DalePillars.com

What can I say, I’m having an affair with Wordpress - again. Another sleepless night, unable to peel myself away from the endless array of widgets and plugins that enables you to extend the base Wordpress platform into a Web 2.0 multimedia extravaganza. It’s brilliant. It’s addictive. It’s open-source CMS with a HUGE community supporting it. Wordpress is also stacked, out of the box almost, for SEO. There are some minor tweaks you may need to action, and plugins you need to install, but generally the Wordpress engine pumps out validated XHTML that the SE’s prefer. You can add a Google Sitemap at the click of a button, detailed stats at the click of a button - it’s endless. I’ll prepare a list at some stage of the plugins I’ve tested, and my favourite all time, must have plugins.

I’ve been working with a template that has simply revolutionalised a series of network sites I’m building out for the education sector. This template, once you get your head around it, displays alot of information in a rather clear, functional and accessible manner. Very much a CNN style “News Theme”. One of the tweaks I performed was Ad Rotation with comprehensive tracking tools, including analytics. Clients can access their profiles for ease of enhancement, and advertising reports and statistics to see where their leads are coming from.

There are times when you experience conflicts and corruption, but you can always find a thread or post somewhere outlining the solution, as you can bet someone else, elsewhere, has had a similar issue at some stage.

Seriously though - why would you even think of paying for a CMS, let alone a custom CMS, when you can use something so well supported such as Wordpress? …that has literally thousands of themes available, and is totally extendable. I’ve been refining and perfecting a few templates, stacked to the hilt with all of the required widgets, plugins and modifications, etc. Mind you, everything is always upgrading. …and it’s not too hard to go plugin crazy and swamp your template with extraneous code that’ll inevitably slow the user experience right down if not exercised with relative frugality.

More on this later…

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