This site runs on WordPress, a most excellent system for websites. It’s best known for being behind Blogs, as in this site, but can also be used in other ways. I’ve been preoccupied this week with a project I’m doing which will put some tutorials online, and I’ve been shaping a WordPress install to suit. Yesterday I think I made the breakthrough I needed to get the articles into a good sequence and make it easy to navigate around amongst them.
Much of the problem I was having was conceptual and around the structure of the content, more than around the WordPress system. One difficulty is that my clients have what is essentially a book being put on a website, but that’s the material we’re working with.
Semiologic CMS is a theme which smoothes the way to using WordPress as a Content Management System.
Blogs generally put the most recent information at the top and front so the reader works through posts in reverse chronological order. In this tutorial though visitors may want to start with Chapter One and work through, probably, but not necessarily, in sequence, to the last chapter.
It took a while, but after searching the forums and the Codex I located a couple of places where sorting is set up and changed DESC to ASC (descending to ascending).
I also needed Scott Merrill’s In Series plugin, which allows me to group articles in sequence and set up a special navigation between them. WP Category Posts is also active in my plugins list and probably contributes to being able to list all the articles in one ‘chapter’. Ryan Boren’s Search Hilite (also known as Google Highlight) provides user-friendly highlights on search terms after a visitor executes a search.
There’s more work to do before the site can go live, including polishing the final text, but at least we’re on a good footing now.
And of course, just as I was getting started on the heavy customisation of version 1.5 of WordPress it looks as though version 2.0 is on the horizon.
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