My WordPress CMS Checklist

WordPress Checklist

WordPress is great. I’ve tried Snippet Master, PageLime, Joomla, Drupal and various other CMS packages but for some reason I ‘clicked’ with WordPress.

One of the main challenges with creating a CMS website for a client is making the administration back-end or ‘Dashboard’ as user-friendly as possible. A lot of CMS packages overwhelm the end user with too many options and some are just not powerful enough for many websites.

WordPress started out as a Blogging platform and is still very much a blogging platform. Through the various releases of WordPress we can see where it has developed into something a more like a CMS but it is still not a back-end I’d want to hand over to 90% of my clients in it’s standard configuration.

One of the best (and worst) things about WordPress is the Widget functionality. It’s really cool how you can stick widgets here and there on ‘widget-ready’ themes but on the other hand you don’t really want to have to tell your client; “Yes you can put that special offer in the sidebar but you have to learn HTML and CSS to format it the way you want” and “Sure, if you want an image there you’ll have to type the whole path. You want it linked too? OK, just put in one of those little left-angle brackets, then type in A HREF=….”

You see what I mean. YOU know what you’re doing. YOU don’t mind inserting bits of codes into little boxes. Your client on the other hand probably won’t be very impressed with the hoops they have to jump through.
Again, Short Codes, while very handy, are still not completely ready for the end user that wants pure WYSIWYG editing…
People want to see what they are editing, not a piece of code that says your (whatever) will appear here. Continue reading »