Behind the Scenes of NIH, DoD, NASA: WordPress in Government

Yesterday, GovLoop and WordPress hosted the event, Do More With What You Have: Experience WordPress in Government, highlighting the power of WordPress to modernize and optimize government websites. The event included numerous case studies of websites that use WordPress CMS services, which are robust, scalable and adaptable with numerous plug-ins and add-ons. At the event, government employees were connected with other successful WordPress users, developers and implementers to share best practices for smarter, more efficient and dynamic government websites.

Missed the event? Check out the slides here.

[Above: The Library of Congress uses WordPress to power its blog.]

The first presenter of the event was Peter Slutsky, Director of Platform Services at Automatittc/WordPress.com VIP. Slutsky presented on the State of WordPress in Government, giving a brief history and overview of WordPress and its ability to transform websites.

One of the first takeaways of the presentation was that WordPress is ubiquitous. WordPress powers 18% of the web and there are over 60 million WordPress sites. So, chances are that you’re probably already interacting with WordPress just by surfing the web.

Important to those in the web development community is that there are three flavors of WordPress:

1. Self-Hosted grants complete control over the code and web experience
2. WordPress.com is the largest WordPress site in the world. It’s a SaaS with easy set-up and self-service.
3. VIP is the best of both worlds solution. It has all the benefits of WorldPress.com plus the power to run custom code.

Slutsky also gave some answers to frequently asked questions regarding WordPress CMS capabilities:

Is WordPress only for blogs? No.
WordPress also serves an enterprise CMS and has lots of integration opportunities with APIs, plug-ins, social media.

Is it scalable? Yes.
One only needs to look at the stats of WordPress.com to see how scalable WordPress is in terms of traffic and volume. The site has 4 billion page views per month and over 500k posts and 400k comments every day.

Is WordPress secure? Yup.
Thousands of organizations are involved in making WordPress secure and VaultPress provides real-time back-ups and security monitoring.

Is WordPress mobile? Yes.
WordPress has mobile apps for all major devices that can be tailored through optimized themes and responsive design.

Slutsky highlighted that WordPress’ core philosophy is to be simple and elegant, but also powerful and flexible. The proof is in the pudding, so here are four government examples of WordPress in action:

• NASA has been using WordPress for years on multiple sites including open.nasa.gov, data.nasa.gov and code.nasa.gov.

• The Director of the National Institutes of Health uses WordPress to highlight new happenings in health.

• Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) uses WordPress as a CMS and various WordPress plugins to make the agency’s information available to the public.

• CIO.gov is the website of the U.S. Chief Information Officer and the Federal CIO Council and uses WordPress.org as its flavor of choice.