Lately I ‘volunteered’ to take over our local PTA website. It was an attractive Flash site - but no tools were available to maintain it. Wanting to try something new - I checked out several of the major PHP CMS systems out there and finally settled on Joomla.
I got everything setup - it wasn’t too difficult but it did take some time to RTFM, experiment a bit and get everything configured correctly. Once I get it setup I thought it worked pretty good. It had news, an event calendar, etc. Nice. Or so I thought. Then one day I was talking to my wife and she politely informed me no one liked the new site.
“Everyone says the new site sucks” she said.
OK. Not really. But that’s how I interpreted it!!
She said people had mentioned it was ‘too complicated’.
So I had to backpedal a bit. What to do? Try another CMS? There are literally zillions of open source, free PHP based CMS systems.
Then I started looking at my blog and wondering why I couldn’t use WordPress? After digging through all the available plugs - I quickly made the decision to give it a shot, and once again WordPress amazed me in it’s flexibility and ease of use.
So it still took me some time - again to RTFM, find all the required plugins and get things setup and content transfered over - but in the end I’ve gotten very positive feedback about the new site. Management is also easy for me - the WordPress UI is dead simple, and if I ever need to turn the reigns over to someone else I feel comfortable knowing I can get someone up to speed on things very quickly.
If you are interested the site is here: http://www.hollygrovepta.org
Update:
Here is a quick list of plugins I used:
- cforms II - contact form
- Event Calendar (and widget) - events
- File icons - for newsletter and other uploaded docs
- Random quotes - Used to show volunteer opportunities in sidebar
There are a zillion themes out there - finding one suitable for your site is a matter of personal taste. I tried a lot of 3 column themes before settling on the current Cutline theme. Some were not widget ready. Some were poorly coded. But since switching themes in WordPress is so simple - it is very easy to try out a theme and if you don’t like it - delete it!
When looking at plugins - think outside the box. I had a huge list of volunteer opportunities I wanted to present - but wasn’t sure how best to display them without overwhelming viewers. When I was browsing through some plugins I stumbled upon the random quote plugin and discovered I could use that to display a random volunteer opportunity in the sidebar!
Otherwise some minor CSS editing and I was done. One neat thing I would check out - is how the Cutline them allows you to use a ‘custom’ CSS file so that you can customize your theme - without altering the original files. Then if you upgrade the them - you will not have to worry about overwriting the modified CSS.
You May Also Enjoy Reading:
6 Comments
Joomla is horrible. The admin is clunky, the code is inconsistent and… it’s just horrible. On top of joomla itself, all the plugins are written completely different from one another. Heaven help you if you have to modify something or add some features.
It’s really bad. Consider yourself lucky you got off it before you got too deep into it.
I hear good things about Drupal.
The new web site looks great! I’ve been trying to decide on a CMS for an upcoming project and took a look at WordPress, but I wasn’t sure how well it would function for a “non-blog” website. In all my testing, I wasn’t able to see how to create a web site that didn’t look like a glorified blog.
Would you like to share any tips, plugins, techniques, etc? I’ve love to see how you did it. Thanks!
Anon - I’d like to try Drupal as well. I chose Joomla originally because I thought it was going to be the successor for Drupal but that’s not really the case. And I was hoping for the new version to be released sooner. Hopefully they will address many of the issues in the next release.
Richard - I’ll try to update my post this afternoon with a list of plugins which I ended up using…
Alright - I’ve updated the post with a list of plugins I used, some notes about thinking outside the box when considering how to use some plugins, and using a custom CSS file.
Thanks for the info about the plugins. I’ve got some more questions about customizing WP…
When experimenting with WordPress, what I did was just fiddle with various settings on my hosted account at WordPress.com to see how flexible it is. It seemed like there was no way to tell it not to treat a page as a “blog”. You could turn off commenting on the pages, but then you were still left with a “comments have been disabled on this page” message.
Maybe the standalone version is more flexible than the hosted version. What am I missing? How do you create pages and remove the standard “blog” functionality? Thanks for your help!
I have not messed with WordPress.com. On the PTA site - the only page that is a ‘blog’ is the homepage where I treat more as ‘news’.
The Board, Fundraising, About, etc. are all ‘pages’ on which I have comments disallowed. So there is just straight content and it acts like a static page.