Puffbox

Word reaches me that the Brazilian Ministry of Culture uses WordPress to power the vast majority of its website. At first glance, you’d never guess – but there’s a credit in the page footer, and a number of tell-tale URLs. Plus they’ve left the WordPress ‘generator’ credit in the RSS feed template. (That’s a handy hint if you’re ever curious to find out what server software people are running.)

I could be wrong, but it looks like they’ve got a number of independent WordPress (ie not MU) installations ojn the same server: you’ve got the main site, then a group of separate blogs in a separate directory on the server. This gives them tons of flexibility: the corporate site can concentrate on being a pseudo-CMS, whilst the blogs get on with being, er, blogs. Check out the main site’s site map page, showing all the available RSS category feeds. Enough orange buttons for ya? And with the latest pages having (sequential) page IDs of 9550-odd, it’s clear they’ve put some serious effort into it.

It’s a really nice example of WordPress in the civil service, which I’ll no doubt be showing people as proof that yes, it can be done. So… how long until we see a British Cabinet-level department powering its entire corporate website with WordPress? Between you and me, I’d say about a fortnight. (Ssssh.)