I'm looking into setting up a very simple site (static pages and an image gallery) with Wordpress for a non-web-savvy client, so I'd like to simplify the Editor role's admin interface as much as possible.
Looking through Wordpress's plugin directory, I found several plugins that "CMS-ify" the admin side of things, hiding menu options and the like. Are there any "admin-cleaning" plugins you'd recommend? Are there any other plugins I should look into?
I keep preaching this plugin all over Stackoverflow, but seriously go with PodsCMS. It rocks the house with it's features, scalability, and developer support. There is good documentation and accessible Q&A from the developers via the Pods Forum, IRC Chat, and even Twitter.
To simplify the Editor role (or any role) check out Adminimize.
http://wp-cms.com/our-wordpress-plugins/wp-cms-post-control-plugin/
http://www.noupe.com/wordpress/powerful-cms-using-wordpress.html
As far as plugins to limit user controls, I always use Capability Manager (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/capsman/). It allows you to grant or revoke any/all capabilities for any/all roles. You can also create your own role types with their own capabilities. As far as CMS-ifying your WP, you can set static pages as the front page and create galleries by default. There are also plenty of plugins to insert lightbox or thickbox, or what have you to add very nice looking UI for your galleries:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightbox-2/
That's just a few.
I would go with Adminimize or Capability Manager as recommended by others.
PodsCMS is impressive, bit is going to be rendered more or less obsolete with WordPress 3.0, which is coming out very soon. So I would not be starting with that system right now.
Related
We are planning to create an asp.net website (probably mvc), that needs a cms for news items.
Our content managers and others who require to publish news have asked if they can use wordpress for content management.
Our users have different roles, and news items should be visible to certain roles, or even specific users if possible.
The reason they want wordpress is the manager's user friendliness, so if some other alternative with the same kind of user experience would be ok.
Could anyone please point me in some direction?
NOTE: I'm still doing research at the moment, so I've got nothing holding me back at this point.
There is an API plugin that has been developed to spit out information in JSON, but I have not actually implemented a site with it:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/json-api/
Perhaps you could have the authors work on a wordpress install and create your app to draw content via that plugin?
I too was facing the same issue, little different. We want to have WP as CMS so that our site can take the benefit of SEO which is very easy with WP. SO we installed WP under a folder in the Main ASP.net based website. Initially there were issues, I was unable to run it. Finally managed to run it. Solution is posted here - http://www.wwwlabz.com/how-to-run-a-php-based-website-from-a-subfolder-in-asp-net-website. Hope it will help someone. Actual site where we implemented this is http://www.periproperties.com/content/.
Now I want to have specific section of WP to be accessible on my site. SO I am exploring different options and will post, if found something
Thanks.
DotNetNuke is the most popular ASP.NET based CMS (source). I am implementing my first project in it and so far I am very happy with it.
Note the free edition will not work for you since you need customizable security roles and free has a limited set of predetermined roles. You'll need the pro edition.
I don't know how similar it is to WordPress. Overall, WordPress is much more popular but of course there are platform issues with WordPress since it is Apache based and you want to create an ASP.NET website.
I'm pretty new to web design (but a very experienced programmer) and I'm creating a pretty simple wordpress blog for a friend. Take a look if you want: http://beachief.com/. Right now he has a domain mapped to a wordpress.com account, so I have no access to plugins or custom themes. This is what he wants me to add:
A like/dislike function for all posts
One section with 2 blog columns side by side (not supported by the theme - or any others that I could find)
The ability to let users log in and post their own content
My question is: is this stuff possible to do with a wordpress.com account? Or will he need to switch to an independently hosted wordpress.org site? Let me know what you think, thanks
Personally, I really like Wordpress. It's an incredibly flexible, stable, and strong CMS.
If you're really wanting the like/dislike functions, I found this:
http://www.mrphpguru.com/blog/2011/01/14/like-dislike-post-plugins-for-wordpress/
But there are also some other great post rating alternatives here:
http://www.geeksucks.com/showcases/10-cool-wordpress-plugins-for-ratings.htm
and for people logging in and posting their own content, you can manage users through the Wordpress backend (usually yoursite.com/wp-login or yoursite.com/wp-admin), and allow or deny specific permissions from them.
He will need to switch to Wordpress.org and be independantly hosted.
Wordpress.com does not let you use plugins or custom themes, unless you pay for a VIP plan.
i have created a website for a non profit organization. People on the site want to post stuff . i want to figure out the best way to allow them to do this.
Can i host a wordpress site and somehow embed it into my website
Do i need to install some whole CMS solution?
Other solutions for supporting user driven posts.
to clarify, the functionality of wordpress is all i need (people posting content and pictures).
It's easy to integrate Wordpress into a static html site.
Integrating WordPress with Your Website « WordPress Codex. (You do need mysql, but almost every hosting company out there offers it.)
If you want to convert an existing html site to Wordpress, look at Theme Development « WordPress Codex. Developing Wordpress themes is no more complex than other CMS's, and here are lots of tutorials out there. You divide up your html into header.php, index.php, page.php, footer.php, etc., and css into style.css. If you do a standard Wordpress theme, then plugins will work fine.
Go ahead and do a full install of Wordpress; there's no option for a minimum install. WP is small, anyway.
