WordPress: Yes It Can July 23, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Wordpress.Tags: cms, custom fields, non-blogs, online presence, pages, small business, web presence, Wordpress, wordpress as a cms
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It has been said before and it is true – WordPress is not just a blogging platform. Even though it is used by huge numbers of people for just that purpose, WordPress is flexible and powerful enough that it can be justifiably described as a Content Management System (CMS). As a CMS it can be used to build and manage web sites that are more general in nature – everything from simple web presence sites to sites engaged in ecommerce. I would perhaps add though that WordPress, when used as a CMS, is better suited to the low end site rather than the more grandiose. Whilst I am sure that there are some large sites out there, for the most part, I’d guess they are the exception rather than the rule.
So recently I have been looking at ways to leverage the power of WordPress in order to accelerate the creation of websites aimed at, for example, simple web presence. There are two features in particular that lend themselves to this purpose. Firstly there is the ability to create pages in a structured hierarchy. So for example you can create a product hierarchy by creating a page called “Eau de Cologne” as a child of a page called “Perfumes” which itself might be a child of a page called “Gifts”. This hierarchy can be used to present product displays in a structured and meaningful way.
The second feature is the “Custom Fields” feature. This allows the association of named data items with any given page. So for example the page “Eau de Cologne” mentioned above could have custom fields called “price” and “description” associated with it. These data items can be accessed and displayed within the context of the page. The important point here is that, using custom fields, we can separate out the non-static data, in this case the product price, from the product page layout. If the price changes the appropriate custom field is updated and not the page itself.
Although not really scaleable to large numbers of pages these features make it possible to use WordPress to build reasonably complex websites that are not blogs. (I’m struggling to find another word for “non-blog” – I don’t think “static” is correct).
To illustrate this I have built a small sample site here that uses both of these features. The products page is produced dynamically from the products hierarchy and price information is extracted for each item. I needed to write some PHP but there are many built-in functions provided by WordPress that made it fairly simple to do.
In summary, WordPress, together with it’s theme’ability and ease of use, is an excellent choice of CMS for creating and managing non-blogging sites that need to handle limited numbers of products, services or other structured data. Worthy of further investigation.
Content Management Systems: Let The CMS Take The Strain March 25, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Wordpress.Tags: cms, content management systems, drupal, joomla, website creation, Wordpress
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Many years ago when the internet was young, and I was already middle aged, building a web site one of the things that we IT workers often thought about doing. Back then it was mostly a matter of hand coding HTML (the language used to build a web page) and then using trial and error trying to achieve a decent looking layout. Eventually some reasonable tools came along but, still, it was a pretty labour intensive process.
Today, thank goodness, things have changed completely. Today the name of the game for web site creation, at least for personal and small to medium sized businesses, is CMS or Content Management Systems. The purpose of a CMS is to handle the appearance of a web site and to let the user concentrate on the content that goes into it.
Knowledge of HTML, whilst useful and even essential for going deeper, is no longer required. A CMS will allow the builder to choose a ‘theme’ for the site. A theme being an overall style, a look and feel for the site. Some themes will have a business look to them, others will perhaps be more arty in their appearance.
It’s up to the builder to do no more than choose the style that meets their needs and the CMS will customise it accordingly. It will apply the chosen theme to all pages thereby ensuring a consistent appearance throughout the site. This all happens automatically and the web site builder does not need to be concerned with the process at all. Instead they can busy themselves with generating and entering the content they would like to publish.
Depending on the CMS being used there may be thousands of themes to choose from. Themes are often free to use but, where a very professional or specific look is required, there are companies that sell them.
Amongst the best known open source content management systems are Joomla, Drupal and, latterly, WordPress. WordPress is perhaps best known as a software package for creating blog web sites. However recent enhancements mean that WordPress can now be usefully used to build a more general, or static web site. In addition being open source all of these systems are free to download and use.
If you are looking for a low cost way to get yourself or your business online then, initially at least, take a look at WordPress. Getting a site hosted is very cheap these days and, if your needs are modest, you can even have hosted it at WordPress.com for free.
For those who need more, the ability to handle credit card transactions for example, then Joomla or Drupal are going to provide more options and flexibility.
But don’t be put off thinking that you need to be able to write and understand HTML. With today’s CMS packages all you need to have in order build a great looking web site, is something to say.
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