Wordpress for Non-Profits and NGO’s

WordPress is an open source CMS (Content management system) powered by PHP and MySQL.  It is often used as a blog publishing application. It has many features including a plugin architecture and a templating system. Used by over 300 of the 10,000 biggest websites, WordPress is the most popular blog software in use today. As of September 2009, it was being used by 202 million websites worldwide.

Flexible design (Themes)
You will never run short of templates or themes when using WordPress. If you don’t like the themes that come with the default installation of WordPress, you can hunt on the Internet and you will find thousands of free. You can even find themes directly from with in the wordpress and with few clicks have it setup and ready to run.

Flexible functionality (Plugins)
There are several thousands of WordPress plugins in the WordPress community and new plugins are coming out everyday. WordPress plugins for NGO's and Non-Profits that allow you to do just about anything that you want and can be installed in few clicks. For example, you want to connect to Twitter, you can search the Wordpress database and find the right plugin.

Easy update
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade is a plugin that automatically upgrades your wordpress version to the latest files provided by wordpress.org. Not only does the automatic Upgrade make it possible to upgrade Wordpress core, but also all plugins and themes.

Good for seo (search engine optimization)
Search Engines have to be definitely kept in mind when building a website. WordPress uses different functions which allow it to be search engine friendly. For example sending pings to other sites, making categories, tagging your posts, use of h1/h2 tags etc. With very simplie change the system also offers seo friendly urls.

Great support community
There is a large user community backing the development of Wordpress. So, whenever you face any problems, you can go through all the available WordPress forums and communities and find answers for almost all your questions.

Easy setup
WordPress is really easy to install. It is included in the automatic installer on host sites like Fantastico Autoinstaller tool and can be activated in just a few clicks! If your host does not support Autoinstallers like Fantastico, you can find instructions on the wordpress website.

Multiple users
When using WordPress, people who have an account on your website have different options for control over the website. User roles are not complicated, you can easily change and control the user access levels.

Easy connection to Social media.
With different plugins you can easily share your content with different social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

User friendly
More robust and feature-filled CMS tend to be weak in user-friendliness and high on complexity. Teaching beginners to handle Wordpress is easy task.

It is free
Wordpress is completely free, you can get plugins, support and themes for free. All it requires is some time to find the right setup for you website. NGO’s and Non-Profits usually have access to volunteers that have some experience with computing and Wordpress offers great value and project to voluntaries.

It is stable and easy to update
Even though Wordpress is free it has more development capacity than most professional cms systems can offer with thousands of voluntary developers. The system is very stable and easy to update.

It is portable
Wordpress is easy to backup and unlike many professional solution it is easy to move to different host.

Build community
There are many plugins available to make your website in to community around your NGO or Non-Profit.

Your host needs to have at least. You can select from the thousands that offer:

• PHP version 4.3 or greater
• MySQL version 4.1.2 or greater
• The mod_rewrite Apache module

You can then obtain Wordpress software from wordpress.org website. You need access to your site and its directory and software to proceed with the installation via ftp and setup the mysql database.