Making Wordpress More Client Friendly

Ah, it’s been a busy weekend. I’ve packaged up a zip file and SQL database export that I can use as a starter kit for client websites that I base on Wordpress. It’s the barebones setup with the plugins which I use every time, tweaked to all of the settings that I usually prefer, and that I often forget to set in a rush to get ready for a client presentation. But most of my effort for the weekend went into the back end. That didn’t sound right. The admin interface is what I meant.

To start with, I re-branded it. I kept the links to Wordpress, I’m more than happy to admit that that’s what most of my sites are based on, my clients just don’t need the confusion of having Wordpress logos all over a site they paid me to do. So for consistency I removed the graphical logos and relegated the Wordpress links to textual credits. I added Circle Six logos where appropriate, but for the most part, just stripped out a lot of graphics and used CSS styling instead.

Then I finally found a solution for the WYSIWYG editor. I had been playing with a few options, some too simple, some too complex. I needed my clients to be able to do a little more than the dumbed down version of TinyMCE built into WP could do, but not nearly as much (or as poorly) as something like that is Cross-Platform and Cross-Browser.”>WYSIWYGPro can do. So I re-enabled some features in the packaged editor, including the ability to define headlines and blockquotes, as well as set custom, pre-defined (by me) styles on paragraphs, images and text. One of the things I didn’t like was the way that the editor was wrapping images in span tags when you tried to apply a class to it, so a little DOM hacking and now it adds a class directly to the image tag. I set up a group of semantically named classes to use as a default set that I can include in every stylesheet, and set the editor up to read the stylesheet and create a very good approximation of the way the text will look on the site. It’s the best solution I’ve found yet.

I tweaked Extended Live Archives to work with my server and saved the settings. I added my Autotag mod to Ultimate Tag Warrior and included it in the package. WP-cache, a couple of SEO plugins and Related Posts round out the plugin lineup.

As a final step I set the SQL export up in the template editor I created for TextMate. Now when I’m ready for a new site, I just pop up a dialog box, enter the site address and database prefix and it gets my SQL import ready to go. Edit the config file, upload the whole thing and import the database. Bam. New site ready for customization.

One weekend lost should save me a lot of time doing repetitive tasks in the future. Upgrading could still be tedious, maybe even more so with an install this customized. I had considered building the whole thing as a plugin but the options just weren’t valid for what I wanted to do. Hacking the PHP files was the only way to achieve parts of my goal. Oh well.

My next post is going to be on my new experience with Expanse CMS. I’m really excited ;-).