WordPress

WordPress has been a popular choice among dsmHack teams for many years. There are over 55,000 plug-ins available to extend its functionality.

Past projects

These are some examples of past dsmHack projects which were built using WordPress:

Is WordPress right for your project?

Here are some of the pros and cons we’ve learned over the years at dsmHack to help you decide if WordPress is the right choice for your project.

Pros

  • Easy for end users to update content

    This is probably one of the biggest selling points for WordPress. It comes with a fully featured user interface for managing your site and it’s content out-of-the-box. That being said, don’t think this means there is no learning curve. If you are just building simple pages and blog post then it should be pretty simple to learn but as soon as you start using plugins for more complicated content things become a bit less user-friendly.

  • Plug-ins

    At the time this was written there were well over 55,000 plugins available for WordPress. If there is something you want to do on your site chances are there is a plugin for it. Of course, with that many plugins then that means there will likely be more than one plugin to solve your problem. So, sometimes it can be difficult to deciding which plugin you should choose.

  • Themes

    Similar to plugins there are an endless number of themes available for WordPress.

Cons

  • Maintenance

    While a WordPress site is really easy to get up and running, maintaining it can be an entirely different story. WordPress has automatic updates built-in for the platform, themes, and plug-ins. However, if you’ve made any customizations to your theme then updating it will likely overwrite all of your customizations. If you’re going to be making custom updates to the theme that you’ve chosen, it’s recommended that you use a child theme for those customizations. More information about creating a child theme can be found here.

    In addition, many times plug-ins are not compatible with all versions of WordPress so you can find yourself in a situation where you want to update WordPress but doing so would result in a plug-in no longer working. This can be very frustrating to manage and is something most of our nonprofits will have a hard time understanding. The main thing you can do to mitigate this is limit your plug-in usage to only mainstream and well supported plug-ins and either don’t customize your theme or if you do customize it make a copy of it and customize the copy.

  • Vulnerability

    Being the most popular CMS has it’s downsides and one of the biggest is that it means WordPress always has a target on it’s back. WordPress is notorious for having vulnerability issues and this is why the previous point above about maintenance is so important. You need to keep WordPress up-to-date to make sure you have the latest security patches. It’s also very important you have strong passwords and preferably two factor authentication on the admin site. Also, it’s recommended to turn off the ability to post comments on every page unless the nonprofit needs that feature.

    The WordPress community has a number of both free and paid security plug-ins to actively monitor vulnerabilities. Depending on the client and budget, a paid plug-in may be worth its price to keep the website secure.

  • Performance

    A fresh install of WordPress will have seemingly no issues with performance. However, as soon as you start adding in a theme and several plugins, more often than not you will start to see a slow down.

    There are many performance-improving plug-ins that provide caching for the WordPress site. This allows for better performance under a larger user load, or when a page has a large amount of dynamic content or plug-ins. Find out more about caching plug-ins for WordPress here.

  • Collaborative Development

    One of the biggest challenges we see at dsmHack is how difficult it can be to collaborate within WordPress. It’s common to see issues with multiple people editing the same thing at the same time and end up overriding each other’s work. There are plenty of strategies available to help mitigate these issues though and we talk a bit more about that in the Development Process section below.

Getting started

If you decide WordPress is the right choice for your team’s project then you will have several other decisions to make. Before you can really get started you will need to decide on hosting, a theme, and what your development process will look like.

Hosting

First decision you will need to make is where you will host the WordPress site. The two primary types of hosting available are managed hosts and unmanaged hosts:

  1. Managed Host - A managed host handles most of the details of deploying and managing a WordPress site for you so that you can focus on building out the design and content of the site. These hosts may provide automatic backups, upgrades, caching, SEO support, enhanced security, among other services. Overall, a managed host will be more reliable than an unmanaged host but downside to a managed host is that you tend to have less flexibility in what you can do with WordPress. For instance, many managed hosts limit which plugins you can install. Some others do not allow you to access the database that backs your website. You’ll need to weigh the pros and cons of these benefits and limitations with your team to make the right choice for your nonprofit. Some examples of popular managed hosts include but are not limited to WordPress.com, WP Engine, Kinsta, or Flywheel.
  2. Unmanaged Hosts - An unmanaged host will give you the most flexibility and often times they will allow you to deploy more than just WordPress sites. You will normally setup your site using cPanel or a similar web based configuration tool. After the WordPress site and database have been created the host won’t usually have much to do with anything else. You are likely on your own to figure out all the things mentioned above that the managed hosts would do for you. As stated above, unmanaged hosts just carry some more risk with them because all that responsibility is on you. If you are only choosing to use an unmanaged host because you want to use a plugin that the managed hosts don’t allow, just make sure your team discusses whether or not that plugin is worth it. Some examples of popular unmanaged hosts include but are not limited to Siteground, Dreamhost, Bluehost, or GoDaddy.

For more information about various hosting options you may find this write-up from CodeinWP which they titled Best WordPress Hosting. Please just note that we are not officially recommending any specific host or endorsing any recommendation from CodeinWP. Ultimately, this decision falls on your team to make.

Theme

It is very common to overhear dsmHack teams having spirited debates over which WordPress theme to choose. There is lot to consider past just the superficial. It’s very rare that a team is good with using a theme exactly how it comes out-of-the-box so you’ll need to understand which pieces you will want to change and whether or not the theme provides you the ability to customize the theme through configurations. Generally, free themes do not provide many customization capabilities so you may also need to consider paying for a premium theme that gives you those possibilities.

Development Process

At dsmHack we usually see a couple of different approaches to WordPress development.

Production development

The first is what we will call “just doing it all in production”. This is exactly how it sounds. You stand-up the website on your production domain and everyone just gets in there and starts making changes. This has some benefits. In particular, the biggest benefit for a 48-hour hack is that you are already in production from the start so there is no worry that you still need to get past that hurdle. Of course, there are the obvious downsides as well. The risk is much greater that you will make a change that breaks something and won’t be able to revert back. You really should avoid this option if the site is already live. If you are using a managed hosting solution then this might be your only choice but many of them provide staging environments so you can make changes and test them before pushing it to the production site (another advantage of managed hosts).

Local development

The other approach is to run a local version of WordPress for development. The advantage of running WordPress locally is that you remove any risk of causing impact to your other team members and the production site. You can try out new plugins and themes without worry. Also, you won’t have to worry about any network issues since everything is local. The downside is that you’ll need to come up with a deployment strategy to actually move everything from your local site to the production site and you’ll need to deal with merging your changes with changes from your team.

There is no one and only way to handle this so you will need to figure the best process that works with your team. To get the conversation going here are some examples:

The best thing to do is to figure all of this out before you start building the site. Too many times, we’ve seen teams who have their website all built out 2 hours before final presentations but it’s all on one person’s laptop and they are scrambling to figure out how to get it deployed. Having this figured out on the first day of the hack will set your mind at ease and allow you to deploy multiple times as you build the site out so that you know you will be ready to go for the final presentation. Just make sure you also manage your time effectively. You only have 48 hours so if you are still figuring out development and deployment strategies on Friday morning then you are going to fall behind.

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