I wrote my original post about running two blogs on one site a while back, and it’s been one of the most popular articles here, but I’ve never been entirely satisfied with the approach. Maintaining two separate WordPress blogs, even when they share the same installation files, is not really convenient.

So when I revamped the site recently I was keen to find an alternative way of handling the issue. In this article I’m going to describe how I set about it.

More about having two blogs on a single site

centrespread is a great site for the discussion of magazines. Site owner Adam Foster asked me to help him by creating a form so visitors can suggest new magazines to be featured.

I made a WordPress plugin for him that submits user input to the database. It’s built on top of the widely-used cforms ii plugin.

“Absolutely 100% perfect. Thank you so much for your help. It is good that there are good people out there who care to do work to perfection as if it were their own.” — Adam Foster, centrespread.

[ Edit 2 December 2008: anyone considering sIFR should also look at typeface.js. I don't think there's a WP plugin for it yet but I could be persuaded to write one for a suitable reward. ]

[Edit 11 June 2008: this post is somewhat out of date as I've now stopped using sIFR on this site. I got rather fed up with its imperfections to be honest. ]

The typography of this site was looking a little dull, so I thought it might be nice to use sIFR to jazz things up a little. sIFR - which stands for the rather daunting-sounding Scalable Inman Flash Replacement - uses a some neat trickery, a combination of Flash, Javascript and CSS, to change fonts on a page dynamically when it is loaded. This means you can use heading fonts which are

without having the pain of creating substitute images for every item of text.

So, what does it take to get sIFR working with WordPress? (more…)

In my previous post about search engine optimisation of WordPress I described how I was using the Permalink Redirect plugin to ensure all the URLs at this site are correctly slash-terminated. Today however I was using rebuilding my Google site map using GSiteCrawler when I was dismayed to notice that all the “wrong” URLs were still appearing in the list. How could that be? The answer took some finding (and it’s all rather technical), but I think it’s worth mentioning as others may unawares have the same problem, which causes the plugin to be defeated even though it seems to be working.
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I’ve just given this entire site a makeover. I got fed up with the hybrid site management I’d knocked together when I first set it up and I decided that migrating it fully to WordPress would be the best approach. At the same time I thought this would be a great opportunity to do some serious search engine optimisation, since WordPress, combined with the right plugins, would make the process much easier.
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[ Edited 8th June 2008: I'm not doing it this way any more. Read this more recent post for the lowdown. ]

It’s a frequently asked question - how do you get multiple blogs from a single installation of Wordpress? And the answer is surprisingly simple, if a little technical.
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I’ve known for a while that you can use Wordpress as a small-scale content management system, but I’ve not had the chance to put it into practice until last week, when I worked on a site for which it was an ideal fit: a client already using Wordpress for blogging, a relatively small number of pages, an existing design which could be readily adapted.

All the same, there were a number of challenges. First there was an existing two-tier menu system. I felt this needed to be user-managed rather than hard-coded, so new pages could be added to the second level. I based my solution on the Fold Page List plugin, but with a couple of minor additions to make the menus more customisable: per-item CSS styling and menu-specific text.

The site required a contact form, for which I used the excellent cforms plugin, which is a model of what a plugin should be: flexible, easy to get to grips with - and it works.

I also installed SEO Title Tag, Add Meta Tags and Spam Karma. Something like SEO Title Tag is vital if you have any desire to optimise your pages for search engines (and why would you not?). A good meta description is also important, not so much for achieving a high position in result lists but in getting users to click on your listing.

Once I’d migrated all the existing content to wordpress pages, the site was more or less finished. Quite a painless exercise, on the whole.

One caveat, though about Wordpress as a CMS: if you have a page hierarchy, page permalinks will reflect that, so for example if you have an ‘about me’ section under which there is a ‘my hobbies’ page, the permalink will be something like ‘/about-me/my-hobbies/’. If at some future date you decide to move your ‘my hobbies’ page to a different section or to the top level of the hierarchy, its so-called permalink will change. This is a major drawback, but one for which I’m considering a solution: watch this space.

Consider me won over to the idea of Wordpress as a CMS, though. This very site is currently at the workshop being rebuilt along those lines…

Helen Palmer of Tailor Made South Africa Travel wanted to get control over her website, which was based on an unsatisfactory custom-made PHP application. She already had a Wordpress blog so I suggested using Wordpress for the entire site. This would mean she could update her pages whenever she liked, which would be a major benefit to the business.

I converted the site template to a Wordpress one and migrated the existing content to Wordpress pages. This also necessitated some PHP coding to generate the two-tier menu structure she required. At the same time I made the menus keyboard accessible and adjusted font sizes for greater readability. I also added the facility for pages to have fully customisable titles and meta data for search engine optimisation purposes. Finally, I made a little favicon to enhance the site’s identity.

Alan Graham has been having trouble with Wordpress:

WordPress rant, additional web rants, and an exclusive!

Along with a few friends, I run a local networking organization. We have a blog, and it fell unto me to give that blog a facelift. So after doing some Photoshop/Illustrator work to make a new “theme” for the blog, I went into WordPress to do just a few tiny changes. Now I’m relatively new to [...]

[via Web 2.0 Explorer]

I sympathise. While I really like Wordpress for daily use once it’s installed and working, the template system is a nightmare for anyone who’s not a PHP programmer. I’ve recently been doing a lot of work with Drupal, and it suffers from the same issue: it’s extremely customisable for skilled users but anyone else has either got to use a ready-made template off the shelf or employ an expert.

For techies like myself this can be seen as an opportunity to sell our services, but I don’t think we should be too complacent about the situation. There are content management systems out there which are much easier to customise than our favourites and we should not assume that our skills will always be required. (Last night on TV there was a programme in which Ken Stott discovered how hard his tailor grandfather had to work, in the days when every man wore a suit and every suit was hand-made. Then there were thousands of tailors in every big city: today there are just 20 companies doing hand tailoring in the whole of Scotland. The same can happen in any industry.)

I don’t think web development is likely to disappear altogether in the near future, but will we still be hand-customising templates in 10 years time? I hope we’ll all be doing things that are rather more interesting. And because Wordpress, Drupal and their ilk are open source, community efforts, we can help bring about the changes that’ll make them truly easy to use. The separation of presentation from content is a good thing, but it’s not the same as making presentation an irrelevance.

Not long ago any change on a website had to be carried out by professionals, expensively. Now we sell the idea of user-maintainable content, but many web designers are still trying to keep hold of the job of looking after the presentation of a site. Sure, there are good reasons why site design should be done by skilled people, but those don’t necessarily have to include technical ones. Aren’t computers supposed to remove barriers, rather than erect them?