The current English department site is dependent on a content management system. The people in the department I've talked with find the system brittle and fragile, so are unwilling to make substantial modifications as they fear bringing the entire department site down. I haven't used the system myself.

They want a new section in their site dedicated to featuring specific course offerings. They are not confident they can add this to their current site. They have decided to create a word-press instance within their current account to accommodate the "featured courses" stuff while they are building their new cascade site.

So we temporarily have an unconventional situation of a proprietary website infrastructure which has a word-press instance stuffed into a folder in the middle of the site.

I made a backup of the site as it existed before adding the WP folder, just for safekeeping. I assisted MH (post-doc) in getting the WP instance set up and configured. In a couple of weeks of use, there have been no collisions or corruptions of the proprietary CMS or the WP instance, so it looks like this setup will survive until replaced by the Cascade site.