Ramboll WordPress

I am happy to announce I have recently helped giving birth to a heavily customized WordPress installation for Ramboll.

The blog runs on the latest WordPress with multisite configured. All subblogs are running the same theme specifically designed for Ramboll. (Not by me).

Ramboll?

Ramboll was founded in Denmark in 1945 and the multinational engineering consulting company has since then grown to employing about 9.000 people around the world.

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramboll

At present there is only three sub-blogs live, with more coming up. In no particular order:

Urban Energy Solutions. This blog is maintained by Anders Dyrelund, and he writes about the ideas and challenges regarding new energy strategies.

The second blog is written by Graeme Smith, and he blogs about the Tallinn Town Hall Project in Estonia.

The third blog is written by Susanne Kalmar Pedersen and she blogs about the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel.

But why WordPress?

I asked one of the key people in this project from Ramboll to write a few words about the project and why they chose WordPress.

After having researched different options for creating internal as well as external corporate blogs for a while, Ramboll decided to launch a WordPress based blog in 2008. This was used by our CEO during a major integration process – Ramboll had just bought a UK-based company, and we needed to communicate directly with these new colleagues, as well as existing Ramboll employees.

While this blog had minor skinning changes, to make it easily recognisable as a Ramboll site, we had no internal resources for making major changes, or even creating a real Ramboll theme. This proved problematic when we wanted to use the blog for more general purposes, and started integrating different plug-ins.

During autumn 2010 we wanted to re-launch our blogging efforts, and a pilot project was initiated, where bloggers from different parts of the organisation posted about the theme “Urbanization”. This was in relation to a conference held at our Head Office in Copenhagen.

Lars Koudal, of CleverPlugins.com and CleverWP.com fame, helped us with the development, integrating plug-ins, and created a specific Ramboll theme.

He later customised this theme for use on the portal site http://blog.ramboll.com, and a subsequent internal blog portal.

Our bloggers now have all the benefits from WordPress’ easy-to-use back-end, and a refined front-end.

Espen Nikolaisen (Group Webmaster), Ramboll

A few nifty things

Several special things were custom-coded for this particular WordPress installation. Although some of the features could have been implemented using 3rd party plugins, it was important to have as few dependencies as possible.

In some cases where it did not make sense to code a particular function, research was done to find the most efficient solution using WordPress plugins.

Follow, Like and Email

Three particular functions were added to the custom theme, custom e-mail sending of  blog posts and then two new features:

The follow button is only available to registered users, and when any author is “followed”, the user will get an e-mail every time a new post is published by this author. Un-following equally easy.

The “like” functionality is also only available to registered users and is used to track the more popular posts across the network of blogs.

Most commented, read and popular

These numbers are used to generate the list of most popular blog posts. This is displayed via a custom widget, which can be used on the sub blogs as well.

The amount of comments and visits are also tracked. Visit data is recorded via internal code as well.

The widget displays the aggregated most commented, read and popular (using the “like” feature) across all blogs in the multisite WordPress installation.

Please note: There have been several people from many different companies involved in creating both the first internal blog and this first external WordPress blog.

I am just one of them.

ASE, LSK, EAGN: It was a pleasure working with you all