Ask A Mentor

2010 marks Team 2449, Out of Orbit’s third season in the FIRST Robotics Competition. In our brief history, we’ve had great support from other teams and have enjoyed helping others as well. We’re eager to extend our hands to others across the competition barrier.

To help other teams, especially rookie teams and those who are thinking they might like to join or form an FRC team, we’re putting some energy behind this “Ask A Mentor” BLOG.

To have your questions answered by one of our dedicated mentors, please feel free to either send us an e-mail with “Ask A Mentor” in the subject line, or comment on any of our Ask A Mentor BLOG posts. We’ll do our best to meet your needs.

This year the web team is using WordPress to develop the team’s website. Why? Well, there are a variety of reasons. The main reason is that we wanted to use a Content Management System (CMS) to make development easier with a large team. A CMS allows users to add content independent of the site’s formatting and style. No special software is needed.  You can work on the site from anywhere that has internet access. Site development with a CMS is a method typically employed by web professionals, so it’s a great skill for our students to learn.

We chose WordPress as our CMS for several reasons:
It’s easy to learn.
There’s tons of support out there in the WP development community.
There are oodles of great free themes out there to speed development.
WordPress has plugins that make just about any functionality possible.

Our team is lucky to have local WordPress gurus at Phoenix WordPress Training sponsor our team by hosting us at one of their workshops at the start of our build season. Our web team is spreading that goodwill back into the local CMS community. The students recently presented at a CMS Meetup here in Chandler.