Nice to see the team at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport launching a new WordPress-based site this week, for the distribution and archival of their transparency data. They promise the monthly publication of financial data, with others ‘as appropriate (at least annually)’. Data is being posted as CSV, as per official guidance, and uploaded as attachments to WordPress posts – meaning it can be viewed by (hierarchical) category, and/or month of publication, or via RSS feed.
In fact, it’s precisely the model I’ve been discussing with the Wales Office, for implementation in the next week or two… although in their case, we’ve been using categorised WordPress posts for two and a half years, integrating things like FOI disclosures into their news stream; so it’s really just following an established model.
It’s a nice touch to see DCMS using a government-developed WordPress theme – namely, the Digital Britain/Clean Home design by BIS. The site looks to be hosted at Rackspace, like Culture’s (ASP-based) corporate site… What? WP on a Microsoft IIS7 server? Hey, why not – WordPress doesn’t have to sit on Linux, and Microsoft have been love-bombing the WordPress community recently. Having said that, I still feel somewhat uncomfortable at seeing a WordPress logo on a microsoft.com page. (If you’re determined to run WP on Microsoft, this site will be useful.)
If you’re coming along to the Word Up Whitehall event on Wednesday, you’ll be able to ask CIO Mark O’Neill all about it.
Response
It’s a great move, not least because it’s a strategic decision made by the organisation to acquire the skills and capability to work in WordPress, and not just something someone in Marketing has been able to sneak in under the radar. And from a WordPress point of view, it shows how the platform can be used for much more than blogging and even consultation sites: it’s a way of publishing structured data with associated feeds, potentially for multiple organisations, at very low cost.
Disclosure: I’ve done some coaching work with the DCMS team, but this project is entirely their own. I suppose I hacked around with the lovely Clean Home theme too, so have some culpability for that, but in a past life 🙂