Whatever your political views may be, WordPress was just recognized by the Obama Foundation. Duly noted by WPTavern, organization’s new website is based on WordPress 4.7. The team behind the development went as far as to introduce WP REST API.
Oh hai WP REST API pic.twitter.com/EBGDexNwRA
— Daniel Bachhuber (@danielbachhuber) 20 stycznia 2017
Digging through BuiltWith (or just by looking into website code), we can confirm that Obama’s page is indeed a WordPress one. What else do we know?
Here comes:
- It uses jQuery as a JavaScript library.
- There’s jQuery Cycle Plugin for galleries.
- ZURB Foundation is the front-end framework.
- It utilizes Google Tag Manager (to make marketers and devs jobs easier).
- YoastSEO is also installed (great choice, by the way).
- CloudFlare content delivery network is in place.
For all of you wondering, we don’t think that WordPress was Mr. Obama’s choice. To make sure, we took the liberty of asking him about it. No response so far, but…
A bit more about the tech behind Obama.org
ZURB Foundation (or just Foundation) is a responsive front-end framework providing a grid, HTML, and CSS UI components, templates, or code snippets. That includes typography, forms, buttons, navigation, and other components. Moreover, Foundation may also incorporate optional JavaScript extensions. Foundation is an open-source project maintained by ZURB since 2011.
jQuery, on the other hand, is a cross-platform JavaScript library that simplifies the client-side scripting of HTML. As a free, open-source software it became one of the most popular JS libraries in use today.
While the two above are well-known for developers, there’s also something else. Google Tag Manager makes both devs and marketers lives easier. Instead of asking the coder to install a tracking code (or a new feature from an outside source), a marketer can easily copy and paste the snippet into a “tag”. It works automagically.
YoastSEO is one of the most efficient plugins for WordPress – one that guarantees SEO optimization and scans for readability issues within the blog post. It comes in free and paid versions, both of which are highly usable.
CloudFlare (or any other content delivery network) comes in handy when you expect traffic incoming from various countries and continents. The goal of such network is to serve content to end-users with high availability and performance.
Of course, there are a lot more components that make a website successful, pleasant to use, responsive and fast. You have to take care of the image file sizes, optimizing for different browsers (both desktop and mobile), and keeping your code clean and well documented.
The Obama Foundation page, created by Blue State Digital, does the job just fine.