The conference is now over, but Dimitri, one of this year’s guest bloggers has sent a few more posts about interesting sessions including this presentation about WordPress.
Drew Geraets and Thomas Knoll wanted something lightweight, flexible, and easy to implement when they ventured on building their new site. Their CMS was bulky and not friendly enough to carry the project. So they turned to WordPress. The result is the beautiful Freshly Squeezed, a student blogger site. With an extra plug-in or two (freely available from WordPress Codex), they were able to afford just the right amount of control over the bloggers, without suffocating their inner creative.
Next, they tackled something a bit different: a magazine site. Adding Flickr photos integration, cleverly using categories and custom fields, they put together Concordia St. Paul Magazine. The categories control where an article goes (Feature Stories, Faculty News, etc.) and which issue they belong to (like Summer 2007). The custom fields store information about cover photos. It’s a very simplistic set up, but it serves the purpose.
Today, Drew and Thomas have a few WordPress sites to brag about, including Concordia Orientation and New York City News Service. WordPress has proven to be the right tool for the job. With its extensive community and variety of plug-ins, the mature open source blogging platform appears to serve just right as the light-weight content management system, especially for limited-scope, focused sites. With the experience under their belt, the team sensed a pattern emerging.
As a special surprise for session attendees, the speakers unveiled Minnehaha, a downloadable (version 1.0 coming in November), playable, Creative Commons-licensed repository of tips, plug-ins, and resources for higher education Web developers who want to use WordPress to roll out their next project
. Also, they put all of the relevant links on del.icio.us. Go
check them out.