It’s All Just A Ride

My history with Wordpress, one of the most popular self-hosted blogging platforms, is admittedly not that long. Maybe a little over a year. I hadn’t fully appreciated the fact that one can make static pages in Wordpress until I saw Kerim’s post on using it as a CMS. That was a few months ago, and at first it seemed a bit counter intuitive. Why use a blogging platform for creating static pages? Then, when the LRC decided to revamp its website, the concept suddenly became much clearer. If you want to have a blog as part of your website, it is much simpler to start with Wordpress and adapt it to also use static pages, rather than the other way ’round. Building a blog from scratch is no easy feat. You need a good working knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL or PostGreSQL. Most people who are into making websites can handle the first two, but the last two are more for advanced users.

I don’t know enough PHP or database scripting to build a blog from scratch, so Wordpress is a necessity. I do, however, have enough know-how to edit a CSS template, and tweak existing PHP code to fit a Wordpress template to my own needs. Thus, Wordpress takes care of the hard part. This way all of your static pages retain the same CSS styling that the blog does, ensuring continuity between pages. Pages can then easily be added, deleted, or edited by any authorized users (thus the idea of CMS). This technique does require one to reverse-engineer a template, but I usually find that much more fun than building from scratch.

Leveraging Wordpress also gives you access to easy to use plugins that do things like re-order your links, display Flickr feeds, display other RSS feeds, and any number of other niche tasks you can think of. In most cases there is no need to actually alter any code, rather you use the Wordpress administrative interface to select the options for any given plugin. Basically, it is as extensible and flexible as you want it to be, for the most part, and it’s all free.