The web page of Dan

Today I finished putting my entire portfolio in Wordpress, so I thought it would be appropriate to write about my experience setting it up and using it.

I was interested in using Wordpress as a CMS for some time now, mostly because I wanted to be able to edit my portfolio anywhere from a web interface and allow people to comment on all of my work in an open format. In addition, I was looking forward to Wordpress automatically taking care of a number of things I would normally have to do manually like organizing my content and setting up permalinks.

I got a basic installation of Wordpress running with a customized theme pretty quickly, and after messing with some of the settings I had it doing everything I needed it to do. With the help of plugins, I was able to get Wordpress to do more advanced tasks such as optimizing my pages for search engines and automatically creating a sitemap for search engines when updates are made.

Although I find Wordpress a very useful tool that is easy to use and learn, it has its problems. Here are just a few I ran into:

• Why can’t I edit the order of my links?

  This seems ridiculous that without the help of a certain plugin I am forced to list links on the sidebar in alphabetical order. Come on Wordpress!

• No <span> elements within <li> elements.

  In order to style menu lists (like the navigation and sidebar links) the way I wanted with CSS, I had to install yet another plugin to add <span> elements within <li> elements for page links in the navigation menu. And to add them to link lists on the sidebar I had to manually edit code in two files (not good).

• The WYSIWYG editor messes with HTML code.

  While editing, Wordpress’s standard editor will automatically add line breaks and remove HTML elements without content, even if you are in the HTML tab of the editor. This is fine for users who mostly use Wordpress as a blog and write simple content, but it makes things very difficult for more advanced users who run Wordpress as a CMS and write HTML code in the editor for some of their pages. Although I chose to simply disable the WYSIWYG editor in my user preferences, there must be a better solution to this.

• The blog menu link only highlights on the main page of the blog.

  When you go deeper into the blog, like viewing a specific post, the blog list element does not have the appropriate CSS classes applied to it to allow it to be highlighted.

But enough complaining, here are the plugins that I installed to get my Wordpress installation exactly how I needed it and overcoming some of these problems:

• All in One SEO Pack - Everything you need to optimize your Wordpress installation for search engines.
• cforms - What I use to create my contact form, but is capable of adding more complex forms to any Wordpress pages/posts.
• Exec-PHP - Necessary if you need to use PHP code within your pages/posts, like how I grab high scores for Tetris.
• Google Analyticator - Adds Google Analytics code to the footer of your templates, which is much nicer than manually adding the code to the footer file.
• Google XML Sitemaps - Automatically generates a sitemap.xml file for your website (sweet!).
• List Pages Plus - Allows you to make additions to the classes, title, and elements surrounding page links in the navigation menu. I use this to wrap page names in <span> elements.
• My Link Order - Let’s the user decide the ordering of links on the sidebar instead of having them automatically listed alphabetically.
• Wordpress Thread Comment - This plugin allows users to reply to each others’ comments on posts/pages. Personally, I think this functionality should be included in the default Wordpress installation.

It was tough getting everything set up, figuring out how all the settings work, and deciding what plugins I needed, but I’m very pleased with how my site is running in Wordpress and look forward to being able to edit everything within it.

Side note: I’m hoping to use this blog more often to write articles about my experience as a web developer as opposed to mostly using it to announce when I complete projects, so expect to see some useful stuff written here (if I ever get around to it).