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Notes from my Barcamp Session

barcamp logoPart of Barcamp is that everyone must give a session. I gave mine on using WordPress as a CMS for your non-blog website, discussing the development of MGross.com.

I'm not quite cool enough to know how to use a Wiki, so here are some notes and links.

Some Useful WordPress Plugins

· Get-a-Post: I use this plugin to let the front page blurb be edited without changing the rest of the front page template.
· Get Custom Field Values: This lets me create templates with multiple text areas, using WordPress' custom fields. An example is the two-column layout on this page. The right column is the body text, but the first column is a custom field.
· Redirectify: Allows a WordPress "page" to actually redirect to another site entirely. Useful for integrating "legacy" pages into your automatic navigation structure. On the MGross site, this is used for The More Things Change link in the books submenu.

A Note on .htaccess

One of the most important things to do when you recreate a site in WordPress is make sure the old links still work. Lots of people still link to your old URLs -- they don't want a 404 error! So, you can go to Manage > Files and add redirects to the beginning of your .htaccess. Here's a few from mgross.com's .htaccess:

# Redirects from Old Site
Redirect 301 /profiles.htm http://www.mgross.com/articles/profiles/?
Redirect 301 /articles.htm http://www.mgross.com/articles/article/?
Redirect 301 /author.htm http://www.mgross.com/about/?
Redirect 301 /740.htm http://www.mgross.com/books/740-park/?
Redirect 301 /times.htm http://www.mgross.com/books/740-park/?
Redirect 301 /model.htm http://www.mgross.com/books/model/?

The 301 means permanent redirect, so search engines like Google will update the link. The /? is required, or else WordPress will get confused and error.

Other Links

· Original Post on MGross.com Launch [ScottKidder.com]
· Creating and Using Pages [WordPress.org]

These are some links I've found on Google, though I haven't had time to read all of them:
· WordPress 1.5 as a Website CMS [AlexKing.org]

Find more? Comment here or email me, scott AT skidder.net.

Posted in Barcamp, Design, Technology, WordPress on January 15, 2006, 11:00 AM | Permalink

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