Software Project Management project on WordPress

WordPress
Authors:
Lin Wu
Meng Wei
Namita Nair
Rahul Gupta
Shilpa Sattiraju
Kanchan Kusmude
Rajesh kumar Ilango
v1.3 6/3/2016 1

Agenda
• What problems are we trying to solve?
• In-depth description of WordPress
• Technical functionality
• Relationship to others
• Project Objectives
• Principals
• Software Development Model
• Conclusion
• Recommendation
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The Next Big Thing
Focus on helping bloggers
Focus on helping developers
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Blogger Problems
• Typography perfection
• Write without problem
• Distraction free reading
• Social profiles
• Search engine friendly
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Developer Problems
• Simple development environment
• Availability of plugin extensions and themes
• Faster application build with readily available API’s and
support
• Content flexibility
• Availability library support
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In-depth description of
WordPress
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About
Uniqueness
Design Principles

About WordPress
• Founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little
• Started in 2003 with its first release being on May 27,
2003 as a fork of b2/cafelog
o Very few users
o Motivated to build an OSS project to enhance typography of
everyday writing
• Have grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool
with millions of users
• Has become the most popular blogging system with
more than 60 million websites being built on WordPress
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Uniqueness of WordPress
• Apart from being a blogging tool, it has evolved to be a
content management system(CMS) too.
• It has a web template system using a template processor
to combine web templates to form finished web pages.
o A template processor is a piece of software designed to combine
one or more templates with a data model to produce one or more
result documents.
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Next in line for
WordPress
• Maintain strong backward compatibility.
• Improve iteratively and avoid sweeping changes.
• Implement major new features as plugins.
• Continue betterment of front-end editing and content
design.
• Eliminate the myth amidst users that WordPress is just a
blogging platform.
• Expand the features of the provided application
framework.
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Design Principles
Philosophy
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Philosophy
• Out of the Box
• Design for the Majority
• Decisions, not Options
• Clean, Lean, and Mean
• Striving for Simplicity
• Vocal Minority

Technical Functionality
Web Software
Ease of Use
Own Doman Name
Customer Support

Web Software
• Used to create an attractive website or blog
• Provides thousands of plugins and themes to help
transform the website
• The core software is built by hundreds of community
volunteers
o Highly customizable
o Evolved with thousands of contributed additions over time
o Detailed documentation of the core code to aid effective use
• Easy to install and use.

Ease Of Use
• Simplicity and Flexibility
o Makes online publishing quick and easy
o Allows user to create any type of website, blogs and applications
with themes and extended plugins
• Publishing Tools
o Easy content management and offers content protection by
securing posts and pages with a password
• User Management
o Allows variety of contributors for a website, and let others be just
a part of the community
• Search Engine Optimized
o Plenty of SEO plugins are available which facilitate optimized
search results for the user websites

Own Domain Name
• WordPress.com blog comes with a free address, (like
example.wordpress.com).
• Users can get a custom domain name (like
example.com) with some nominal charges.
• Users can add multiple domains to their blog in which
one domain is set as primary domain.

Customer Support
• Documentation
o Detailed information about everything from installation to
creating themes and plugins
• Support Forum
o An active online community which is the heart of WordPress.
Provides help to users through blogs posts and tutorials
• WordCamp or Meetup
o Informal, community-organized events that are put together by
WordPress users. Everyone from casual users to core
developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other

Relationship To Others

Upstream & Downstream
PHP &
MySQL
WordPress
Users
Blogs/
Websites
Downstream
Upstream

Project Objectives
Technical
Financial
Political

Technical Objectives
• Multi-user and Multi-blogging
• Integrated Link Management
• Plugin System
• Theme System
• Application Framework
• Custom Content Types
• The Latest Libraries

Financial Objectives
• No training costs
• Ease of use resulting in increased efficiency
• Promote sharing, learning, and improvement through
forums and WordPress community
• Cut down the implementation and maintenance costs

Political Objectives
• Global platform for blogging, application development
and content management
• Allows developing user websites in 70+ languages
(multilingual)
• Widely used and ease of use
• Easily integrated because of cross platform feature

