Some of you might have disagreed with me when I answered No to the question ” Is WordPress a CMS?” I probably should have said Yes AND No…
I’ve been using WordPress for a number of years now. Version 1.2 might have been the first version I worked with. Originally built as a blogging platform, WordPress 1.2 mainly focused on Posts. The ability to display anything but your blog posts on your home page didn’t exist and I’m not even sure Pages were around. When compared to larger CMS built by Oracle, IBM and Microsoft some would argue that WordPress isn’t a CMS mainly because of the lack of approval process. Content types in WordPress are also limited, but WordPress 3.0, due for release anytime soon, is about to change that. Custom post type and menu management will offer us much more flexibility to manipulate content and thus enhance WordPress’s CMS ability. No changes in approval processes are expected for WordPress, but personally I don’t think that there’s a need for this. If this is all that it takes for WordPress to gain the title CMS, then I think it can do without. Organizations and companies looking for sophisticated approval processes usually have many layers of bureaucracy and probably won’t be looking for a free CMS anyway.
Looking back at an older versions of WordPress, it’s interesting to see how the platform and community has evolved. I’m not sure that Matt and the folks at Automattic perceived that one day WordPress would become much more than a blogging platform and be used as a CMS. I can only see great improvements and exciting features when I look at WordPress’s evolution and I won’t be looking at another CMS solution for a long time.
With only a week away from the sold out WordCamp Vancouver, Cameron Cavers, Dave Zille and I have been preparing our slides and questions for our upcoming panel. As you’ve probably heard me say before, WordPress is not only for blogs and we hope to demonstrate what can be achieved during our panel.
Having said that, we’d like to make sure that our presentation meets the audience’s needs. If you have your ticket for WordCamp Vancouver, are interested in learning more about how to use WordPress as a CMS and have a question, please leave a comment below or on the WordCamp blog post.
WordPress and most other blogging platforms allow you to organize your content in one of two ways: Categories and tags. I’ve often been asked about tags and so thought I would write my thoughts down. Personally, I don’t use tags. Here’s why.
Categories are easy to grasp
Sorting out your blog posts is crucial. This simple act alone will tell your readers what your blog is about. I currently have 291 posts organized in 22 categories. Visitors to my site can clearly see what my blog is about simply by scanning the category list. I like to think that these categories are similar to the sections of a book store or library. If you’re looking for the latest Neil Gaiman novel, you’re most likely to go in the Fiction section instead of the cookbooks. The same is true for your blog categories.
Thus when planning your blog, you should think of broad categories that will guide your users towards the content they are seeking.
Tags are too personal
On the other hand, tags aren’t very logical. As Michael Fields pointed out in his excellent article, tags are found on items sold at department stores and on Christmas presents. When applied to blog posts, they don’t make as much sense and are highly personal. Sites such as Delicious and Flickr use tags and I find myself frustrated to see that there is no proper tagging convention.
As a result I find myself only using categories and so far have never had a request asking me where are my tags? Perhaps that’s because my blog is simple and doesn’t have that many articles. A blog with numerous writers or that focuses on many different subjects may benefit from the combination of both tags and categories. In fact a complex blog may also benefit from Custom Taxonomy. Michael Feilds’s article describes how custom taxonomy can be used to organize your blog in new and exciting ways. I highly recommend that you have a look at it and learn about the many ways you can use tags appropriately.
During the 2010 SXSW Interactive Festival designers debated whether or not WordPress is killing web design. The idea is that WordPress and other CMS are constraining designers to think outside the box and turning them into lazy designers. I was quite pleased to hear that no one on the panel agreed with this statement. Brendan Dawes, one of the panel members pointed out that WordPress is simply a tool that manipulates data. Said in another way, Gina Bolton confirmed what I believe, which is that WordPress is highly customizable and can be made to do whatever you want.
One of my latest project consisted of converting a design provided by Mizu Creative into a WordPress site for Paul Sangha. The site included a photo gallery which required jQuery animation, a few different templates, random background images and flash on the home page. I’m very proud of this work, but more importantly, by the fact that it looks nothing like a WordPress site.
I’ve worked with many graphic designers in the past and when asked about constraints, my only suggestions is to keep the width of the canvas to 960px. This constraint is only there to ensure that the site will look good on most browsers, but even this is debatable and will depend on the target audience.
The Paul Sangha website is a great example which demonstrates that designers should not be constrained by the CMS.
Don’t you just hate it when you launch a site, hand it off, get paid and a few weeks later the client says, you know… I think I want to change the templates now. This is not working for me.
My first reaction when I hear this is, “crap, I didn’t do my job properly, how can I fix it“. And the reality is, that without user interaction, it’s often difficult to anticipate what they and the client will want and so this type of feedback should be expected and in fact welcomed.
My last project with Tod Maffin allowed me to learn a great deal from such a request for change.
I have a “blank” WordPress theme for myself, because I make a lot of WordPress themes. Starting from Kubrick, or any other pre-made theme, would be absurd. There is to much stuff there that would have to be stripped out or fought against to be useful. So, I have my own.
Music to my ears. When I started using WordPress years ago, I couldn’t get my head around Kubrick. Cleaning the code took way too much time and energy. I originally created my own theme for a WordPress class. In order to teach students how to theme a site in 6 weeks, I needed something clean and void of excess stuff so I set up my Basic Theme.
