And so the idea is born

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I attended a few sessions at the Word Camp help at Portsmouth University today. One of the sessions i really wanted to attend was to do with the application of WordPress in an enterprise.

The session got me thinking. Uh oh i hear you say.

WordPress is almost entirely community driven. That in itself is proof that it’s a fantastic tool for building websites. However, it’s obvious that more people are trying to edge WordPress into the enterprise scene, but have come across hurdles whilst doing so.

My idea is simple; create a parallel community behind WordPress that drives the development of a separate enterprise “flavour” of WordPress.

Initially this site is to drive discussion and to guage interest. Later I can see this spiralling out to include enterprise plugins, theme development and ancillary services that dovetail to provide a killer platform for enterprises.

At this stage, i would love to get an idea of interest in the project. All i ask is for you to leave a comment, or tweet me at @cssgareth.

Let’s get this baby rolling…

Gareth

  • http://twitter.com/ollieread Ollie Read

    I’d definitely be interested in helping out.

    I have but one questions, could you define what you mean by ‘enterprise plugins’. Are we talking plugins that provide functionality for the enterprise, or are we talking premium plugins? I haven’t really dealt with the license requirements of WordPress but I’m fairly certain selling plugins is again the licensing agreement that you agree to when you chose to use WordPress.

  • Anonymous

    My definition of an enterprise plugin would be something that would help it integrate with Windows Active Directory, for example. Mainly plugins that wouldn’t be used by the average joe, but would be incredibly useful for enterprises.

    I would also push for these plugins to be made free, but with “paid” support. After all, another piece of the enterprise puzzle is the support of the product. I have ideas for how this could be solved, but there needs to be demand for this flavour of wordpress.

  • Paul

    I’m in @pca_uk

  • Akif

    The main questions is; how would Enterpress distinguish itself from WordPress? Why would someone use Enterpress instead of WordPress.

  • Dan Frydman

    Brilliant – I’m in. The slide on the main challenges is a great place to start.

  • http://tetrahedra.co.uk/wordpress-in-the-enterprise/ WordPress in the Enterprise

    [...] session at WordCamp UK, the conversation continued throughout the weekend. Gareth Thompson has now created a site to help us manage that ongoing [...]

  • Chris Taylor

    I’m very interested in this as well: @mrwiblog in Twitter

  • http://markwilkinson.me Mark Wilkinson

    My experience of using WordPress with Enterprise comes within Education where blogs or WordPress installs are used by up to 1500 users in Secondary school environment. Here we managed to install WordPress running on IIS7 with little or no (more than usual) problems.

    We used the wpDirAuth plugin to allow Windows Active Directory Users to login to WordPress. They used their normal network login credentials to login to the sites and then WordPress creates them a user as a Subscriber. I could then login and give teachers and other staff higher privileges as required.

    If users change their network (Active Directory) passwords then WordPress still lets then in and changes the details for that users. It seems to work really well actually. As a plugin this works very well, however I could not have done this without the knowledge of the network admin as I know little about the WIndows Server environment.

    WordPress has also worked great for our internal sites (Intranet) to host info pages to staff. It works well as it is but I am sure there could be some refinements in order to improve it and make it better for Enterprise users. I look forward to getting involved as much as I can.

  • http://twitter.com/mkjones Michael Kimb Jones

    Hey all :) this sounds like a great idea. A list of current working useful plugins would be a good idea, let me see what I can dig out over the next couple of weeks.