WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS)


As you may have noticed, ISInc.com has gone through a major face lift. For years we were leveraging a home grown website that served us well. But, over time, we found it difficult when users needed to add content to the site. At that point, we started looking at open source projects that might be able to suit our needs.

If you haven’t noticed, there are hundreds of CMS projects out there. Our needs were simple: We wanted an easy to use CMS that gave us the flexibility to integrate our product catalog.  Along came WordPress.

There are a lot of mature CMS products out there for a company our size. On the open source side, there are applications such as Drupal, Joomla, e107. On the commercial side, there is RedDot, Microsoft Sharepoint and Interwoven to name a few.

The key features we were looking for was:

  • a quick implementation time
  • the opportunity for our instructors and employees to share information via a “Blog
  • mature administration console
  • ability to create templates
  • ability to heavily customize the interface

It was a difficult decision between Drupal and WordPress.  It came down to the ease of administration in the WordPress console which in my opinion requires little or no training.  Drupal is an excellent application, and it is definitely powerful as a CMS for multiple blogs/sites, but it was more than we needed as an application.

Features we implemented in WordPress:

  • Ability to create static pages using multiple templates
  • Filters for extending the functionality of the base application
  • A new presentation theme (I hope you like it!)
  • Custom widgets for Navigation

I hope to write up a deeper discussion about how we created the custom templates in the coming weeks.

Both Drupal and WordPress install in minutes in a LAMP architecture.  I encourage you to check it out since they are really powerful applications that can get a blog or website up and running in minutes.  If you want to have a better understanding of the underlying technologies, take a look at our PHP training, which will give you a firm understanding of MySQL and PHP.

Comments

  1. Looks great – and it works!
    Easy to navigate, all the info is right there in front of me.

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