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WordPress Hacks: Nested Paths For WPMU Blogs

Situation: you’ve got WordPress Multi-User setup to host one or more domains in sub-directory mode (as in site.org/blogname), but you want a deeper directory structure than WPMU allows…something like the following examples, perhaps: site.org/blogname1 site.org/departments/blogname2 site.org/departments/blogname3 site.org/services/blogname3 The association between blog IDs and sub-directory paths is determined in wpmu-settings.php, but the code there knows nothing […] » about 900 words

WordPress Hacks: Serving Multiple Domains

Situation: using WordPress MU (possibly including BuddyPress) on multiple domains or sub-domains of a large organization with lots of users. WordPress MU is a solid CMS to support a large organization. Each individual blog has its own place in the organization’s URL scheme (www.site.org/blogname), and each blog can have its own administrators and other users. […] » about 1400 words

Tricky Uses of bSuite

After writing the project page for wpSMS I didn’t have much more to say in a blog post announcing it. The cool thing about writing Pages in WordPress is that I can create a taxonomy like /projects/wpsms/ to place them in. The downside is that new pages never appear in the RSS feed.

So I need both the page and a blog post to announce it. I could have simply copied the content from the wpSMS page into a blog post, but that creates confusion and splits the audience between the two pages. Instead, I’m using two bSuite features: the [inclu``de] shortcode and the post redirection support.

  1. Create the page.
  2. Start a new post.
    1. In the post body put the include shortcode like this: [inclu``de post_id="123" field="post_content"].
    2. In the custom fields put an entry with the key: “redirect” and the full URL to to your page.
  3. Relax, you’re done.

The include shortcode will copy all the content from the page (so you don’t have to manage it twice), and the redirect custom field will tell bSuite to redirect anybody trying to read that post to your page.

Do WordPress Pages Better With bSuite

WordPress‘ Pages feature makes the popular blogging platform a sophisticated CMS. bSuite adds a few features to make it even better. Write excerpts, tag, and categorize your pages WordPress excerpts are an underused but powerful feature that allow you to explain to your readers why they should read the page you wrote. Tagging and categorization […] » about 300 words

People Ask Me Questions: Web Design Software (or is it Website Management Software?)

The question:

What’s a good user-friendly Macintosh web development program? A friend called. She’s thinking of buying Dreamweaver, but is afraid it will be overkill. She found Frontpage to be easy and needs something similar.

My answer:

If the intent is to design individual pages on an unknown number of sites, then I don’t have a recommendation.

If the intent is to build a site (or any number of sites), then I’d suggest looking at WordPress. It’s an open source CMS, and there’s a hosted version that makes it easy to try out at WordPress.com.

What I didn’t say, well, it was buried in my answer, was that I see a big difference between designing a page and building a site. The tools are very different.

The Sungard/SCT Luminis Content Management Suite Demo

We got the demo yesterday of Sungard/SCT‘s Luminis Content Management Suite (sales video). I mentioned previously that the sales rep thinks Pima Community College and Edison College show it off well. Here’s what we learned in the demo: It started with the explanation that data is stored as XML, processed by JSP, and rendered to […] » about 800 words

Kim’s CMS Shortlist

With 1,800 CMS vendors in the marketplace, we’re mining what we know or know-of as a way to shorten the list. Kim named the following four:

  • Joomla, a derivative of Mambo
     
  • Collage appears to have good content reuse features
     
  • OmniUpdate has a good list of higher ed clients
     
  • Drupal: open source and turning heads

CMS Pitfalls

Everybody wants a content management system, but there’s little agreement about what a CMS is or what it should do. Even knowledgeable people often find themselves struggling for an answer before giving up and defining a CMS by example. The problem is that we know we want better websites, and we know technology should help, […] » about 500 words

Editing WordPress “Pages” Via XML-RPC

WordPress‘s Pages open the door to using WP as a content management system. Unfortunately, Pages can’t be edited via XML-RPC blogging apps like Ecto. This might be a good thing, but I’m foolhardy enough to try working around it. Here’s how: Find a text editor you like and open up the wp-includes/functions-post.php file. in the […] » about 300 words

Most CMSs Suck

I’ve been slowly struggling with the question of how to replace pMachine, my CMS engine here. I haven’t really liked any of the alternatives that others I know are using (link link link link), though I’ve been hard pressed to identify exactly what my complaints are. Among the points in Making A Better Open Source […] » about 300 words