Usually, when doing work for clients or other people within your organization, you’ll have to think a little bit differently than if you were going to be the primary user yourself. Remember: you’re a savvy user, but that may not be the case for everybody else. That’s why you need to trim WordPress to the essentials, and make sure that there aren’t too many options to confuse the user.
The first and foremost trimming action you can perform is to limit the user privileges. Most of the time, the Editor account role will be enough, and sometimes you may want to go below that as well. Either way, for every step down the user level ladder you take, less options are displayed for the user, and that is a good thing in this case.
It goes without saying that you should make sure there are no unnecessary plugins activated, since these not only potentially slow things down, they also clutter the admin interface with option pages and things like that. So keep it clean.
You can make the WordPress admin interface appear in tune with your needs by using one of the CMS plugins available. There are several, but WP-CMS Post Control (wordpress.org/ extend/plugins/wp-cms-post-control/) will probably get the job done. With this plugin, you can hide unnecessary elements for your users, disable autosave (which can be a nuisance), control which image uploader should be used, and a bunch of other things. It can really make the WordPress interface a little easier on the eye of the scared and non-savvy new user. I especially like the message box option, which can contain information for the user on how to proceed, and links to more help.
There are also several plugins that let you hide parts of the admin interface. You may want to consider them if you will be responsible for running a site at your company, or for a client, for a long time. But beware if it is a one-time gig! As you know, new WordPress versions roll out all the time, and that means that plugins may stop working, or need to be upgraded. While that is easy enough in WordPress, it also means that you have to educate the client in how to do it if you’re not responsible. Still, to use WordPress as a CMS makes a lot more sense if you hide the stuffyou don’t need. The competition may not be doing it, but if you’re using WordPress to power a semi-static corporate Web site, then it certainly sounds like a good idea to remove all the stuffthe users don’t need to see. Just make sure you’ve got the upgrades covered when they roll out.
Did you know that you can create your own WordPress admin theme? Unfortunately, it isn’t nearly as impressive as the traditional themes, but still, you can change the look and feel. and that may be important.
You can hack wp-admin.css in the wp-admin folder, which is where all the admin styling goes, but a much cleaner, not to mention upgrade-safe solution, is to create your own WordPress admin theme as a plugin. This really isn’t all that complicated. What you want to do is to use the admin_head() action hook to attach your very own stylesheet, and then just override the stuffyou don’t like in wp-admin.css.
A lot of the time when using WordPress as a CMS to power simpler Web sites, most of the functionality is completely unnecessary. A company Web site built around static pages containing product information doesn’t need comments or trackbacks, and the only fluid kind of content it may have would be a news or press clippings section. It just makes sense; some functionality just isn’t needed, and neither is the weblog lingo.
So when you need to build the kind of site that just doesn’t need all the bling and the functionality, you obviously won’t include this in your theme. The following are all things that should either be rephrased or removed in an entirely unbloggish site.
Ideally you’d stick to just one, index.php, for all your listing and search needs, but you can chop this up into several templates if you want to. Naturally, comments.php is completely unnecessary. Page templates, on the other hand, are very useful, and you’ll most likely end up having a static front page using one of these.
Also, remember to remove any get_comments() calls from the template files. Yes, you can just note that you won’t accept comments in admin, but that means that you’d have to change the “Comments are closed” output in comments.php, which would look pretty bad. So better to just remove get_comments() from index.php, and any other template tags where it may be used.
There’s a lot of bloggish lingo within WordPress by default: words like “permalink,” but also “categories” and “tags.” The last two can be defined on a URL level in the permalink settings. Maybe you want to go with “news” instead of the default “category,” and perhaps “view” or “topic” rather than the default “tag?” Actually, a good way to create a news section for a static corporate site is to use Pages for any serious content, like company information and product descriptions, whereas you’ll use the one category, called News with the slug “news,” for the news posts.
That way, you can set up your permalinks so that /news/ will be the category listings, or the News section in this case, and then you let all the posts (which of course are just news items) get the /news/post-slug/ permalink by applying the /%category%/%postname%/ permalink structure in the settings. Really handy, and no need to build a custom news section or anything. This inevitably leads into what you can do with static Pages and how what used to be weblog posts can fill the needs of a more traditional Web site.
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Christian T. at
05132010
1. Wordpress Plugins and Functions PHP
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