Wordpress as a solution for a community webite

Don't get me wrong, Wordpress is a fantasitc tool but it is not the "silver bullet" that many think it is. As a Content Management System it works pretty well if you take the time to understand how it works and are prepared to put in the work to get the pre-configured "templates" (Themes) to fulfil your requiremnts for a community website.

When you do want to use Wordpress

If your requirements for a website extend past the "simple", you require the ability for users to leave comments and communicate with you via the website, then you should consider using WordPress. Doing so you will have the WordPress Community on your side doing all the hard work! This is not to say that you don't have to learn how to use Wordpress and possibly learn a little html and php.

Hosting using Wordpress

You can even use Wordpress.com to host your website or blog. Of course you will have to be using the Wordpress CMS, but that is the whole point.

You can see the Hosting plans that they offer by going to the wordpress.com website. They offer plans from £48 per annum (billed yearly). If you are comfortable with using Wordpress or you need access to the resources that they offer then this may well be the solution for you.

Comment Spam

This is an unfourtunate result of the popularity of Wordpress. Blogs and other websites that are created with Wordpress CMS that have the ability for visitors to leave comments are suseptable to having hyperlinks being posted that are attempts to boost the Page Ranking of the page that is linked.

When I attempted to run a Wordpress website I wuld say that 99% of the comments posted to the site were of this nature. While appearing to be benign all webforms, comments, message and booking pags, are targets for hackers. This can manifest itself in a number of ways. The two most importnat ways are that visitors are allowed to post links promoting themselves or services that they are paid to promote and secondly all forms are subject to SQL injection attacks - something that I will cover on another page. Both of these abuses of webforms can be carried out by "bots", again the subject of another page.

Above is a screen-shot taken from the Village Hall website in October 2021. Here you can see that there has been very little real activity in users interacting with the site.

Of all the feedback, 245 entries in the log, most of these were from when the Village Hall was running events and were responses to booking forms. Actual communications, other than bookings have been very few. The last communication was from Carnival Films inquiring about the location for filming of the new Downton movie. That was almost a year ago!

The Village Hall main enquiry form receives on average 4 spam mails a day. The spam filtering, Akismet (Jetjack), does a pretty good job in filtering these out. The spam is "purged" after a couple of weeks so that the server is not overwhelmed.

Webforms

A comment facility on a website is basically a Webform where the user/visitor enters text into fields on the web page. Used properly, by the visitor, it can be a valuable part of a website or blog. However, if not implemented well, it can be easily abused by those that have other intentions than leaving you usefull feedback or participate in an online debate.