WordPress Best Practices for Government
WordPress is a customizable open-source content management system that allows you to easily organize, manage and publish your content. It started as a blogging platform, but has become the most popular CMS platform around. WordPress has broad appeal primarily because it is easy for non-technical people to set up and use. Its main purpose is to make it easy to publish content, instead of offering a ton of technical functionality that most sites don’t need or would never use.
Benefits include:
- Streamlines your work by automating many content management tasks
- Allows you to easily publish structured content which supports syndication, sharing, and re-use via Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), or other methods
- Follows W3C standards
- Makes it easy to organize and format Web pages
- Supports workflows, so different users can have different levels of access to publish
WordPress offers many ready-made and community-supported themes to customize the look and feel of your site, and plug-ins to add additional features and functionality. Some themes support responsive design, to make your site more accessible on different devices.
It was originally designed as a blog publishing tool, so it excels at publishing blog content, or any sort of simple, text-based content such as news releases or reports.
It’s a good choice if you have a simple, static site, and primarily publish documents, though it's also used by larger sites as the New York Times. If you need database-driven or interactive content, it may require other tools such as a Django Web framework to supplement and support these features. If you’re not sure which type of content you have, read this article explaining static versus dynamic, database-driven content.
Specific Policy or Legal Requirements
- Digital Government Strategy (May 2012)—can help agencies meet requirements around Open Content and Shared Services
How to Implement
WordPress is simple to use “out of the box” and ideal for smaller sites. There are both free and paid versions.
- If you want to host your own site, and customize with your own themes and plug-ins, download the latest free version at WordPress.org
- If you’re looking for hosting and tech support, visit WordPress.com to learn about the paid version
WordPress is good at basic content management, but you may need to install additional plugins to support larger sites or expanded functionality, such as:
- Support for content syndication, such as the WordPress JSON API plugin
- Improvements to editorial workflow, such as with WordPress Edit Flow
- Capability to move content from staging to production environment, such as with a 3rd-party RAMP content deployment plugin
For WordPress to work best, you’ll need to structure your content with clearly-defined content types and metadata. Structured content adapts best to internal workflows, so be clear about the kinds of data you want to publish, and ensure you have a solid content inventory around content types (press release, report, etc.).
WordPress offers lots of help around themes; they have a rich code repository and good technical thinking, and a vibrant user community. If you need more support, that is also available via WordPress.com.
Examples
- Vanderbilt University Web Communications—uses a standard WordPress theme for all University News and Communications sites
- ConsumerFinance.gov uses WordPress and Django
- Many agencies use WordPress for blogs, including the State Department, Department of Education, and GSA's DigitalGov Blog
Resources
- WordPress.org features—key features of WordPress
- How WordPress took the CMS Crown from Drupal and Joomla—case study on why WordPress has become the most popular CMS
- W3Techs report ranking popular content management systems
- Learn more about content management systems
Content Lead:
Rachel Flagg
Page Reviewed/Updated: November 23, 2012
