Brainstorming
Today our PR rep showed me the section of the site containing all of the new documentation set to go live once our WebMaster finishes up the new site. None of it is styled beyond the very basic stuff like paragraph tags and bolding so as to make his job easier.
I promise, I’m going somewhere with this.
Our boss has expressed some interest in using a Content Management System for the new public site, in order to more easily facilitate updating for those staff members who may not know HTML or PHP. While I’m definitely not in complete agreement with this stance, it’s the one that has been taken. So far it seems like not a whole lot of real work has been put into making this work, so I decided I’d do some thinking about how to make this all work. That’s when I stumbled upon several sites using WordPress as their CMS. It makes sense, really. WP 1.5 was just released and features official support for static pages. These static pages can be ordered into a heirarchy very easily, and thanks to the .htaccess rewriting WP can do have very clear URLs.
WP’s user system is perfect for this kind of an application. Users can be assigned access levels that define exactly what they can and cannot do. Pages can have permission details set to get even more fine-grained access control. WP can even use LDAP for authentication, making the whole administration setup that much easier.
WordPress is really easily themable, has boatloads of plugins to provide new features, is intuitive to use… it just seems like a really cool idea. I’m thinking about trying to get a sample site setup on either my hosting or our test server and see how well I can get it to work, since making propositions like this with a working example always helps.
March 2nd, 2005 7 Comments »
