New Tech - How About WordPress?

[UBarU Director]

How about if we leave existing the site alone for a few weeks and develop a new site? 

Jon and Karin would be more comfortable if we kept the standard CMS workflow to be similar to past endeavors, so I suggest WordPress. This is the dominant CMS currently. It has the advantage of a vibrant open source community and of the extension language being PHP (actually I think it's PHP all the way down), the same as the current platform, so we could be more transparent given that the group already has some PHP skills.

I have some superficial familiarity with WordPress, but that is because all the hard work on the Planet3.org has been done by my brilliant young associate Dan Moutal, cc'ed. Some of the technical ideas we have tried on P3 are much harder than anything we would do at ubaru.org. 

If Dan is willing to pitch in, we'll make short work of it, and he's expressed at  least some interest.

So what we'll do is develop a parallel site on wp.org, with a target delivery date of when Jon gets back from vacation in about 3 weeks. Then we can decide how to proceed - Dan and I are already self-hosting a WP site and its dev mirror at (host) webfaction.com so what's one or two more?

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Michael and Irene Tobis

Executive Co-Directors (Ranch Managers)

UBarU Ranch Retreat and Conference Center

277 UBarU Drive, Mountain Home TX 78058

(830) 864-8419

[Michael Tobis]

sorry I meant on wordpress.org not wp.org .

mt

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[Karin Gates]

Yes, WordPress is fine with me.  It the CMS that I suggested to you two weeks ago.

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[Jackie Purdy]

I think its worth giving WordPress a shot. From our conversation about skins and colors, it's clear that being able to customize even those superficial aspects of the website is important, and WP may be able to offer better ease of customization. (Granted, I have no knowledge of the mechanics of DNN, but from what Karin's said it appears to be a lengthy and involved task.)

I've just finished some online WP training, nothing along the lines of creating themes or writing code, but giving a pretty comprehensive overview of working with the application, so I'm interested in how this will all come together.

Jackie

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[Karin Gates]

Jackie,

 

Being able to edit the images has nothing to do with DNN.  We weren’t even trying to edit them with DNN.  We wouldn’t be able to edit them in WordPress either.  It is a lengthy and involved process because changing a thousand small images is a lengthy and involved process.  Having WordPress would make no difference.  Creating a skin is outside the realm of DNN or WordPress.  It requires PhotoShop or another similar tool and the original images that came with the skin.  I can change the skins that I create with PhotoShop, but trying to change somebody else’s skin after they have slice the original image into a thousand pieces is next to impossible.

 

Karin

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[Dan Moutal]

Hello everyone. I've been roped into helping out by MT:)  The good news is that much of what used to require Photoshop (or other graphics programs) can now be done strictly with CSS (rounded corners, and drop shadows being some of the more obvious examples.)

Also the people behind some of the official wordpress themes have put together a nice tutorial that is worth reading (if you are interested).
http://themeshaper.com/2012/10/22/the-themeshaper-wordpress-theme-tutorial-2nd-edition/

Mostly I have worked with a theme framework which makes things easier but lately I have not been very satisfied with it and find that any upgrades of wordpress or the framework can break things so I can no longer recommend that approach.

Another option would be to look through the wordpress theme directory to see if there already exists something that would work. This could be modified to better suit the needs of UBarU
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

Here are a few that I found interesting: after a very quick search
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/responsive
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/news
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/pinboard

Hope this helps

Karin Gates wrote:

>From our conversation about skins and colors, it's clear that being
able to customize even those superficial aspects of the website is
important, and WP may be able to offer better ease of customization.
(Granted, I have no knowledge of the mechanics of DNN, but from what
Karin's said it appears to be a lengthy and involved task.)

Karin Gates wrote:

From our conversation about skins and colors, it's clear that being able to customize even those superficial aspects of the website is important, and WP may be able to offer better ease of customization. (Granted, I have no knowledge of the mechanics of DNN, but from what Karin's said it appears to be a lengthy and involved task.)

--
Dan Moutal

 http://ofdan.ca
 http://planet3.org