Hacking Wordpress as an easy updatable link directory
July 18th, 2007
By now Wordpress has been bent, folded and mangled in any number of ways to for custom CMSs. One of the most interesting ways I did it was to both manage a website and create a small Yahoo! like link directory within it.
The website was part of a grant project for helping senior citizens find reliable health information on the Internet. My purpose in using Wordpress as a backend was to speed development time as well as make it as easy as possible for non-techies to update. There were three types of information that needed to be displayed
- The link directories
- Two multipage tutorials
- Static - the front, explanatory page, and the contact page which has since been taken offline.
Looking at it now, there are so many things I would love to change but I also recall how specific the customer was about what she wanted.
Since the purpose in using Wordpress was to manage the links, they were the first thing I looked at. Using the custom fields, it was easy to create those in individual posts, using customized category pages to list them.
The tutorials, likewise had the individual pages created as posts and separation managed by category. Display of the custom fields, internal navigation and the contact form were managed by plugins.
The other static page, the home page, was the index file. Today it could be created with a Wordpress "page" and a preference setting but at the time of creation those features weren't available.
Despite the fact it hasn't been updated since I turned it over using Wordpress was the best choice for this project. It shaved considerable time off of development and eased content addition tremendously.
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Design.
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