Principals
Major Principals
Model comparison
Process assessment

Major Principals
• Maintainers
o Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little- the founders of WordPress
• Sponsors
o 404gotten.org, Image Gallery, WP sponsor Flip Wall, AdSense
Anna, SponsorMe
• End users: Some of the world’s biggest brands and
industries
o NFL, TED, CNN, TIME, DOWNJONES, UPS, etc…
• Distributors
o Woocommerce Brand/ Narnoo Distributor
• Competitors
o Joomla , Drupal, Blogger, Movable Type, Tumblr , Typepad

Software development
model
Development Model
Variations in Waterfall model
Process assessment criteria
Measurable Results
Feature Comparison with Competitors

Development Model
• WordPress typically follows waterfall release model with
the following 5 phases:
o Planning and securing team leads
o Development work begins
o Beta
o Release Candidate
o Launch

Variations in waterfall
model
• Planning and securing team leads phase lasts for a
week, this stage involves design phase in typical
waterfall mode
• Unlike many organizations that squeeze testing part
because of underrating design in the real world,
WordPress development team of beta testing takes a big
percentage of time in the whole project
• Dedicated stage and time for feedback
• Chat rooms that address goals of different stages in the
development model

Process assessment
criteria
• Open source & relatively small team of core members
• Relatively large team with volunteers around the world
• Stream of feature additions and bug fixes
• Competitor assessments
• Lack of unified physical presence of teams

Measurable Results
• Major release: 2 - 9 months.
• Upgrades: 1 - 9 weeks
Releases:
• Feature
o Involving functionalities and usability enhancements
• Maintenance
o Patches to fix bugs, testing version, implement new features.
• 147 releases since 2003
o 2 - 9 new features for every major release
o 3 - 7 bug fixes for every minor release/ upgrades.

Feature Comparison
Features WordPress Joomla Drupal
Cost Free Free Free
Platform Req. Cross platform Cross platform Cross platform
Ease of use
(Training/Cost
to the company)
Simplest
Moderately
complex
Complex
Skills required
Lowest, good
for beginners
Moderate Hardest
Popularity
Most popular
(more than 140
million
downloads)
Next popular
(more than 30
million
downloads)
More than 15
million
downloads

Feature Comparison
Features WordPress Joomla Drupal
Free themes 2000+ 900+ 1800+
Free plugins 27000+ 7000+ 24000+
Updates
frequency
42 days 36 days 51 days
Area of usage
Blogs, corporate
websites, small-
medium sized
websites
E-commerce,
social
networking sites
For all types
Security Moderate Moderate Highl
Search engine
optimization
(SEO)
High Moderate Highest

Conclusions
Main Objectives
Other factors to consider

Main Objectives
• Reduce software licensing expenses
o OSS
• To improve IT responsiveness to its internal customers
by having more control over key IT systems
o Control over content
o SEO friendly
o Easy social media integration

Other Factors to consider
• Easy to run into SEO issues
• Basic learning about the tool is required. Not one click
install yet
• Admin UI should be simpler to use
• Has not able to tackle the enterprise clients
• Mobile is very challenging because it’s fundamentally on
closed platforms

Recommendation

References
• https://wordpress.org/about/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_template_system
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_processor
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
• http://wplift.com/alternatives-to-wordpress
• http://www.cmscritic.com/which-cms-make-up-the-wordpress-
competition/
• https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/how-the-release-cycle-
works/
• http://womeninbusiness.about.com/od/interviews/a/Five-Key-
Benefits-Of-Using-Wordpress-For-Your-Website.htm
• http://inside.envato.com/the-future-of-wordpress/

References
• https://wordpress.com/website/?source=google&campaign=hsb&gcli
d=CNnN5eDwxcECFRBrfgodkSwAIg
• https://managewp.com/14-surprising-statistics-about-wordpress-
usage
• http://inspirationfeed.com/wordpress/tips/5-reasons-you-might-not-
want-to-use-wordpress/
• http://www.bigtunainteractive.com/wordpress-vs-
drupal/#.VG0GwvnF_w7
• https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/4.1/
• https://wordpress.org/news/category/releases/
• https://wordpress.org/about/features/
• http://oboxthemes.com/theme/principles

Version History
Version Date Description
v1.0 October 29 ,2014 Draft Project Report
v1.1 November 9, 2014
Changes made based on draft report
feedback
v1.2 November 13, 2014
Report based on slide time
categorization
v1.3 November 19, 2014 Final Project Report

