April 22nd, 2012 § § permalink
WordPress is one of the CMSs available on the market, but has its share of limitations. Unfortunately one of the biggest is on the area where it stops being a blogging platform and you use it as a CMS.
The main difference between blogging and CMS is the first is focused on posts (time based articles) while the later focuses on pages (generic articles that are no time dependent).
WordPress has been built and in it is being built with a fairly limited number of pages in mind (Contact/About etc). With a standard installation you can go to an apx 5-10 of pages and if you use custom menus and dropdown menus is ok to go up to 25-30 pages (5 main pages each with 5 subpages).
But what do you do when you have, let’s say 300 static pages? The first answer will be: who needs 300 pages in a CMS? Well, on an academic website you can reach that number very easy. There are a lot of programs, departments, classes and staff and posts (or custom posts) are not the solution.
For this type of project I used a 3 columns theme and i wanted a simple feature: have one main menu on a column, and on a second column show subpages, but only when available. For a few years I have used a unupgraded version of GD Navigator. Once I have upgraded both the WP and the plugin a few errors started to appear: the GD Navigator widget was gone and when I have re-added it, no matter of the configuration random subpages kept appearing.
Looking for an alternative wasn’t an easy job, most of the alternatives being either dead or too complicated. Finally I have found the simplest, working plugin, BE Subpages Widget by WP Consultant Bill Erickson . The plugin is extremely easy to use and has only two options:
- Title – this one is optional and I don’t recommend you to use it. Basically you could put in there something like “Submenu”
- Use top level page as section title. – Check this instead of using a title. It will show the parent page and can be used as a breadcrumb
- Make title a link – Also check this to make the parent page act as a true breadcrumb
There. Problem solved. A working implementation you can see over here
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April 17th, 2012 § § permalink
October 31st, 2010 § § permalink
As you might know I’m a big fan of using
WordPress as a CMS. There are different mods and plugins for different purposes but so far I haven’t seen a full CMS plugin for
e-learning. Today i Have found out about
ScholarPress Courseware a Buddy Press plugin that seems like that optimal solution for an
Open Source E-Learning CMS.
Of course this, as many other
e-learning open-source solutions might not be ideal for an university but here are a few cases where it might work perfectly:
- Tutoring: If you are a teacher or a student that offers private classes and you want a low cost solution
- Trainers: You started a small business on training others on various fields
- Schools with low IT budgets
- Online counselling
Below you will find a list of features and a presentation video. This project looks so good that I hope it won’t be abandoned and become incompatible with future WordPress releases
BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware features:
- Class Dashboard
- Courses (Works for both learning models: European/United States)
- Bibliography
- Web API’s integration with WorldCat/ISBNdb
- BibTex Import
- Assignments
- Responses
- Forum integration
- Gradebook
- CSV Import
- Schedules
- Calendar
- Month, Week, Day view
- Integrates with Assignment due dates
- iCal export
- Customization using an external CSS
BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware presentation video:
BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware from Stas on Vimeo.
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September 28th, 2010 § § permalink
Today, by chance, I’ve discovered one of the greatest resources on
WordPress that I’ve seen this year. I’m talking about
Vladimir Prelovac, a croatian wordpress developer (and at first look a pretty darn good SEO guy). One of his biggest projects is
ManageWp.com. What can you expect to find here:
- add multiple (self hosted) wordpress instalations
- create groups of blogs
- quickly post articles / pages in one or more added blogs
- quickly upgrade plugins / installations
For more details you can check this
post.
Usage ideea:
If you are a freelance developer that has a focus on wordpress (or even if you are a web agency), create a sample wordpress install on your server and add all the plugins that you regularly use. Once you’ve done that, add the newly created blog to ManageWP.com. Each time you will need to create a new blog, just use the cloning feature and you are good to go. Now, 1-2 hrs of working have been reduced to a few simple clicks.
TIP 1: If you create themed wordpress installs (presentation, blog, CMS, ecommerce) make as many installs as you need
TIP 2: Before cloning make sure that all plugins and WPs are at their latest version
P.S. If you are worried giving to a third party your wordpress credentials, Vladimir is preparing a
self hosted version of the plugin
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October 17th, 2009 § § permalink
WordPress › Multi-column Tag Map « WordPress PluginsMulti-column Tag Map display a columnized, alphabetical and expandable listing of all tags used in your site. This makes it easier for visitors to quickly search for topics that might intrest them.
This is a plugin that I’ve searched for almost 2 years. Before this plugin, I have used static pages to list tags alphabetically but this was to hard to maintain (on an instance where you have more then 900 tags). Mostly is for WordPress CMS cases because it targets those users familiar with a certain niche and taxonomies within it, making it easy to locate a certain tag.
Use cases:
- Music blogs where tags are bands.
- Blogs about celebrities
In a few days I’ll post a link to a live demo
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