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

After you’ve watched the first video, go to the second in the series here.