If you need a finer degree of working with editors, subscribers and contributors than Wordpress offers out of the box, look at different plugins that offer role managing capability, giving administrators the power to give different levels of permissions to users to write, edit and publish. WordPress › Search for roles « WordPress Plugins
You can pull other content into Wordpress via RSS, too, and either have that content appear as an RSS feed, or have it integrated into published posts. FeedWordPress | simple and flexible Atom/RSS syndication for WordPress
You can get a free account at wordpress.com and try out a limited version of Wordpress, limited in that it is hosted by wordpress.com and you have a small number of plugins and css modifications you can make. But once you selfhost Wordpress, then you can do much more with it in terms of plugins and adapting the css to an existing site.
You could use a Wiki.
There are a few popular free Wiki packages out there these days. By far the most popular would be the framework behind Wikipedia - MediaWiki. Wikis' are a proven way to let users create the content, with systems in place to prevent vandalism/spam. MediaWiki also has a whole bunch of great plug-ins for anything you would need.
Another Wiki option is to use the Wordpress-Wiki plug-in for Wordpress. It lets you use Wordpress, but with some features of a Wiki. Not as feature rich as MediaWiki, but a good option if you really like Wordpress.
You do not need to install a whole cms solution, though wordpress can host an entire site, not just blogs.
You could hack it by using a hosted weordpress and displaying it in an iframe (this one might get some flames - but it works and it's easy)
You could also install wordpress on your server. By the sounds of it this is not your expertise, and while setting up wordpress is getting easier every release, for smaller sites I would much rather recommend pivotx
wordpress has a lot of overhead and requires a mysql database. The templated, while there are more available than in pivotx are harder to create. So I'm suggesting the other solution because it does the bulk of what wordpress does, and though it has far far far fewer plugins, it is a lot easier to theme, as it uses smarty.
This problem/scenario is pretty common. And the most common solution is to install a CMS. Our compagny installs Drupal to let end user manage their website easily. They can edit menus, and change content as easily as you write a document in word processor software.
But there is a lot of CMS out there...
Have you tried blogEngine.net?
I have two sites http://www.dotnetscraps.com and http://www.abhyast.com/ that are hosted using blogEngine.net. It is free and has multi user support, and the best part for me is that it supports both XML and SQL hosting. Anything that you post automatically ends up in the App_Data folder which is what you need to backup.
http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/
There are a plenty of themes to choose from, and if you wish you can customize your own theme without much effort.
Which do you use and why? Does one provide any clear advantages over the other?
I use admin_menu for administrators and developers who need quick access to administration functions, but I use admin for everyone else.
Admin's main weakness for administrators, that it only shows you one section of the menu at a time, is also its main strength for content creators and maintainers who would be overwhelmed by all menu options. The fact that you can have a sidebar with just Create content is great for data entry.
A big plus of admin is its ability to be tucked away into one corner instead of taking up the entire top of the website. In my user testing, people don't seem to think they're editing the live site when the site has a toolbar attached to it: before switching to admin, I would frequently get questions asking how they could see the live site when logged in.
I find them both slower than just using the default system, they both add to page load times and it's very easy to get to the admin page you want using Firefox's url suggestion feature.
Be careful using admin menu, for sites with lots of modules it's buggy, in my experience. It disappears without reason. I've been developing websites on Drupal for 5 or more years and admin_menu was one of my favourites admin tools...
For small sites, I recommend it. For sites with lots of modules I wouldn't recommend it. See the admin_menu isssues, search "disappear" and you will find people complaining about it. Some patches have been submitted, in my case the bug persists.
Be careful with this module on D7.
Admin menu provides a quicker way to get to many of the core admin functions rather than going via admin. It is part of D7 but in D6 is has been known to be buggy and slow.
I'm looking for a wordpress-like blog interface to put inside a Joomla hosted site. The admin interface of Joomla is quirky enough and hard enough to use that daily updates are infeasible.
What I am looking for is an easy-to-use posting interface that supports multiple users with different accounts/names, a tagging scheme, and easy find by date/user/tag functionality.
In particular I'm looking for a relatively easy-to-deploy, out-of-the-box solution, and would prefer not to hack rss feeds together or write too much custom code. I know there are several extensions out there but they all receive largely mixed reviews... Has anyone used any of these? Or has anyone had experience putting something like this together?
Well you could do this - have a wordpress installation. Get the users to post there and then use the RSS feed from it (or the XML RPC Blogging API) to update the Joomla installation. You will have to write the update piece once, but then all the headache is gone.
I'm not trying to be smart here, but if the admin interface of Joomla isn't working for you, aren't you doing yourself a disservice by trying to patch their UI instead of spending your time looking for a CMS that is easier to manage/a better fit for your user base?
Edit: All of the CMS's I've dealt with in ASP.NET are homegrown. However I'm looking into checking out Umbraco based on the recommendations of two well-respected friends. In the case you presented where you already have content in Joomla and a migration out to another CMS is going to be overkill, I think that vaibhav has got it right. You should look into setting up Wordpress or some other blogging engine and then simply have Joomla consume the content and display it in the Joomla site. I've not done it, but from what I remember of Joomla when I was looking at it, I believe that it would support this.
After doing a bit more research I decided to go with the open source MojoBlog. It was quite easy to install and configure and after a few stalls and hang ups that were resolved via perusal of their forums I was up and running. The edit interface is not ideal but it much better than Joomla admin, and it has multi-user-support, tag categorization, modules for viewing by tag, date, etc. Think it will suffice for my needs in the short term.
We at 'corePHP' have successfully integrated the WordPress and WordPress Multi-User blogging platforms into Joomla!. Please visit us to see what these feature-rich components have to offer you. https://www.corephp.com/wordpress/wordpress-integration-for-joomla-1.5.html
Happy Blogging,
Michael Pignataro
VP of Operations
www.corephp.com