Wordpress is my new best friend
I love love love wordpress. I love it so much this newest revision of this site was built using wordpress as a CMS (Content Management System). In the past, all of my previous websites have been static html, but this time around I wanted something with a CMS behind it.
Being a web developer, I have played around with most of the big CMSs out there ie: Joomla, Drupal, Dotnetnuke. All of them seemed a bit too much work for the worth. I even had thought of possibly building a system of my own, but it would have taken up way too much of my time and I didn’t want to deal with the headaches of starting something from scratch. So, in the end my final decision was to use wordpress.
I sat down, loaded up my favorite website I use for inspiration, which happens to be Design Shack and started work designing my new site. Once I finalized how I wanted it to look, it was time for me to build my theme. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordpress here is an excerpt from the Wordpress website that talks about the theme system:
WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click. Have a new design every day.
Putting together a theme isn’t really all them much different that building a normal html web page. Most of it is standard html, but you do need to know a little PHP to finish the job. Wordpress has some great info in their codex for getting started with building themes if you would like to build your own.
Once my theme was put together and installed in my wordpress installation it was now time for me to decide how to build my portfolio section. After many hours of searching though the plugins, that are available for wordpress, I stumbled across podsCMS. The pods cms system really opened my mind to the endless possibilities I now had in my hands with wordpress. If you look on the “Work” page of my site, pods was used to build that system. Now, once I have completed a new project all I have to do is login to the wordpress admin and simply upload some images, fill out the form I built and my new project is up on my website.
Since this new revision of my website was build, I have had the opportunity to build several other sites using wordpress as a CMS and have no problems. I would highly recommend wordpress to anyone who is looking for a blog system or a CMS.
