YWAM Information Technology

Following on from crashsystems ­blog about web development I thought
I'd share a few of my own suggestions and insights about w­ordpress. I
will basically make this a suggestion to some great wordpress plugins.

Why have we gone with Wordpress?

The main reason for this over other cms systems is for it's
flexibility. It is a very simple administration system to teach to
those who don't know much about websites. If someone know's how to
login to gmail, write and e-mail and attach a photo into their e-mail
then they can definitely learn how to manage a wordpress site. As a
designer it is also very simple create a custom design through using
css stylesheets as well being able to hack apart the system in whatever
way we want.

In our original site we were still learning
wordpress and so took an approach of mixing our own html code and using
the wordpress system to manage main sections of content. This made it
easy for us to get started on building the site. But we are now about
to redevelop our site to make it completely managed through wordpress.
This means using things like wordpress widgets which allow you to put
small sections of content in the sidebar.

Some of the tools we use.

I work on a Mac and have found a great css editor called ­CSS Edit.
The main feature I love about CSS Edit is the ability to load a live
web-site. You can then either load your own css file from your computer
or extract the css files attached to the site and start with them. This
makes it very easy to develop a design for a wordpress site. The only
other way I can think of doing a theme for a wordpress site is to run
your own mysql and php locally and run wordpress locally. Then write
your css and reload the site. With CSS Edit any css changes are only
made in the programs preview and so don't take effect until the css
file has been saved and uploaded to the site.

In the recent 2.5 upgrade we discovered an issue with the bulk
upload system wordpress had added. This is an issue that occurs
depending on your hosting setup. There is a hack to fix this but it
disables the bulk upload. Wordpress had added ways of creating photo
galleries through this system but since it is not yet working we had
stuck with a great photo gallery plugin. It's called next gen gallery
and gives you the possibility to upload multiple photos, create
multiple albums and post them in various places and various ways on
your site.

One of the great Wordpress tools I mentioned above is
the sidebar widgets. These are great ways for adding sub menu's, small
pieces of html, etc. You can find many different widgets on
wordpress.org. One of the problems with this though is you only have
one sidebar that is duplicated on all your pages in your web-site. What
if you want different content in the sidebar on different pages. There
are some hacks but they cause you to rewrite a lot of code in your
wordpress installation. This is where I have found a plugin called page
sidebars to be very useful. Administration is a little complicated in
how to navigate it but what it basically does is give you a new sidebar for which ever page you want.

I have been using k2 as a theme. This gives some good features in giving simple way to upload a header image. It is great theme to do a quick and easy installation and has a bunch of useful features built in.

To add to this I have also been using a plugin called classy body. This does a similar thing to Sandbox in giving custom body classes per page which enables a huge flexibility in styling different pages, sections, categories, etc individually.

Please add your thoughts and any wordpress tips and tricks you might have.