Comments on: Making WordPress into a CMS

By: Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 09:49:58 +0000

@dave wpremix is a bit of a weird one. Once I figured out you’re not supposed to use it all but just pick the bits that work for you it made a lot more sense. It’s like one of those massive toolkits you see at B&Q which you buy even though you only need a couple of spanners and a number 12 socket.

I think there is rule, though, that a theme which extends WP into non-traditonal bloggery is going to be a bit complex. I’ve been trying to hack the Grain photoblog theme recently and it’s a bitch to modify if you’re not so hot on the php.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wp-grain/

By: Gavin Wray

Gavin Wray — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:53:29 +0000

I’ve tagged some of my favourite plugins and WordPress theme collections from design mags with WP4G in delicious. Good luck with the project.

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:24:16 +0000

Here are a few links for plugins:

Backup Wordpress
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
All In One SEO Pack
Ping Optimizer

Of course, incompatibility may abound, and checks should always be made to ascertain suitability.

Good luck with the project.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:53:45 +0000

Thanks for the contributions, guys!

@Pete – yeah, I use WPRemix here but haven’t done much to configure it. I found it pretty complex for a WP theme, which are usually so simple!

@Steph You mean Wordpress can’t do *everything*? I know what you mean though – anything over maybe 25-30 pages and things get really messy. There are some nice plugins to help with workflow though…

@Simon – you are a lovely man. Merry Xmas to you, too.

By: simon wakeman

simon wakeman — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:47:26 +0000

Hi Dave – have tagged a load of my favourite resources in delicious with WP4G – hope you find them useful

Happy Christmas!

By: Steph Gray

Steph Gray — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:34:14 +0000

Well, there’s Exec-PHP, which (as you know) lets you execute PHP within content, rather than just templates:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exec-php/

One of the key benefits of Wordpress for me is that it’s built with news-style features in mind, like RSS feeds for posts, comments, tags, categories and so on, and that there are plugins like Subscribe2 or Subscribe-to-comments which help visitors to follow the conversation even if they aren’t RSS users.

But fundamentally, the main strengths are the simplicity and community around Wordpress: simple in that anyone with a bit of PHP can fiddle around with page templates and apply them easily to different parts of the site; community which is always a Google away when you run into quirks or need to check how the Wordpress template tags work.

I’d also like your site to include examples of projects Wordpress isn’t so good for: sites with lots and lots of pages which need complex nested hierarchies can’t be much fun to work with in WP. There’s workflow, but it’s fairly basic. And I’m sure there are other limitations but I can’t think of them right now…

By: Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:31:14 +0000

Summat is up with the comments on wordpressforgood so here’s what I was trying to post:

I’ll kick things off with the obligatory http://wpremix.com/ which I used to build http://custardfactory.co.uk

It costs some $$s and took an evening of figuring out how it all slotted together but was worth it.