The document discusses using WordPress as a content management system (CMS) for ExploreStLouis.com. The goals were to develop an appealing site for visitors, meeting planners, and others; overhaul user flows; and integrate social media on a secure, scalable platform. WordPress was chosen due to its free and open source nature, large library of plugins, and ability to customize content and structure. The redesign process with WordPress was successful overall, though it required customizing plugins and shifting to a self-publishing culture.
9. Open source… … A religion That’s ridiculous. We geeks just want to write good code & we all know open source is nothing more than… There are discussions whether open source is political.
10. Quick Comparison Feature Ease of Hosting and Installation Ease of Setup: Simple Site Ease of Setup: Complex Site Ease of Use: Content Editors Ease of Use: Site Administrator Graphical Flexibility Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization Structural Flexibility User Roles and Workflow Community/Web 2.0 Functionality Extending and Integrating Security Support/Community Strength
11. Quick Comparison Feature Ease of Hosting and Installation Ease of Setup: Simple Site Ease of Setup: Complex Site Ease of Use: Content Editors Ease of Use: Site Administrator Graphical Flexibility Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization Structural Flexibility User Roles and Workflow Community/Web 2.0 Functionality Extending and Integrating Security Support/Community Strength
Enterprise CMS costs a million dollars and doesn’t work out of the box! 07.08.11
WordPress – easiest to install and understand Joomla – solid utility player with a bit of a learning curve Drupal – great choice for more complex sites, but more complex All 3 (plus others) – excellent choices, growing communities, improving daily 07.08.11
WordPress – easiest to install and understand Joomla – solid utility player with a bit of a learning curve Drupal – great choice for more complex sites, but more complex All 3 (plus others) – excellent choices, growing communities, improving daily 07.08.11
Free is good No forced upgrades Ownership Ability to define/expedite features Access to skilled community Elegant/easy to administer 53M WordPress sites in the Wordl Software distributed freely with its source code: Allows re-distribution without licensing fees to creator Requires source code and instructions to be included with software or made available Allows everyone to modify and redistribute software under the same terms Why people may not like open source Uncertainty about development model ‘ Not the way we’ve always done it’ Lack of warranties and support Migration costs Copyleft provisions General method for making a program (or other work) free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well 07.08.11
Akismet – Default, not installed, because commenting is disabled. Ambrosite Next/Previous Post Link Plus – Workaround for pagination of blog posts and custom post types. Avatars – Integrated with popular Gravatars online profile system for forums, blog commenting, etc. Allows authors of ExploreStLouis content to have a profile picture linked to their edits/contributions. Capability Manager – Good plugin for defining custom user roles. CON: Limited to demarcating post types and plugin areas, not down to specific posts or pages. Contact Form 7 – Great plugin for any form whose behavior is to send an email of solicited input from the user to an email address or set of email addresses. No real cons. Custom Video – Integrity-created plugin for adding slider-enabled video widget that displays embedded YouTube videos. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Create an xml sitemap, with advanced customizations (like hiding certain area of the site if needed) Events Manager – PROS: Very organized backend. Powerful location settings for each entry. Good documentation for their template tags CONS: Have trouble with the internal search of inputted events in the plugin. Does not really allow a way to indicate “All Day Events”, a request which was discovered later on in the process. Had some database update issues: e.g. Becky from the CVC would update a description for an event but it wouldn’t save. May have been a server issue, as it seems to have been addressed with the move to the new servers. FV Simpler SEO – Provides friendly interface for content team to input page specific keyword and metadata. Friendly interface to provide site wide keyword and metadata. Google Analyticator – Easy integration with Google Analytics. Also shows graphs and charts on analytics in admin dashboard HITS-IE6 PNGFix – Workaround for allowing 24bit transparency for PNG images in IE6 Image Crop – Custom Integrity-created plugin to allow content team to crop images through a WordPress based web application. NextGen Gallery – PROS: Strong image management system and gallery/album creation for the content provider (allows uploading zip files) CONS: The slideshow feature does not allow for easy customization. The slideshow is not AJAX enabled, meaning it won’t re-query the database for images after the page is loaded (i.e. the NextGEN slideshow for the right hand widget will only cycle through the four images initially loaded on the page. To see all the images, you have to go to the dedicated Photo Gallery page on the site) Search & Replace – Admin side functionality to search through site database and replace content. Very useful for replacing absolute URLs (for example, images inputted through the WordPress media library) with the final live site URL. ThreeWP Activity Monitor – Plugin tracks user changes throughout the site. Implemented as a security feature. WordPress Database Backup – Plugin that automates database backup, critical for a site with so much custom content. WordPress Importer – Standard plugin to import database/XML file from one WordPress site to another. Used to transfer page/post data from development environment to live site. 07.08.11
For a site this large, with this many different types of content, it was important to breaking down content into digestible groups, to make management of that content possible. Examples of the groups we broke the content into: News Releases, Sliders, Testimonials, Neighborhoods 07.08.11
Being able to create custom fields allows for a fine level of control at the coding level over the behavior of images and content that need to be called out, or treated specially for a post or page. 07.08.11
Illustrates how it becomes easier to change the order of content pieces, and manage them if the site’s content is broken down into logical groups. Screenshot is of the 25 Things to Do page, which integrates also with a right column widget that appears elsewhere on the site, but both the page and the widget are managed through this menu item. 07.08.11
Modularity and scalability of the right column throughout the site through this interface. Create sidebar groups that cater to the content of each area of the site and populate them with the available widgets. 07.08.11