WordPress Publisher Blog

Sam Guzik over on CoPress.org details the successful relaunch of Student Life, the “independent newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis”, on the WordPress MU platform:

In their evaluation of various platform choices they concluded:

“Although Drupal is also extremely powerful, we found that WordPress’s interface was better suited to a workflow that would begin to allow non-technical reporters and editors to work within our CMS.”

You can read more details about this project on CoPress.org.

[ Visit Student Life ]

I’ve been chatting with the folks at Tierra Innovation and WNET.ORG (Channel Thirteen in New York) on their impressive collaboration utilizing WordPress MU as a CMS for WNET.ORG’s network of high-traffic websites:

Using WordPress MU’s built-in features along with custom themes and plugins such as WPDB Profiling, they made it easier and much cheaper for WNET.ORG to roll out multiple sites that provide a great user experience as well as editorial and creative flexibility. Before the new CMS, WNET.ORG could only launch 1-2 sites per month. Now, they have the capability of rolling out 5-10 sites per month for a fraction of the cost.

What’s very cool is that Tierra and WNET put together a white-paper detailing how this project came about and how they ultimately decided on WordPress as the platform of choice. You can read all about it in the white-paper titled: How a Non-Profit Media Company Profits from Building Open Source Online Publishing Platform (PDF) (embedded below using scribd):

[ Visit WNET.ORG & Tierra Innovation ]

The Ford Story is a recently launched site committed to making Ford’s progress towards getting new high-quality, fuel-efficient cars, and trucks on the road today transparent and open. The site is completely powered by WordPress and uses WordPress as a CMS to deliver a wide variety of static content, videos, photos, and dynamic updates.

We talked to Scott Monty from the Global Digital Communications group at The Ford Motor Company to see what the company’s experience using WordPress has been like so far.

Why did you choose WordPress over other publishing platforms?

We wanted to use a flexible platform that would easily integrate with the social web. The Ford Story is going to be a dynamic site, and we wanted to be ready to respond to the needs of the day, so we needed a technology that would allow us to take a modular approach. Knowing that we could use plugins and other components that connect with the rest of the web was a strong selling point.

What was the process of designing and developing The Ford Story site with WordPress like for you and your team?

The team that did the actual development hadn’t used WordPress for Ford before, but from what I understand, they were immediately able to work with WordPress and make it function the way we needed. As we have continued to develop and tweak the site, WordPress has allowed to do so on the fly.

What aspect of WordPress has been the biggest help in getting your site up and running and keeping it going how you want it?

We’re going to be giving the site a bit of an overhaul in a few weeks, and the team has been actively testing code, plugins, and different features of the site. The ability to quickly swap in and out these components has made the process pretty smooth.

Where else is WordPress used at Ford?

We already use it for our Social Media Press Releases and for our Autoshows site.

How does WordPress fit in with Ford’s broader move towards embracing social media?

Our vision for social media is to connect consumers with the people of Ford and to allow them to connect with each other, providing value along the way. We hope that as we turn The Ford Story into the social media hub for the company that this is clearer than ever. We know that WordPress is a widely respected, well-known, and community-developed platform in the social media space. It means that we’re more closely aligned with current trends and Web technologies and that we can develop the site more quickly as we move into the future.

Intruders.tv, an international web tv network, recently relaunched their globally focused channels, having switched to WordPress MU as their publishing platform of choice.

Since they started out two years ago, the Intruders team have been bringing high-quality, high-profile tech/Internet interviews to the world with HD video, in a number of languages, from a refreshing breadth of locations. Head of content and Co-Founder Vincent Camara explains:

“Throughout last year, Intruders tv registered over 10 million video plays, conducted over 600 interviews and have a library of over 300 hours of HD content available”

The new, streamlined MU implementation and design (by howard/baines) provides a seamless experience between the growing number of channels Intruders.tv is adding to its rosters.

Retaining a focus on the innovators “creating tomorrow’s business, today“, Intruders is expanding the breadth of its offerings to cover Film, Fashion, Mobile and Cleantech, in addition to partnering with leading technology news site the INQUIRER as a content provider.

Best of luck to the team, and a warm welcome to the WordPress family!

[ Visit Intruders.tv ]

Michael Biven, CTO of Laughing Squid, wrote a great post highlighting how to optimize your self-installed WordPress setup:

Taking responsibility of your WordPress site by keeping it up to date to the latest version and managing it’s load on the server hosting it is just as important as the content you’re writing for it. Security updates, performance improvements and other bug fixes will help keep your site running smoothly, but there are a few other steps you can take to improve it’s performance.

Scott Beale confirms that these optimizations have had a big impact on the Laughing Squid Blog:

We use almost all of these recommendations on Laughing Squid , which has helped to keep server loads low and things running smoothly when it comes to front page Diggs and ongoing high traffic from sources like Google search and StumbleUpon.

Read the full post on Michael’s blog: Optimizing performance for WordPress