I’m going to the WordPress meetup in NYC. I’m a little unprepared because I haven’t downloaded (or even looked at it-gasp!) the theme they’re going to be talking about. I do need to know what the top dawgs consider correct usage of categorization and I am a little weak on the whole custom fields thing. But all my projects involve using WordPress as a CMS, so I had to sign up when Tina (laidbackhome.com) alerted me there were only 4 spots left. It’s all full,now. I don’t have a laptop but I’m sure Ms.Shoulders will share.
Here’s the Meetup Description:
WordPress isn’t just for blogs anymore. It can be used as an effective content management system for editorial sites when you employ the right plugins and methods of categorization and navigation. Consultant, designer, and developer Johnathan Andersen (www.johnathanandersendesign.com) will share his experience in the online content publishing industry and how you can use WordPress to build and manage your own online magazine and make money.
In this presentation we will use the Revolution theme, ‘Church’ style to create an editorial style blog with advertising. We will look at various ways to utilize categories and custom field plugins to control content and provide an engaging experience. We will also look at how popular sites today are providing similar experiences that can be replicated using these techniques.
This presentation will be for all levels of WordPress users who want to learn more about what WordPress can do for their personal businesses.
Rss you rascal! Why would you need to ever screen scrape content from your own website? Why not just use RSS feeds? If you want to use your own RSS feeds from your own content to display it somewhere else on your site you can do that! But what if there isn’t an RSS feed from the section in question ? What can you do?
I desperately needed to do just that and worked non stop until I got it hashed out. The blah blah below is what I did and why I had to do it.
Task: build a site using the expensive shopping cart that your client purchased. The client has big expectations and you are faced with a big problem: the shopping cart doesn’t create an RSS feed and you used WordPress to power the rest of the website. Now you have 2 separate components running one site: a flat file shopping cart and WordPress as a CMS , how do you get them to play nice? Are you a PHP programmer? (In my case sadly,no). Well if you aren’t a programmer you can still use wp-blogheader.php to do neat enough things like pull your WordPress theme’s navigation menu in the shopping cart header and your WordPress theme’s footer in the shopping cart, too. In the end you’ve worked really hard getting 2 very different PHP applications to look exactly the same. But you aren’t happy yet. You want some automation. You don’t want to make your clients work that hard.
WordPress is easy to use – my clients quickly catch on to how they can do pretty much anything with it and they can do it themselves.
But how do I get that shop content onto the homepage? Like, dynamically? The home page features their upcoming events and very carefully handcrafted (by me) Featured Products Posts that match the shop pages content in looks. But the whole point of this exercise was that my un HTML savvy clients be able to update their website themselves. I installed a few plugins to help them along such as Post Template . With this they can copy and paste image and page URLs, add some tags and a title and publish. But there is still all that damn HTML. I’d rather they not have to even see it at all.
Another thing is they sometimes run out of a product that was featured in a post on the home page. The product then pretty much ceases to exist in the shopping cart. When this happens and then someone follows the link in the Featured Product Post very bad things happen. Babies start crying and birds cease their joyful song. I’m kidding: the link leads to a page with a nasty PHP error printed on it.
Obviously the next step really was RSS. Or getting some sweet RSS action from a page that wasn’t putting out. I went looking for services like Page2RSS, Feedity and Feed4All. I looked at Dapper and Yahoo Pipes. On my Code page you can see an example of the use of Page2RSS and the MultiFeedSnap plugin displaying content from my client’s shopping cart.
Dapper was really neat (you can make flash badges!) so I am definitely not giving up on them but I didn’t get Yahoo Pipes. Feedity inserted ads in place of the product images and Feed4All just didn’t seem to work. So far my experiment has let me avoid classic screen scraping and I feel like I’m getting close to getting what I want. There are other plugins to explore, too. But MultiFeedSnap works pretty well I must add.
Have you had any clever triumphs in this arena? I’d love to hear about it.
Please leave a comment if you think mccormicky.com ok as is or too damn plain.
Reasons for Remaining Plain:
I want people to read my articles without being too distracted so I have kept a “plain” look for a long time ( I prefer to think of it as subtly simple rather than just plain plain). I generally dislike clutter. If I could control clutter in my home I would. But I can’t toss out my housemate’s stuff…
Reasons for Being More Ornate:
My website should reflect what I can do as a designer. Thinking people will look at my portfolio and judge based on that work after the 1st impression of my site –well, this might be faulty logic.
I was attempting to create an eye catching yet subtle button for a site. It was getting boring. To amuse myself, I made some honking large ugly buttons. I’m including the [download#1] in case you love big ugly buttons enough to want these. Right click to save or you’ll get a page of strange and cryptic characters. I guess I should have put it in a zip file…Added new uglies but no.13 to 17 aren’t that hideous.
I’m going to the WordPress meetup in NYC. I’m a little unprepared because I haven’t downloaded (or even looked at it-gasp!) the theme they’re going to be talking about. I do need to know what the top dawgs consider correct usage of categorization and I am a little weak on the whole custom fields thing. But all my projects involve using WordPress as a CMS, so I had to sign up when Tina (laidbackhome.com) alerted me there were only 4 spots left. It’s all full,now. I don’t have a laptop but I’m sure Ms.Shoulders will share.
