Putting ESC on Wordpress

One of the things that’s been taking up my time lately has been putting the Cornell Engineering Student Council on Wordpress. I figured it was a good thing to do as the VP of Leadership, especially considering that the former website was running on a hacked-together jumble of ASP pages that required manual editing by FTP. I had the idea to put it on a CMS ever since I built Liquid Designs and it was just a matter of finding the free time to do it. Spring Break means a lot of free time, as in very little at all but more than I have at school.

Before starting, I looked at quite a few platforms, including Mambo and Joomla. I tested them at Open Source CMS and I ended up coming back to Wordpress. It wasn’t just because I know Wordpress well. The problem I had with systems like Mambo and Joomla is that they are just too bulky. The section for adding content has tons of buttons and tabs and options which really aren’t ideal for an organization where the webmaster sometimes doesn’t even know PHP. I just wanted a box for writing and a couple options for the category and the template, and Wordpress is one of the few platforms that has that. As for extra features, the AJAX enhancements really are very useful. The ability to upload files without leaving the “write” page and then reach any of those files at the same time is key for content management. It’s something that really makes Wordpress 2.0 unique among all the CMS’s.

So I put ESC on Wordpress. Most of the old content is static but there’s this one part: the announcements. These were definitely a pain to do by hand, and while they were displayed on the main page they also had to be linked to the corresponding subpage that the announcement pertained to. This was the first thing to be syndicated, and it was easy too. I set up a category called “announcements” and I was able to use the Wordpress functions to display the latest 3 on the main page. I was also able to use the following line to display a link in the sidebar to an RSS feed for this category:

<a href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>?cat=1" title="Syndicate Announcements with RSS">Announcements</a>

The result is a very convenient setup for updating Announcements and for users to get the information. I also added a “blog” category because it’s about time the leadership of ESC use blogging to communicate with their visitors. I know they all have personal blogs so it will be second nature for them.

Now let me tell you about all the plugins I used for this project.

Filosofo Old Style Upload

This is a must for any Wordpress 2.0 site. It’s perfect for when you need to upload a file, just upload, the way we did with Wordpress 1.5.

Less

When users click the “Read more” link, it goes to the top of the page, not where the link was.

PHP Markdown Extra

I’m a fan of Markdown, and if the Javascript textbox doesn’t cut it, I’ll teach others to use it too.

Article Family

This one is golden. It provides a function that allows you to check if a page is a child of another page. It was a must have for making a dynamic sidebar that expands for children of a page. You can see it in action when you click the “about” link in the sidebar of the site. The PHP is still a little messy but at least no one will have to touch it when another child of the “about” section is added.

Wordpress Database Backup

A no-brainer.

These plugins illustrate another plus for Wordpress; there’s a large developer community that have provided users with enough plugins to give Wordpress any functionality they need.

So the last issue is the look. I did a few cosmetic changes to the ESC website because, well, when I do things I like to do them well. Compare the new site to this screenshot of the old one. The changes were simple; a centered layout, larger text, rounded corners on the gray boxes and a much cleaner footer. On top of that I added a favicon, and I also removed one annoyance on the old site, where the announcements were displayed on all subpages. Still, I think these changes are the icing on the cake, the small details that make the whole website look much more polished.

I’m not entirely done with the ESC site; I still need to work on the forms, maybe add in a calendar, and eventually add some forums running on bbpress or Vanilla. I’m just writing all this information here because I think it’s useful for anyone thinking of using Wordpress for something more than a typical blog. I’ll be presenting the new site to the members soon and we’ll see how the next webmaster makes out with it. I’m sure he or she will be happy to work with it rather than static ASP files over FTP