A Frog in the Valley

Following a few posts on wordpress design and lightweight PHP CMS (thanks for all the comments!), I bit the bullet and went forward with the idea for a real project (definition of a real project : a client, a budget and a deadline)!

Here are my quciknotes for this work, from my del.icio.us wordpress tag history and a few other local bookmarks not yet posted to the cloud (this list is specific to setting up wordpress as a lightweight cms where blogging is *not* the primary usage scenario).

This post is in progress, but I needed to share this info my fellow developers on the project so I thought I would “CC:world” since it might be useful for others…

Articles for CMS style wordpress installs

• Howto put a custom frontpage in wordpress
• From weblog to cms with wordpress
• Why I choose wordpress as my CMS
• WP 2 WYSIWYG H1/H2/H3 support

Useful Plugins

• Askimet anti-spam - mandatory!
• WP-DB backup - better safe than sorry
• Permalink Redirect
• Google Sitemap Generator
• Slug-Trimmer
• FeedBurner plugin
• Contact Form II
• Improved include page
• Static front page
• Democracy AJAX poll
• WP-Email
• Flickr RSS
• FavIcon Head
• FirstRSS
• My Link Order

Custom Templating development

• Minimalist themes (to get you started)
• How to Convert Any Web Template Into a WordPress Theme and Big HTML/CSS/PHP cheatsheet list at Lorelle on Wordpress
• PNG background image : Theme cheat sheet
• Wordpress CSS graphical reference and tutorial
• From XHTML/CSS to wordpress

Advanced / programming

• Wordpress API cheat sheet
• Wordpress action hooks
• Custom article management with wordpress

Working with wordpress in other languages

• Wordpress in french

More to come and a link to the website when it’s officially launched (in a week or two). If you have suggestions and/or comments you are more than welcome to post them in the comments. One thing I would like to develop more is the strategy to manage a multilingual website with wordpress, this one is english and french, for now I am going with two blogs to manage that, with a front page with language choice. As I will implement this for my own blog here, it might be a bit different with two columns on the front page, one per language… Not sure yet.

Tags: opensource, php, wordpress, cms