UMaine.edu is the premiere Web site for the University of Maine. UMaine is located in the town of Orono, along the banks of the Stillwater River and offers a strong traditional education at an affordable price. UMaine help students create success stories – with a wide variety of programs and opportunities – and we do so with world-class faculty members, nationally recognized research; first-rate facilities; a friendly, safe atmosphere; and easy access to some of the best year-round recreation sites in the nation.

Why it’s in the Showcase: UMaine.edu uses WordPress MU as a customizable CMS and branding engine for the various departments and units that make up the whole of UMaine. The web development team is continuously creating new plugins and modifying appropriately licensed plug-ins to further the goals of UMaine’s online presence.

Comedy.com is your guide to what’s funny right now. Follow us for links to the funniest videos, pictures, jokes and lists from across the web.

Why it’s in the Showcase: In addition to being a hugely popular website, Comedy.com uses WordPress MU to pull the content from all of its various blogs onto the site’s homepage.

Contexts Magazine is a peer-reviewed magazine of the American Sociological Association. It strives to make academic sociological research accessible and relevant for anyone interested in how society works. In 2008, the editorial office of Contexts (at the University of Minnesota) launched contexts.org, which not only features content from the magazine, but is also home to a community of around a dozen blogs authored by sociologists around the country. WordPress MU is behind the entire site.

Why it’s in the Showcase: For an academic audience and publishers, contexts.org is a bold step in taking a traditional publication online and expanding its mission to include blogging. For non-academics, contexts.org is a leading portal to learn about how sociologists approach the world. The site host blogs on media and culture, politics and technology, data and graphic design, and more.

Best Buy is the largest speciality retailer of consumer electronics in the United States. The company, which is based in Minnesota, has more than 150,000 employees and $40 billion in revenue.

Why it’s in the Showcase: Best Buy uses WordPress MU to power 1050 local store blogs, empowering more than 1m500 store associates to blog about store location data, events, announcements, and happenings. Using WordPress, Best Buy has been able to aggregate important store data and pass it back to key enterprise applications via custom web services. Best Buy also uses WordPress’ theme capabilities to experiment with Microformats, RDFa and RDF.

Note: The “visit site” link is an example site. More sites can be seen by changing the number in the URL. There is no central portal for all of the stores.

In 2003, some of our teachers in Goochland County Schools began publishing to the Web in a new format called a blog. In 2005, Goochland’s schools launched a division-wide initiative for teacher blogging. That same school year, we introduced student blogging behind our network. For the 2008-09 school year, we take another leap ahead with “Teacher Blogs 2.0.”

Why it’s in the Showcase: A small school district embracing blogging and giving its teachers a way to communicate with students and parents through blogging is an excellent use of WordPress MU in education.

A culture blog from The Wall Street Journal about media, entertainment, celebrities, and the arts.

Why it’s in the Showcase: BGSU is one of a growing number of universities using WordPress MU to offer a free blog to any interested student, faculty, or staff member.

Why it’s in the Showcase: The Star Tribune’s foray into blogging with WordPress MU is significant because of the size of the newspaper and the number of well maintained blogs that are part of the newspaper’s blog network.

Why it’s in the Showcase: AMD use of WordPress MU to power a variety of employee written blogs is a great example of a major company using blogging to reach out to its customers and developer community.

Hypebeast was launched in January of 2005 as a one-stop news source for internet-savvy street fashion enthusiasts. Frustrated with having to browse multiple sites to keep up with the latest information, the creation of Hypebeast allowed for the latest news to be broadcast through one specific medium. Over the past three years, the site has grown from small sneaker-based blog to a large well-respected information source within the industry, with a strong emphasis on street fashion.

Why it’s in the Showcase: Hypebeast is a well-designed, content-rich street fashion resource. The site uses the best of what WordPress and WordPress MU has to offer to provide great content to hundreds of thousands of readers through more than 35 individual blogs and a wide variety of featured articles.