Author: admin

It seems that WordPress must be one of the most popular CMS tools available at this time. Obviously this has a lot to do with how easy it is to work with. Installation is a snap, they boast a 5 minute install, and I have to say it’s pretty accurate. Though, it might take a few minutes longer if you’re new to the process. That said I’ve never heard anyone claim the “5 minute” install was very inaccurate.

From here you start to wonder what kind of sites can make with WordPress? This question is tainted by the blog label. Since it started as a blog, WordPress.com us a blog hosting site, and it’s primary use is as a blog. Everyone’s first thought is that WordPress is a blog.

Really, WordPress is a Content Management System, or CMS. Originally conceived as a blog, it’s really just a site manager that stores site content as either posts or pages. Posts are elements that are added often, think of these as blog posts. Pages on the other hand represent content that is more or less fixed, think of this as a static web pages.

Working with these two types of elements there is a broad range of web sites that can be created. Not just blogs.

WordPress provides several methods of organizing site content. Categories, which are, well, categories. Categories allow you to sort content into groups that can be searched, filtered and displayed together. Categories also allow you style types of content differently.

Tags are another organizing tool that provide a free form method of, well, tagging content. Think of tags as keywords attached to content to provide a more detailed description. Use tags to build on the broad areas of content created by categories.

WordPress also provides a system of taxonomies. Think of taxonomies as a specialized tagging. Or, categories of tags. The taxonomy system is not activated by default. To use this you’ll need to activate this feature using the functions.php file. See this tutorial here: http://justintadlock.com/archives/2009/05/06/custom-taxonomies-in-wordpress-28

What types of sites can you make with WordPress? It’s hard to say how much you can do with WordPress. If you’re new to WordPress, I would that you probably do a lot more than you think you can. The tool is very flexible. The Admin panel is also incredibly easy to pick. So it’s pretty is to create a site and pass it to a client to manage with minimal instruction.

Here’s an article on sites using WordPress as a CMS: http://www.webhelpermagazine.com/2008/04/wordpress-wow-seven-top-sites-using-wordpress-as-a-cms/

Looks like I’m not the only one that thinks WordPress is a great CMS tool. Looks like Pakt Publishing awarded WordPress first place Overall Best Open Source CMS. WordPress beat Drupal and Joomla. Which are dedicated CMS tools. Here’s a link if you’d like to read more about this: http://www.packtpub.com/award

When creating a WordPress theme it’s natural to start adding classes and id names to HTML elements as you write them. There is nothing wrong with this. You can use familiar names and be assured that an element has the class that you assigned. There is a downside, in that it doesn’t leverage the plethora of classes already output by WordPress. WordPress produces a long list of classes and ids and can generate dynamic classes and ids that you can’t do by yourself.

The problem, is these classes aren’t visible. At least not until you’ve rendered the page in a browser and looked at the source code. Which is not the way that accustomed to building web pages normally.

post_class() is a function that can generates the following classes:

• .post-id
• .post (or .page or .attachment, depending on the post type)
• .sticky
• .hentry
• .category-misc
• .category-example
• .tag-news
• .tag-wordpress
• .tag-markup

In a typical post_class will generate the following classes:

• post-# (where # is the id number of this post)
• post
• hentry
• category-name

If the post has tags it may generate even more class names. Remember an element may have any number of class names assigned to it.

You could look at the class names as two types: General and Specific. General class names are names that would be the same for every post on the same page. Like post and hentry. Specific classes would be names that might be unique for each post. Things like: post-# (remember the # would be the id number of the post). Some class names will be general and specific. Things like category-name (where name is the name of the category. The category-name might be the same for several posts, while not matching everything on the same page.

Tags, not shown above also generate class names. post_class will generate class names for each tag assigned to a post in the form of tag-name.

What’s important with all of this? Having WordPress generate your class names make your job of creating a template easier and give you more options when creating a template.

Rather than adding your classes to everything, let Wordrpess do it for you. To make use of these classes what’s important is to understand the general classes. These are applied to everything. These might have been the classes you assigned yourself. Instead use the WordPress names and save your self some trouble and standardize your templates and style sheets.

Use post_class by adding to a likely tag within “The Loop”. Remember that post_class generates class names that are specific to posts. That is some of the names will change from post to post. This means that post_class is best used on a unique element that surrounds each individual post.

The post_class method outputs class=”” along with the class names. Use it in this way:

<div <?php post_class() ?>>
... post content ...
</div>

Imagine the div above was contained in The Loop. The rest of the post content would be contained within the div above.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/post_class