Back up Slides

Uniqueness in WordPress
Web Template
System
Template
Processor

Bill of Rights
• Licensed under General Public License (GPLv2 or later),
that provide 4 core freedoms
• Freedom to
o run the program, for any purpose
o study how the program works and change it as per our wish
o redistribute
o distribute copies of modified versions to others

Technical Objectives
• Development tools to help novice developers
• Support for tagging of posts

Lead Developers
Principal Role
Ryan Boren Bug Whisperer
Mark Jaquith Director of Whitespace
Matt Mullenweg Head of Bug Creation
Andrew Nacin Entomologist in Residence
Andrew Ozz Tiny Manly Code Editor (MCE)
Peter Westwood Title Rebuilding

Other Principals
• Design
o Ben Dunkle, Matt Thomas and Jen Mylo
• Documentation and Support
o Mark Riley and Lorelle
• Others
o Michael Heilemann
o Matthew Paul Thomas
o Ulf Harnhammar
o Brian Meidell
o Movable Type, Drupal, and TextPattern for ideas and inspiration

Other Principals
• Contributing Developers
o Michael Adams
o Nikolay Bachiyski
o Sergey Biryukov
o Cristi Burcă
o Jon Cave
o Helen Hou-Sandí
o Dion Hulse
o Daryl Koopersmith
o Dominik Schilling
o Joseph Scott
o Andy Skelton
o Samuel Wood
• Developer Emeriti
o Robin Adrianse
o Dougal Campbell
o Donncha O Caoimh
o Robert Deaton
o David House
o Alex King
o Mike Little
o Michel Valdrighi
o Owen Winkler

Principals Motivation
• Maintainer
• Matt Mullenweg(wiki) and Mike(wiki) Little- the founders of
WordPress.
• Matt Mullenweg- Started using the b2/cafeblog in 2002 and
also contributed to the code. In 2003 he announced forking
the software to bring it up to date with the web standards. He
joined Mike Little after that and together they started
WordPress with the underlying b2 codebase.

Model comparison

Additional Features
• Media Management
• Own your data
• Full Standards Compliance
• Built-in Comments

Own Domain Name
• Users can get a custom domain name (like
example.com) with some nominal charges:
o A domain can be registered through WordPress.com on a price
starting at $18.00 per domain, per year
o The $8.00 Private Registration upgrade will hide the user’s
contact information, which is open to world otherwise
o Adding a pre-owned domain costs $13.00 per domain, per year

Own Domain Name
• Users can add multiple domains to their blog in which
one domain is set as primary domain
o User can add more domains to cover common misspellings of
the primary domain
o All other domains will redirect to the primary domain. Visitors can
get to the blog using any of the added domains
o The address visitors see in the browser’s address bar will always
be the primary domain. So visitors will still get to the right place
even with a typo

Blogging Theme
• Built a minimalist blog theme
o Without extra
o Easy to read
o Remove Unnecessary noise
o Connect visitors to online presence shortly
• Built an attractive place
o Bloggers blog again
o Readers want to read again

Statistics on user websites
and blogs on WordPress
• 48% of Technorati’s Top 100 Blogs are managed with
WordPress
• 74.6 Million Sites depend on WordPress
• These sites vary from business to individual levels
• Popular Websites hosted on WordPress:
o Vogue, The New Yorker, Time, ESPN, SAP, Best Buy
o University Websites: Harvard, MIT, USC, Georgia Tech

Benefits for our company
• Benefits for our company principals by implementing WP
in our company are as follows:
• Since its a content management tool we can manage the
content easily through publishing tools provided by WP
• It is secure as no one else has access to the content.
• Easy installation and updates so more time can be spent
on productive work.

• Theme system: can create themes for clients,
customers, and WordPress users. The API provides
extensibility to create themes as required. Can give
away themes for free to users in the Theme Repository
• Plugins sys: The APIs allows to create plugins to extend
WordPress. A plugin repository is available to host
plugins on it
• Community: Is the heart of WordPress. Can ask a
question on the support forums and get help from a
volunteer, attend a WordCamp or Meetup, read blogs
posts and tutorials about WordPress.

• Application framework: provides a lot of the features like
translations, user management, HTTP requests,
databases, URL routing and more for developing
applications
• Latest libraries: Has latest script libraries including
jQuery, Plupload, Underscore.js and Backbone.js.
Always ready to accept new tools
• Content type: Comes with default content types, has
flexibility to create own custom post types, taxonomies,
and metadata.

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