Three years ago, two friends of mine and I started to build a content management system for building and maintaining websites. We didn’t really know what we were doing but we had a few very forgiving test clients that gave us a great opportunity to learn a lot. And learn we did, but the project dragged on for years, forever changing in scope and direction, some features turned out great, others remained extremely unfinished.
All the while I was wanting to implement this system on my employer’s website. They paid to use it, and since it was a bit of a work in progress, I was only using bits and pieces of it while trying to find time to develop the rest of it.
It was soaking up tons of my time and energy working on this project and I finally started looking around at other systems to see if I could use someone else’s solution.
I ended up at WordPress. WordPress is primarily used to build and maintain blogs like this one (but not this one). WordPress is an extremely powerful tool. It’s very easy to create a bunch of web pages and your website just gets bigger and bigger very quickly. So quickly, that it took me about three weeks to build my employer’s site (nearly 200 pages) in WordPress. Three weeks may sound like a lot, but I knew nothing about WordPress to start. I had to do a fair amount of techie stuff to figure out how to do a few of the more complex things. I also took about a week off of this project in the middle of that.
I won’t get too detailed on all the nuts and bolts of WordPress, but the reason I chose to use WordPress boils down to a few reasons:
Do I have any gripes about WordPress? I’m sure I do, no tool is perfect, but the only one that I care to mention now is this: When I’m in the admin area, it refers to the website you’re running as a “weblog”.
So, that’s a nitpicky thing. All in all, thanks to the WordPress development team. I finally got the site I needed. Oh, want to see the site? Cadence International
All articles on this site are licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. All design, code, etc are All Rights Reserved.
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Be Good Not Bad is all about really good web design, based on the utmost respect for web standards, accessibility and respect for the user. Based in Denver, Colorado, Be Good Not Bad is run by Brian Warren, freelance designer, blogger, homebrewer and coffee nut.
Looks very nice, Brian. I had once poked about the old site, and this one feels much more responsive to me as an end user.
As a WordPress blogger, I’m impressed with the flexibility of the platform. Now I know that the rest of my old non-blog site is due for change!!!
§ By JohnH at 10:32am on August 22 2005 ★ Are you sure? Delete // // Cancel
Wonderful application of WordPress, Brian.
I agree with Chris that it would be great to see a detailed write-up of how you used WordPress to create the site: what modifications did you need to make, what plug-ins did you use, etc.
§ By Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg at 10:32am on August 22 2005 ★ Are you sure? Delete // // Cancel
When I first played with WP, I thought, “They label this a blog software?! It’s as CMS-like as you could possibly get!”.
The sheer flexibility of it all is what astounds me. Being an open source app makes it all the more sweeter.
Nice article, I’ll drop by more often
§ By Azmeen at 10:32am on August 22 2005 ★ Are you sure? Delete // // Cancel
Excellent comments on WordPress. I, too, use WordPress as a CMS with the help of some great plugins that make life SO MUCH EASIER.
The biggest gripe I have with CMS functionality with WordPress is the lack of administrative control over the Manage Posts panel. I want to see which posts are in which category and sort them accordingly. Sometimes I work weeks ahead if I’m working on a project, so showing only the last 15 posts is ridiculous if I have 20 future posts waiting and I can’t see what’s up next.
ColdForged’s Enhanced Page Views plugin makes this all possible, so I adore it for making WordPress much easier to use as a CMS.
As more and more plugins become available that enhance WordPress to make it more CMS friendly, then people can choose to use WordPress as a blog or CMS. The choice is nice.
§ By Lorelle at 10:32am on August 22 2005 ★ Are you sure? Delete // // Cancel
Nice to see how Wordpress was able to do all that. Great Job.
§ By Peter Hoven at 10:32am on August 22 2005 ★ Are you sure? Delete // // Cancel
While I am sure in your situation that is annoying, you can’t forget the fact that WordPress is a blogging engine, we are not a CMS.
And it is the common feeling of the developers and hackers on the project that we don’t want to become a CMS.
Nice job on creating the site with WP, you might want to write an in depth look at how you did it.
§ By Chris J. Davis at 10:32am on August 22 2005 ★ Are you sure? Delete // // Cancel
Nice use of WordPress and its many features!
If you really don’t want WordPress to call your site “weblog”, you can easily achieve that by editing the offending .php-files in your /wp-admin/ folder.
Just open up the files and search for weblog/blog and replace it with whatever you want
§ By joakim at 10:32am on August 22 2005 ★ Are you sure? Delete // // Cancel
Actually I still prefer Textpattern for my blogging, but it’s totally a personal preference thing. I do like WordPress a lot. Both are great tools. John Mark, one time I referred you to Blogsome a free wordpress hosting site. Free means you don’t be havin’ to pay for your blog.
§ By Brian Warren at 10:32am on August 22 2005
Yep. Good job. One of these days I’ll actually find it in me to pay for hosting and use something cool like wordpress for my blog.
§ By John Mark at 10:32am on August 22 2005 ★ Are you sure? Delete // // Cancel
Thanks everybody. I appreciate it. I will try to find some time to write down how I did it all. It’s still pretty fresh in my head, but already I am forgetting certain things I did to make it work. Goodness knows it will probably be a pretty long article. Still, if it will help people, then I’ll see what I can do. Not today though, it’s my birthday!
§ By Brian Warren at 10:32am on August 22 2005