If you go to the virtual developer center  you may not see many differences from the original template (read the beginning of the story here) but in fact, we have done plenty of work behind the curtains.

Let me start by saying that  configuring a wordpress site is much easier than a drupal one (remember that the Modeling Languages portal is using Drupal so I’m using both at the same time). Nevertheless, one thing that I dislike from wordpress is the lack of “official” plug-ins for each task. In Drupal, most times you only have a single plugin (module in drupal terminology) for each functionality while in WordPress you have many. This is good when you have the time to examine and test all options but not so much when you want to have your system in production ASAP.

If case anybody is interested the list of wordpress plugins we have installed (so far; we are still missing a couple of additional plugins to improve SEO aspects) is the following:

• Google Analytics: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/
• Sendblaster (managing newsletters for the portal, definition of subscription forms): http://www.sendblaster.com/wordpress-newsletter-double-optin-widget/
• Contact Form 7 plugin (definition of several contact forms for the site): http://contactform7.com/
• Antispam bee: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/antispam-bee
• Theme my login (provides a login/registration form that follows the general style of your site): http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/theme-my-login/
• Social Connect (allows users to connect using existing google, facebook, twitter,… accounts) : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-connect/
• Addthis (share links in the posts): http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/addthis/
• BackWPup ( Backup the database and all your wordpress files. You can configure the plugin so that everything gets stored in your Amazon S3 account, dropbox or your disk): http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backwpup/
• Recent Posts (to create a page with a list of the recent posts of your site): http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/recent-posts-plugin/installation/
• Feedburner FeedSmit extend (improve integration with feedburner for the RSS feeds): http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedburner-setting/faq/
• PHP Execution plug-in (execution of PHP snippets in your pages): http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/php-execution-plugin/
• WordPress SEO by Yoast (all in one solution for your SEO needs): http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/