The wonders of Wordpress

Note: This post is over a year and a half old. You may want to check later in this blog to see if there is new information.

I don’t think there’s much Wordpress can’t do, with a little hacking. Over the last two days I was able to put together 2 sites that incorporated some very interesting features for clients.

One site is a jewelry “brochure” site that needed to be simple to update but incorporate a log of new features. I’m providing the client with a simple tool for cropping and uploading full size and thumbnail images of the jewelry, named based on a pre-set scheme. The site allows you to type in a description of a piece of jewelry, and then enter the base image name in the excerpt field. It automatically handles adding the thumbnail to the description with a link to the full size image, adding the thumbnail to a visual list of recent work in the sidebar, and to a categorized gallery. It has a pseudo-static homepage and features a “related items” sidebar when viewing an individual piece that uses a hacked up version of Ultimate Tag Warrior to list pieces made from the same or similar materials. Hovering over the title of a piece pops up a preview image.

The second site is an online magazine that incorporates an advertising structure. Sponsors can buy in at 3 different levels and can be set to rotate in a “featured” category as well. Sponsors are “tagged” with keywords, as are the articles, and when an article displays, related sponsors are displayed as well. This was accomplished mostly with categories, Ultimate Tag Warrior and a few custom SQL queries. It did involve one patch to Wordpress which I’m hoping they’ll fix in the next release, otherwise an upgrade will break the site (temporarily, of course). The tricky part was removing sponsors from the next\previous navigation links when viewing articles, which ended up being not-too-difficult after all. Fun stuff.

Both pieces incorporate my autotag mod for UTW, which allows for quick re-use of previously used tags and suggestion of tags for words repeated multiple times in the content. In the case of the online magazine, this makes determining appropriate tags for long articles a 5 second process.

I’ll publish links to the sites as soon as they go live, which should be in the next week or two.

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7 Comments

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  1. Ross Johnson 12.21.06 / 8am

    I have wordpress installed on two clients websties as a CMS. One of them works out great, as all they need to do is post a newsletter from time to time - the other one they can’t get it through there head that it is not MS Word and I didn’t install it so they could design their own pages.

    I constantly get calls about how to make pictures align to the right and how to draw box’s, regardless of how many times I have to explain “Sorry its only there for content alterations, I can install a full CMS like we discussed a few times if it is that important.”

  2. Brett Terpstra 12.21.06 / 8am

    Actually, I hacked the editor built in to Wordpress to allow me to add custom styles to a dropdown in the back end editor. Now all i have to do is define styles in a stylesheet called editor.css in the theme directory and those styles are available to the user. Styles like imgright and textjustify come in very handy ;-). I can give clients a few of the options they didn’t have before without letting them insert a whole bunch of font tag crap into their site. I maintain control over styling, they get the ability to justify an image left or right and add a few highlight and headline styles to the text. It’s enough to keep all of my clients happy so far. I haven’t had any clients that want to “design” the page… the most strenuous request I get is the ability to add and move pictures around, and to be able to change font sizes. So as long as I can keep the font sizes within a given range and control how they display, I can turn the reigns over.

    If you want to see the code for the editor, just let me know. It’s a lot sweeter than trying to get Chenpress or WYSIWYGPro to be XHTML compliant…

  3. Ross Johnson 12.21.06 / 9am

    That would be excellent, and sounds like a MUCH better solutions. I have tried installing Chenpress, FCKedit, and a handful of other half decent WYSIWYDG solutions with only minimal success not only in valid code but actually working properly with images and whatnot.

    For a full CMS I have been using some of the nightly releases of Mambo actually, which now supports CSS and produces pretty decent code on average. For awhile now I have been thinking of producing a “heap of code” that I could port to any given website that allows content changes and basic image manipulation but if I ever get around to doing that is up in the air.

  4. Kevin Klein 12.28.06 / 10am

    Brett, I would absolutely *LOVE* to see the code for the editor.

  5. Philippe de Chabot 01.03.07 / 3pm

    It’s a great idea and I’d love to see the code for the editor as well.

  6. brett 01.03.07 / 3pm

    I will post the modified code for the editor this evening as a new entry.

  7. naisioxerloro 11.28.07 / 7pm

    Hi.
    Good design, who make it?

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