More Interesting Uses Of Wordpress

Lorelle points to a detailed article on using Wordpress for online magazines. Max says:

WordPress, however, is an extensible website content management system that can be used to run magazine-type websites. Here are steps I took to turn this online magazine on Cebu from a blog into its current presentation.

So very right, Wordpress is being used as a CMS. You can see sites like The Blog Herald, that are inherently news sites. Supporting multiple authors, roles, scheduled publishing, custom fields, comments, static pages, multilingual support, syndication support are some of the capabilities that make Wordpress suitable for this. The feature that takes the lion’s share though, are categories – multiple hierarchical categories. These categories can be used to implement so many features that they have become a must-have feature. The terrific template system along with this can work magic.

Along with the stuff mentioned by Max, Wordpress automatically handles the volume and issue management. Being a blogging tool, the posts are archived chronologically, which is usual way for handling issues and volumes. Even if not, Wordpress provides mechanisms for retrieving posts for any period, literally any.

Wordpress is excellent, however, as a personal publishing tool only. For anything more than that Wordpress can be found to be lacking as a CMS. The basic content type it can handle is a post, which can be packaged as an article or news item. For radically different items, say, events, post would not be an apt structure. In case you create a new content type, it will not be completely supported by Wordpress, e.g., search will not work for that content type. Additionally, there are certain publication features that are missing:

• customizable and extensible workflow: the default workflow is very two step and limited. Usually, in practice, magazines include multiple roles in the workflow – jouanalists, editors, publishers. Sometimes, different types of articles are to be edited by different editors.
• version control and rollback: maintaining versions of the drafts, and ability to rollback to an older version.
• tracing: tracing actions that can be audited.
• search: the search is partially effective. It neither supports relevancy and does not search across pages, excerpts or custom fields. There are certain solutions, but still not what the industry expects.

Besides these, Wordpress is an ideal publishing tool. The best thing about Wordpress is it lets you control not just the content, not just the style, but both. Using this combination you can develop a theme that is accessible, usable and supports standards. And it has been used for websites of various types:

• Wordpress as CMS for Stanford Community Health Resource Center
• Websits Pushing Wordpress Beyond Its Limits
• Wordpress as CMs at codex

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Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda