Chicks Who Ride Bikes is website for women with a passion for biking. It uses the User Submitted Posts WordPress plugin to manage community content.
The website is community-driven and hosts blog posts, events and a shop.
The Challenge: Fostering Passion
“I wanted to give women of all shapes, sizes and abilities to be able to get out on their bikes and feel part of something. So much of social media these days focuses on how women should look and what they should wear,” says Jordana Blackman, creator of Chicks Who Ride Bikes.
And it was not possible doing that without supporting local Australian businesses. “Bike shops and other businesses within the community are incredibly important to getting women out on their bikes and making sure they keep riding,” she adds.
The Plan: A Supportive and Connected Network
The website took many forms in its five years of existence. Over time the team found out that the best way to achieve those goals was building a community and a following from businesses in the cycling industry.
This would ensure enthusiasts and local businesses would be connected.
A modified version of the PeepSo social network handles many of the functionalities of the project, but the team needed something to further promote and facilitate collaboration.
That’s when they found out about CreativeMinds’ User Submitted Posts WordPress plugin, that adds a basic form which enables logged-in users to submit posts and upload images without accessing the admin dashboard or the WordPress site Back-End.
The Result: User Submitted Posts Engage Community
Users can post content via a customizable Front-End interface
”User submitted posts are critical to building our online social network as all of our members are able to publish their own blogs and content which is pushed out to our community. The plugin makes it simple for our community members to do that,” she celebrates.
The plugin provides draft and moderation support, allowing the admins to manage all submissions with ease.
Joana stresses that they did “an incredible amount of research to end up with this end product”. Currently, they receive around 30 user submitted posts a month.
For next steps, they plan to extend the functionalities the WordPress can provide: “We are looking at integrating maps, routes and other functions to the site when our user base grows as an additional value offering and point of difference.”
