WordPress dominates the market when it comes to Content Management... Read more

WordPress dominates the market when it comes to Content Management Systems. Just look at these stats. It has nearly 60% of the market in 2017. What makes it so popular? One of the biggest reasons is it has a robust framework that can be molded into whatever shape you require. One cool thing we can do with WordPress is bake a bid management system into our WordPress website. See the video above for the first part of the tutorial.

Requirements and business cases for the bid management system

• Content type that contains several fields where solicitation / bid metadata can be entered: Ensure highest level of data quality on the backend through field validation and field type determination. Improve searchability on frontend.
• Solicitations hidden behind a registration wall: Without mandating users sign up, we cannot see who is interested, which we can then use to tailor
• Additional fields on WordPress registration page: By default, the registration page captures a valid email address and username. That information tells us next to nothing about the type of people/organizations signing up to view our solicitations.
• Solicitations status changes from published to draft upon reaching deadline: Only current solicitations showed be accessible to end users. WordPress contributors should not have to remember to revisit the solicitation and manually unpublish it once the deadline is past.
• Solicitation download tracking: We want to know how many users downloaded the solicitation attachments to get a good feel for its popularity.

Recommended ingredients (and their plugins) to meet the requirements for a bid management system

• Custom content types (Pods Framework)
• Registration page customization (S2Member Pro)
• Subscription and page restrictions (S2Member Pro)
• Post expiration (Post Expirator)
• Google Events tracking (GADWP)