Apr
22
posted at: 9:14 PM
Recently, I've been working on a side project for a friend at work. The objective has been to transform his creative vision into an XHTML-ified Wordpress implementation. Having never worked with Wordpress, I was excited to have the opportunity to see how far I could push the CMS, as well as refine my php skills a bit.
My impression of the CMS has been nothing short of great. For the price tag -- being nothing, you receive an out of the box solution that is fantastic at managing content. Going into implementation, I had the idea that I would have to reverse engineer what is essentially blogging software to also power a site. This is simply not the case. Wordpress is incredibly flexible and versatile, enabling and empowering the developer to create highly custom solutions while keeping things simple. Incredibly simple.
Other than doing the standard blog mechanics, Wordpress lets you create "pages." These can then be associated with a template, which could be the default template, page.php, or a custom template file that you define. To make the association, you simply add a comment in your new template file giving it a name, and the Wordpress admin automagically allows you to associate it to page content.
This made it tremendously easy to create custom one-off templates like this one that could contain custom functionality (like Flickr integration), yet still have the content powered by the CMS. Now, if only I could find a free CMS this good on the .NET platform!
My only complaint from the pure content standpoint that I've seen other systems do (not for free), is set aside hooks or content areas that could have multiple content sources in the CMS all on the same page. For example, I built out a resume page that had two columns, and I really wanted to get away from storing any div tags in content blocks. Ideally, I'd like to be able to edit two blocks: the left-hand side of the resume, and the right-hand side. Perhaps there's a way to do it with Wordpress and my near-perfect review will be changed to perfect, but it still got the job done.