As reported in a previous post, as a first step in working towards a more immediate and interactive online funding service, Danny from SYFAB set up the Funding News Wordpress blog.  By providing news, comment and background information that is tagged, categorised and searchable, Danny hopes to create a much more useful resource than the old system of adding funding news to the home page.  The new blog also gives service users an opportunity to comment and feedback on the content.

At a recent get-together to talk about SYFAB's funding service, discussions centred on how SYFAB could build on the blog, whether there was scope for the creation of an online community around funding in South Yorkshire, and whether whatever evolved could replace SYFAB's SIFT tool.

At the meeting, Simon Berry of RuralNet described some of the innovative ways in which they have been able to automatically incorporate content dynamically into their website.  This inspired me to look at what was possible with WordPress.

The Funding News blog, uses WordPress's free hosted service.  This gives the user access to a couple of basic visual themes and 'widgets' that add an additional layer of interactivity.

I experimented with a full WordPress installation which requires you to have a web hosting package (with certain technical requirements), but allows a much greater deal of flexibility and, crucially, allows you to upload 'plugins' developed by third parties.

Using widgets and plugins, you can add loads of additional features that turn a standard blog into a much richer interactive website.  I have created a  dummy SYFAB site to demonstrate how this works in practice.  The attached pdf document provides a visual guide to these features:

• RSS sidebar widgets: These automatically pull latest funding news from UK Fundraising and latest sector news from Third Sector Online.
• Delicious widgets: Any interesting articles that are tagged by SYFAB within Delicious are automatically populated in the "hot funding links" section.  Any service user that tags an article with "linksyfab" Within delicious will submit content to the "users funding links" (subject to moderation by SYFAB).
• Feedback and Ranking: The ranking plugins allow users to rate content in addition to providing comments as in a standard WordPress blog.  SYFAB can judge what content is popular and feature highly rated and frequently commented content through the sidebar widgets.
• Polls:  These allow SYFAB to get a quick snapshot of the prevailing opinion of service users on a range of issues.
• RSS: Users can subscribe to feeds so that they are pushed new content.
• Tag clouds, blogrolls, and categories: Presenting information in alternative ways, allowing service users to browse the content intuitively.
• Share: A button on every blog post that allows the user to bookmark the content at all the various social bookmarking sites.
• Tell a friend: Quick and simple way for the reader to forward blog content to other people that they think will be interested.

In terms of visual style, I have used the Atahualpa theme adapted to incorporate SYFAB's new branding.  I like the pink by the way!

The beauty of WordPress is that once installed it becomes just like a content management system (CMS), that can be accessed by anyone with web access.  It is perfect for an organisation like SYFAB who have found a niche where a blog is a more suitable than a website for delivering some content.

Being open source, there are plenty of developers that are falling over themselves to design useful new plugins.  And it is free!