I was thus curious when I read Chris’s article and downloaded his theme. It’s super clean and to my delight it’s not so different from mine. I have a lot more CSS than he does and he’s got some fancy stuff going on in his header.php, but overall I would highly recommend it. Starting from a clean theme to design a WordPress site is the best way to work. If you haven’t had a chance to try a blank theme, you should check it out.
When WordPress 2.8 was released, a new function called body_class() was made available to developers allowing us to style our pages differently. This new function places a location-specific class on the opening <body> tag. I must admit, I missed this function when it came out and only discovered it recently. But it’s proved very useful. I can now specify different background images for my pages and posts.
Here’s how to do it.
Open up your header.php file and change <body> to <body <?php body_class(); ?>>
The function will automatically generate extra html code. Have a look at the source code to see what classes are available to you and simply create new styles.
For example if you have an about page which has a page id equal to 2, you will notice the following code:
<body class="page page-id-2">
In your css, you could add a new style such as
body.page {background:yellow;}
This would change the background of all your pages to yellow.
Or
body.page-id-2 {background:yellow;}
And now the yellow background will only be applied to the page with id #2.
Nathan Rice wrote up a great article about the body_class() function and you can, of course, get more information by visiting the Codex.
With Vancouver gearing up for Olympic frenzy, I thought that everyone would have sat back and waited for the party to begin, but no.. It’s been crazy busy at Bluelime Media. So much so, that I totally missed track of January and now heading into February with yet another full plate. I’m not complaining though. Some of the projects we’ve worked on have been delightful.
During the holiday season, I took a stab at redesigning the kitsilano.ca blog. The original design was somewhat too constricting and Rob wanted a few features added. The greatest addition is the incorporation of random banners submitted by the community. If you ever find yourself in Kitsilano and snap a few pictures, simply upload them to flickr and tag them with kitsilanoca, and you never know, you’re picture may be used as a banner on the site.
We also completed a blog for Patricia Robitaille’s company, PR Strategies Inc. Being self-employed since 1993, Patricia’s wealth of knowledge on self-employment is incredibly valuable. Her blog will allow her to share tips and tricks with those wanting to learn more about self-employment.
Another self-employed colleague of ours, Bruce Clarke is president and co-founder of Superna Life Sciences which is a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on the commercialization of treatments for niche diseases and indications, primarily hematology and oncology, in the Canadian marketplace. We built a simple, yet elegant website for Superna allowing them to promote their new venture and raise funds. The branding and design of the website were created by Johnny Kuan at Avenue Creative.
Next, we also collaborated with Splat Designs and built two websites for the Yaletown Laser Centre and Cosmetic Dentistry. Both sites used the same layout and look and feel but display different content. Building two sites at once was very efficient but also very confusing. More than once, I inserted the wrong image and content on the wrong site.
Last but not least, my on-going collaboration with Tzaddi at ThriveWire continued and we put together a WordPress site for the Vancouver Convention Centre‘s Intranet. Unfortunately, this site is located on their own private server with no public access so we can’t show you anything. Working with the VCC’s IT team, we developed it on an IIS server which proved very challenging at times, but the the team at VCC is very happy with the end result and it will serve their company well.
If you’ve been following the Bluelime Media website you will know that we’ve partnered with Barbara from BlueCitrus on many occasions to develop websites and as the saying goes, “The son of the cobbler has no shoes“, the BlueCitrus website was in need of a facelift. My latest teaching gig at Langara provided me with the opportunity to design and develop a WordPress site for Barbara. The goal of the class was to teach the students how to use WordPress to create a portfolio. So building a site for Barbara was the perfect project.
Barbara laid the ground work and designed the header, navigation and gave me a good indication of how she wanted the site to work, but I was given carte blanche on how to make the portfolio work. After looking at numerous portfolio examples, I came across the stunning work of Koldo Barroso. Koldo’s illustrations are simply marvelous and I could look at them all day. His portfolio section is simple, yet very elegant. On closer examination of his site, I noticed that he uses Slimbox to display his gallery pieces which is just a slimmed down version of the original Lightbox.
A few clicks later, I read a few tutorials on how to use Slimbox and decided to use it to build it Barbara’s portfolio section. If you’re familiar with WordPress plugins, you’ll know that beyond how to install and activate, instructions are usually fairly slim when it comes to how to use them. Since I just finished the site and the steps I took are still fresh in my mind, I thought I’d walk you through on how to set your own gallery using the Slimbox Plugin.
While designing your WordPress site, you may want to create a page that’s different from your other pages and posts. I’ve created many websites which have a custom home page, portfolio section, site map etc… WordPress allows you to create custom templates in a few simple steps:
Open up your page.php or index.php and add the following code at the very top of your page:
<?php
/*
Template Name: Name of your Template
*/
?>
Save your your file as new-template-name.php (you may want to use portfolio.php, sitemap.php, etc..)
Upload your file in your themes directory
In your WordPress admin, edit the page that you want custom and select the newly created template from your “Template” drop down which is found under “Attributes”
That’s all it takes to create the template, but now you will need to customize it to make it look different from your other pages. You may want to have a different background, dimension, etc…
