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Wordpress as a CMS
March 16, 2009
We have been using Wordpress at Gauge Interactive for nearly all our projects since release 2.0. Initially we were excited about using Wordpress on the previous revision of the GI site. We wanted the state of the art blog functionality to increase traffic to our site. As well it offered convenient and effective SEO features for blog posts and static pages. Wordpress has received massive amounts of attention and support in the last couple years and continues to grow. There have been lots of advancements in the Content Management System (CMS) area of Wordpress. More people have started using Wordpress for creating websites with galleries, calendars, newsletters, media archives, as well as blogging. This includes us at Gauge Interactive. Aside from the vast amount of plugins, there is so much flexibility offered by Wordpress.
Wordpress is great for organizing your websites content. The ‘Post’ is your basic data object which can be assigned to one or multiple categories. From there you can create custom ‘queries’ to ‘loop’ through, and display your content. The built in Wordpress functions are intuitive and easy to use for customizing your queries to the database. This exemplifies the power PHP and allows you to build dynamic, content driven websites. The software also uses ‘Pages’ for different sections in the website. Custom coded PHP template files can be attached to Pages to unleash customizability to the maximum. Wordpress also has a well thought out hierarchy for passing data into different layouts. There is so much thought put into the conventions of this software. After working with Wordpress its hard to turn back.
For increased SEO Wordpress offers convenient application of metadata. Tags are an important component to the basic SEO of your blog or site. Such data can be attached to each Post for use in meta data or page layout. Tags can help your SEO rating so long as they are not overdone. They should remain mostly unique to the Post and its content, yet with a few relevant to the rest of the site (like general tags). A combination of smart Tag usage and the All In One SEO Pack Plugin can greatly improve your SEO. The plugin includes features such as automatic meta data generation and title optimization.
The Media Library is more refined in Wordpress 2.7. You can now choose from more image sizes with Thumbnail, Medium and Large. These can be referenced anywhere in the site through the Post objects. This is convenient for displaying a gallery of images, or having accompanying images for your posts. Check out this post for a peak at how we implement it for our site.
One of the most useful plugins is the More Fields Plugin. It basically allows you to customize the administration panel for writing your content so that there are more text boxes (fields) for data entry. You can control how they look, placement, and who has access to them. It can be very useful for writing posts with specific pieces of information you want to be displayed differently on your page templates. You can also add checkboxes, radio buttons and select lists as your input fields. This plugin can greatly increase your efficiency in work production. It can also improve your layout aesthetic whereby you have items of data displayed differently rather than trying to just type it all in one content box.
One plugin that we haven’t yet explored is the Pods Plugin for Wordpress. “Pods lets you create, manage, and display custom content types using WordPress. Like Drupal CCK, these content types can relate to one another, allowing for sites packed with interconnectedness. Automatic pagination, filtering, public forms, access control, menu editing and more are possible with the Pods CMS plugin.” It looks to be promising and there is constant activity on its development.
Wordpress offers the ultimate in flexibility and extendibility. If your plan is to increase your website traffic and expand your site, this might be your solution.
If you would be interested in seeing what Gauge Interactive can offer you using this technology please call us now! (912) 228-3265
Thanks for all of the resources, really helpful.
bye
Great Site! Thanks for the Information. Just what I was looking for. Will definately bookmark.
Thanks a lot for your work and it helps me to configure word press as simple as anything.
Excellent insight about some of the amazing Wordpress facts and its functioning. Very helpful to all the concerned users.
I’ve tried pods!
thanks for your comments
Great work …. Thanks for your ideas.
more helpful for us and anyone who needs information
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
Did you try Pods yet? You may not know what you’re missing
Like Gauge, over at Blizzard we also use Wordpress as a CMS tool. It really works great! Have you ever seen a plugin that lets non-techie users add/manage cells and tables in their posts? Probably the number one complaint our clients have is their inability to layout posts in tables/columns without knowing code.
I wanted to invite you to check out our whitepaper about SEO for Wordpress for non-techies. You can download it or find out more about it.
Your comments would me much appreciated - keep in mind it is for non-techies, not geekier-then-thou readers