Working with Wordpress

So this site is based around a Wordpress installation and Wordpress being a blogging platform I initially had my doubts on choosing it as the basis for any site that would be a brochure or portfolio style site. This will be my third version of VektorDesign’s site and I have a much more robust idea about what needs to be accomplished, how the information needs to be presented, and the dynamic concepts that will be required. The hardest site for any web professional to complete and be happy with is their own. We are never really satisfied and if we stay with a look it’s because we don’t have time to change or improve it. Dave Shea’s Site changes color depending on the post and the month.

An Event Apart New Orleans was a great wake up call for me to pull my site out of the static stone age and make a portfolio site that was:

• dynamic
• allowed easy posting of client updates and completed projects
• required minimal attention to maintain.

Trackbacks, pings, blogrolls, and commenting are difficult to implement, sitemaps get outdated. Most of all however I still needed to serve out static portfolio pages with style. This blog needed to look like a portfolio and the portfolio needed to be super-fancy with literature. I felt like the only person at AEANOLA without a blog and at the time was proud of it.

So I took a look at my site that had been up for more than a year and still had no print and design examples of work, and at the time of writing this I still don’t have a portfolio up ( this will be resolved soon or this post will be meaningless ). I decided jump into the blog pool.

Now came the research. I am learning more Rails every day so Typo seemed to be a cool choice but I don’t have a production ready Rails server at my disposal. I could build a super-lightweight blog but even a small footprinted site would take time to style design and build, which would cut my time alotted to this project.

Now I had tried to work with Wordpress before maybe two years ago. At the time I knew very little php, almost no javascript, and had no concept of managed application design. The wordpress side of the project was eventually scrapped because the blog side of the site would almost never be used. Also the main navigation needed to echo the static pages and the width of the chosen design didn’t work very well at all with more than 4 static pages in the nav. So Wordpress as a CMS was overkill.

The issue wasn’t that Wordpress was a bad app, far from it, it was more that it didn’t work as a CMS easily for what that project needed.

That was then.

On Wednesday night I downloaded Wordpress to evaluate it. The installation has always been impressive, upload and put in your server, sql, and blog information and you’re good to blog. No new news there. So I logged in and took a look at the admin panel. Hmmm…. something was different. Jquery makes everything cooler but the dashboard just seemed inviting. So I deleted the standard default post and comment, updated the about page, and put a coming soon. Now to take a look at the code.

I don’t know if it’s that I’ve learned a lot or the templating engine is fantastic ( probably the latter ) but working with the layout just seemed to fly into TextMate. It seemed to ask to be worked with and practically had a pint with MooTools when I introduced them. I put sIFR into the logo and looked for some decent plugins. This is where I started to become impressed. Plugins auto-update if you let them.

I’ve heard good things about the All in one SEO pack, so that went in. Google XML Sitemaps went in, I don’t know why I enabled Hello Dolly. The Akismet spam plugin was activated ( it now comes standard ).

So I now had a fully functional blog but VektorDesign isn’t a blog, we’re a design company. I wanted page specific styling on the static pages so that I could have:

• A banner on the index and not on sub-pages
• Different CSS Rules to apply on static pages
• More specificity for my CSS

So more research yielded the Classy Body plugin which gives me the ability to style the site according to the type of content being displayed.

^{table courtesy of the plugin author Alister Cameron}

I could style the entire site with ninja-like precision just like a static xhtml page and then it happened, I fell in love with Wordpress.

So now I’m in the content-creation/honeymoon phase and it’s wonderful. I can’t believe how powerful this application is and they’re literally giving it away.