The Ann Arbor Chronicle is the online-only newspaper for the town of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Why it’s in the Showcase: With a clean and easy to navigate design, The Ann Arbor Chronicle’s website is powered entirely by WordPress. WordPress allows the newspaper’s team of writers and editors to easily create and share content with their readers. For more information on The Chronicle’s own story, check out this post from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University (also powered by WordPress).

MyRather is daily blog, game, and an interactive community based on the widely popular “Would You Rather” conversation game. Everyday, several new “Rathers” are posted for the community to vote on and “Ramble” about. Earn points or “Rupees” for everything you do, view detailed results for each dilemma, you can even submit your own Rathers to the site.

Why it’s in the Showcase: MyRather makes heavy use of WordPress’ custom fields and uses creative backend coding to create dynamic post titles on the fly, all of which are split up into individual phrases based on the many possible language variables and then rearranged and recreated based on a user’s specific input. The site also implements several built-in action hooks to create a live feed for everything a user does on the site in real-time. Individual profile pages for every registered user come with the ability to upload custom avatars as well as for users to submit their own posts, which can then be published to the site.

Why it’s in the Showcase: Shashi Tharoor is a promient figure in Indian politics and has a well-designed website that serves as a hub for his online presence.

To commemorate the launch of its new ultra-low voltage processors, Intel collaborated with Lenovo and Singapore’s most famous department store TANGS, for a 24-hour nonstop Intel-powered blogathon. Ten leading bloggers from the country were placed in TANGS’ window displays and were required to blog for 24 hours without sleep. This blog, with a lifespan of merely 24 hours, was engineered to host the blog posts generated by the 10 bloggers that day.

Why it’s in the Showcase: On the frontend, the microsite design applied a highly interactive 3D sphere that symbolized Singapore’s blogosphere with a Flash-based platform. Blog posts were generated using WordPress over the 24-hour period, programmed with a time-sensitive user experience.

Verio is the recognized industry leader in delivering online business solutions to SMBs worldwide. Distributed through its network of OEM and viaVerio channel partners, Verio’s solutions provide web hosting, application hosting and SaaS applications that enable SMBs to drive online success.

Why it’s in the Showcase: Verio’s entire website is powered by WordPress, from the about section to the company’s listings of the products and services it offers.

Why it’s in the Showcase: The RGA’s official website uses a JavaScript image slider, social media aggregation, font replacement, and a number of custom plugins to provide a large amount of content.

mtvU is a site by MTV Networks that focuses on college music, activism, shows, and activites on campus.

Why it’s in the Showcase: According to the site’s developers, “The majority of the mtvU site is powered by WordPress. Articles are posts. Marquee spots on the homepage and hub pages were based off JonDesign’s SmoothGallery. All links on the navigation are WordPress categories and search is also powered by WordPress. All posts are tagged with artist names, which helps out with related posts in the post template (based off of YARPP). The site also has custom category, single, tag, and author templates. Most of the plug-ins we’re using have been modified by either using a custom template or by making minor adjustments to the scripting. The video lists in the left hub page sidebars and right hand post sidebars are feeds pulled into a WordPress template. The video music search queries the MTVN video search API and dynamically embeds flash video into a WordPress page template.”

Ride Oregon is the official site for Travel Oregon’s (the Oregon Tourism Commission) focus on cycling-related travel and tourism in the state.

Why it’s in the Showcase: Ride Oregon integrates WordPress and BuddyPress to showcase mountain biking trails, road rides, and cycling events around the state. In addition, it allows people to save rides they want to do and mark rides they’ve done so others can contact them about the ride. All Trails, Road Routes, Events, Resources and Rides We Love are handled as separate posts within WordPress.

BuddyPress is used to create and manage users and to allow them send messages to each other. It was customized to allow users to rate the bike routes and save them to a trip they had planned, mark whether the user has done or wants to do a ride, and track all rides and events submitted by a user.

According to the developers, “We used WordPress and BuddyPress for its ease of installation and flexibility. For this site, we needed multiple categories of data segmentation along with member profile account management, which made WordPress MU and BuddyPress a great option.”

Why it’s in the Showcase: Blogband is one of the FCC’s major forays into blogging and social media.

Creative Spaces is an organization based in Melbourne, Australia.  The Creative Spaces website is designed to help you find a suitable and affordable space to develop, exhibit or perform your work.

Why it’s in the Showcase: The Creative Spaces site uses WordPress as a multi-user CMS (in excess of 300 registered users contribute content to the site). It was necessary for Creative Spaces to establish multiple user types with appropriate permissions as well as various post templates for contributing key content. According to the site’s developer, “The WordPress framework provided no limitations to the creative potential of the site.”