There is going to be a panel during WordCamp Vancouver focusing on using WordPress as a CMS. To gauge audience interest, the panel members have asked the following to be posted on the site. If you could take the time to leave a comment, that would be great and would help the panel members target their content.
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At the 2010 SXSW Interactive Festival designers debated whether or not WordPress is killing web design. The idea is that WordPress and other CMS are constraining designers to think outside the box and turning them into lazy designers. This panel discussion revealed that WordPress is not the culprit, designers are the ones being lazy when relying on existing themes.
WordPress is a very powerful tool that allows you to create any site you want. Cameron Cavers, Dave Zille and Christine Rondeau have been building sites using WordPress as a CMS and will discuss how best to approach this avenue. What you need to consider when planning your website; what are the limitations; are there any limitations… We’ll also show a few examples and the code used to create sites that no longer look anything like WordPress sites.
If you are interested in using WordPress as a CMS and have a question for the panel or would like to share some of your code, please leave it in the comments and we’ll plan our panel discussion accordingly.
Not being an expert Wordpress user, this is definitely the main topic why i am attending this conference and travelling for 24 horus to get there!
I do agree with your point that designers are getting lazy and that in the end, customisation of current themes is easier, faster and more profitable.
I would be interested in learning more on how to adapt the templates for a particular section e.g. having the products page displayed in a certain way, and the services page displayed in another.
I’m also very interested in learning how to embed different categories of the blog roll into different sections of a website e.g. Having the posts categorised as “latest news” being displayed in the latest news sections and the posts categorised as “Testimonials” displayed in the testimonials section of the “about us” part of the website.
Thank you
Jonathan, thanks for the comment, that’s exactly the sort of stuff I was hoping to talk about — I do a lot of work for other designers who often have highly unique layouts for each section of a site, so I’ve had to deal with this a lot.
If we have time I’d love to walk through some of the custom code (and out of the box alternatives) you can use to add unique classes and IDs on the body tag of each page… once you’ve done that you can write CSS to style only the content on those uniquely classed pages, etc.
Cool !
look forward to meeting you at Wordcamp and also learning from your experience
Greetings from Malta
J
I’d love to talk about relating different data sets and custom post types. So if we had a music venue we’d have Shows and Artists as post types and how would we relate the two since they are different post types? How about pulling custom taxonomies into different post types and relating them.
I am really looking forward to this panel.
Like any good CMS, the power of WordPress is that website content is separate from structure and presentation. Things like categories, tags, blog post titles, page titles, Links (Blogroll), blog post body text, images, and so on, all live in the database. They can be inserted into a page or a sidebar anywhere, with whatever CSS styling or HTML markup you like. The possibilities are endless.
You can have a page on your site that displays only blog posts from the “Portfolio” category, with a sidebar that appears only on that page, and you can style images on that page differently than anywhere else on the site. When you add a new image to a “Portfolio” post, you don’t have to do any coding at all. The styles are applied automatically – or automattically, if you like! – because WordPress is great software and WordPress developers like the members of this panel are always innovating and finding new ways to build on what’s been done so far.
Much of this success is due to the efforts of Matt Mullenweg and others to keep WordPress an open-source platform. WordCamps around the world help continue these efforts. Thanks to everyone who’s coming to WordCamp Vancouver for your participation and support. Looking forward to Saturday the 12th!
Same here Mark and thanks for the message…off to pack now, got a plane to catch in 12 hours and it will be around 23 more hours after that, to get to Vancouver!
See you on Saturday
Hi all,
I have posted the slides from our WP as a CMS panel:
http://www.dazil.com/624/wordpress-as-a-cms-slides-from-wordcamp-vancouver/