How to use WordPress plugins to manage the content lifecycle: evaluating content; structuring content with custom post types, taxonomies, and custom fields; making style guides available and visible; improving workflow and approvals; dealing with embedded images and responsive design; maintaining and doing ongoing evaluations; planning future content.
First of all, letâs not sit around copying and pasting IDs and titles and URLs and categories into Excel.
Content Audit lets you build your inventory right in the WordPress edit screens.
Because I use Content Audit for my inventories, I often import external sites into WordPress *before* doing the inventory. This is the reverse of the usual recommended process, which is to migrate only the content you want to keep.
Most of your analysis is going to have to be done outside of WordPress, with people and meetings and discussions about priorities. But you can use your traffic logs to make some decisions about what content is effective. I like Dashboard Analytics, which shows you a sparkline based on your Google Analytics data for each page. Use it sparingly, though â it will slow down your page lists considerably.
Your analysis should include a look at the structure of your content.
Lumping lots of different pieces of content into one big post body makes it difficult to work with. You canât easily extract parts of that data and do things like sorting or moving them around in a responsive layout. Even if youâre not a developer, you can take advantage of custom post types, custom fields, and custom taxonomies to break things up in a more modular and logical way.
In some cases, you can use user profiles to store this data simply by changing the built-in contact fields. (I have another plugin for that, User Contact Control.) But on most of the sites Iâve worked with recently, I needed to include people who werenât users, or whose data weâd want to keep around if they left the organization. Tying that information to a user account would force us to keep accounts active â even if they didnât have permission to do anything â for someone who really shouldnât have access to the site anymore. Thatâs very bad from a security standpoint.
Diagram: bio post type
But the biographies will be used in several ways. I donât want to duplicate the information in all these places, and then have to keep three lists up to date. Instead, Iâll create a custom post type for people. Then I can generate lists based on my custom fields, or a taxonomy, or whatever.
A taxonomy would be appropriate wherever you would want your users to select choices from a predefined list (a hierarchical taxonomy, like categories), or where free-form tagging would work well. Taxonomy terms donât have lots of fields like posts and custom post types can, so this is best for simple lists.
Changing the placeholder text (or the field name) using Peter Westwoodâs âMangling Strings for Fun and Profitâ article
Creating new content structures is also appropriate wherever there are types of content that require different functionality. Now, HTML5 audio and video players will be built in to WP 3.6, but this is just an example.
And none of these things belong in the main news page or RSS feed!
There are a bunch of ways to create your custom post types and taxonomies and fields, and thereâs a whole chapter in my book on how to do this.
Iâve seen people criticize WordPress for not supporting content modeling, but it does! It just doesnât have a UI for it, and thatâs deliberate. The developers feel that if you need custom post types, you ought to be at least comfortable enough with code to copy and alter a few PHP arrays. That said, there are some plugins that provide a nice interface for these features. Custom Post Types UI is pretty good. My only complaint is that it doesnât always get updated promptly, but Iâm not in a position to throw stones there.
For custom fields, I like the Custom Meta Box class on GitHub. This is being polished up for possible inclusion in a future version of WordPress. Again, this is code-based, but all you have to do is copy the sample functionsâ fields and edit their labels. This includes
The class includes a ton of field types. Date pickers, currency, rich text editors, image uploads⌠pretty much everything you could want.
This plugin gives you a nicer UI for it.
Once youâve created your new custom post types, you probably need to migrate some old posts or pages. I created Convert Post Types to do this in bulk.
For changing one post type at a time, or just a handful using Bulk Edit, Post Type Switcher is great.
Post 2 Post allows you to create connections between post types. This is how I hook up my people to my research projects.
This pluginâs developer has recently announced that he doesnât plan to keep working on it. However, itâs so widely used and loved that I expect its development will continue with someone else, or by the entire community via GitHub.
This is another plugin from the developer of Post 2 Post. Itâs great for changing a term from one taxonomy to another. If youâve created a new taxonomy and you need to move over some old tags or categories, this will do the job. Itâll also help you clean up your tag list; if you have duplicates, like a singular and plural version of the same tag, you can use this to merge them.
Complete content model! Post types: research projects, tools, people. People are connected to their research projects and tools via Post 2 Post. Taxonomies: topics, institutions. The taxonomies are used for both research projects and tools. Institutions partnering with us on a research project are added to the project when a user tags them in the Edit Project screen. The institutions taxonomy is also used for the People, to indicate which one a person works for.
Media strategy: How are you going to handle responsive images? How will you ensure that transcripts are provided for audio and video content?
If your organization already has a project management tool, thereâs no reason to set up a separate one for the website â it would never get used. But if you donât, there are a couple of plugins you can use to manage the siteâs tasks within the dashboard.
Workflow: Edit Flow
Editorial Metadata are basically custom fields that are only visible in the administration screens â things like required word count, whether a photo is required
Iâm sure Jesse is going to talk more about responsive images later in the day. This is a plugin to implement the Picturefill method Chris discusses in his latest book on responsive design (which is great)
This one is great when you need two images per post. I work with an Australian author whoâs recently become a dual US citizen, and she wants to publicize both the American and Australian editions equally on her site. Iâve set up this plugin, added each book cover, and then I use a few lines of CSS to overlap the two and add drop shadows.
You could also use Advanced Custom Fields or the custom meta box class, and youâll have to if you need more than two, but this integrates more neatly with the media library.
Revising without publishing immediately, with editorial review of the changes: Revisionary
You can schedule the changes!
WP Project Managerâs project list looks a lot like Basecamp.
The single project view
CollabPress
CollabPress does include a calendar view to display due dates. It also integrates with BuddyPress groups.
Back to content audit: you can use it for ongoing content management. It can automatically mark content as outdated after a certain period (you can override this with per-post expiration dates), and send emails to the content owners listing their outdated content. (To remove something from the Outdated list, just uncheck that category and update the post.)
If youâre using Edit Flow for your workflow, you probably donât need this. Edit Flow does come with an editorial calendar of its own. I think this standalone version is a little more polished.
You can use WP Help to build in any documentation you need â like your style guide, or brief reminders on how to use all the extra custom fields in your new post types.