Hello my name is Steve Lam and this is my portfolio. I’m a freelance web designer based in Toronto, ON Canada. I love cats, playing music, valid css/xhtml and generally all things music and design related. My aim is to work with indie artists, musicians and small businesses in achieving frenetic designs while adhering to today’s web standards.

For those who are curious, as an open-source advocate my favourite content management system (cms) is Textpattern!

That’s it. Feel free to contact me for a quote, creative brief, whatever.

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wordpress as a CMS

12 September 07

In an effort to brush up on my php skills, I’ve taken the plunge and decided to try out the latest Wordpress offering currently at version 2.23. Though maybe I should have waited for 2.3 coming out in a week or so, with lovely promises of breaking several plugins across the board due to a semi-complete overhaul of the core code. oh boy!

I’ve never understood how Wordpress reached where they are now. Corporate backing? Increased notoriety due to when Wordpress was caught spamming back in 2005? Who knows. Nevertheless I’ve been playing around with Wordpress and at first it seems fancy enough for me to attempt to stick with it for a project here and there. Or maybe I just like dragging around the plethora of ajax-driven bloat in the WP backend for the hell of it. Who knows..

Anyway, I’ve been searching for articles/blogs/whatever on using Wordpress as a CMS. So far I’ve read articles giving me ‘hints’ like installing TWO copies of wordpress so you can use one for the CMS portion and the other for the blog portion. Huh?
I found another seemingly promising article by a developer/designer who laid out their steps in the making of a website using Wordpress. I stopped reading it the moment it mentioned that they had to place certain user content straight into a WP template file.

This is making no sense to me. It seems like people are trying to overcome impracticality in favour of…well I’m not even sure what.

I guess I must have missed some of the better articles/tips out there, but its moments like these where I’m glad I started off with Textpattern. In Wordpress, you can’t even point articles/posts across different pages without some hacking or reiteration of ‘the loop.’ I found a WP plugin allowing you to post a single article to a different page, but I’ve yet to find anything that would let you style the output of it (like you can with Textpattern’s ‘forms’) without having to create another php template file.

Wordpress’s support forum is also a complete joke. The majority of my searches end up in threads being completely unanswered.

The only real strength I can see with using Wordpress is that the plethora of plugins is immense. There are certainly a few plugins/features from WP that I’d LOVE to see in Textpattern. For now I’m definitely looking forward to Textcommerce and gerhards very promising unlimited, customizable custom fields plugin shown here:

Should be out within the week! Screw Wordpress for now. In my next post I’ll try to detail an essential list of plugins to further Textpattern’s feature set as a CMS.

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(related categories: cms, design, misc, plugins, textpattern )

Comment

Wordpress gets all the hype. I too have been interested to give it a spin, just to get a feel of it. But no cross-section article posting? Lame. Thanks for writing this brief review.

Love the site, came here from welovetxp.com

Dave // Sep 24, 10:09 PM · #

Another reason wordpress blows chunks!

Steve Lam // Sep 27, 06:19 AM · #

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