MIS 2501 Hands-on Project #2: WordPress
WordPress is the world’s most popular open source self-hosted blogging solution. As of August 2013, it was being used by more than 18.9% of the top 10 million websites. Although it’s mostly known for its blogging capabilities, it’s also a content management solution (CMS). This allows you to do many of the things you would normally be able to do on a website. The thought process behind WordPress being open source is that software can be copied easily and cheaply. Once a copy of a software is sold, the profit margin shrinks on it. People make money on WordPress by developing custom themes, commercial plug-ins, hosting public websites, or even by designing those websites for companies.
WordPress interests me because you can do so much more with it than just blog. You can build your own web directory, create a private membership site, create your own online store, or start a discussion forum. For my demonstration, I created a sports discussion forum. The first thing I did was change the plain background to an image that I uploaded. Then, I started to add widgets, such as the search bar, top posts, meta, and the Facebook Like Box. Finally, I added a poll to a page in order to get more feedback and user interaction from members.
Click here for demonstration.