WIST’s website currently runs on WordPress. To a certain degree that’s a bit of a “only tool you have is a hammer” sort of design decision, but as a system I know quite a bit about (on an amateur level), and as, something usable as a Content Management System (everyone in the world seems to use WordPress for page construction), it’s not a bad choice.
While I’m sure that if I did it today I’d do it a bit different, the design I came up with has served pretty well. I still use the “Classic” WordPress interface, as though I were doing a blog — I really am still treating it as a WordPress blog, just with some of the fields remapped and changed for display:
- Quote Body = Post Text, above the “More” line
- Author = Post Category Description (with embedded HTML for bolding) (sorting is done by the Category Name)
- Citation = Post Title (with embedded HTML for italics, etc., and some standards on how to structure it so that things sort logically)
- Source link = Custom Field called “source”
- Notes = Post Text, below the “More” line
- Topics = Tags
This has all required both remembering what fields are which (I use a plug-in called “Requirements Checklist” to make sure I include a Title, a Category, and at least one Tag), and, more significantly, seriously tweaking the Theme files to put the fields into the order I want them in display (front page, single post, archives, search). This was much easier once upon a time when the themes were a lot more straightforward; the last time I needed to update my theme, I had to hire someone to do it.
As a result of all of this, we have essentially a hierarchy of Author → Citation → Quotation
I also do some jiggery-pokery in the feed templates to include the info I want in the right order, including a nice “title” for things like RSS feeds that include the Author, Citation, and site name.
By and large this works pretty well. The biggest problem I have aside from the technology for template files in many themes becoming incomprehensible to me is that I now have something like 3500 categories (Authors), which slows down the page builds.
Anyway, that’s what I’ve got. Thank you for joining my TED Talk.