content management

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.

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.

Zach got a call from the Serena Collage rep who rattled off this list of customers in New England:

• Boston College
• Northeastern
• Bristol Community College
• UMass Lowell