users immediately, without sending an invitation email.