After learning HTML and getting a site going, it became a rather tedious task of updating pages upon pages every time a change needed to be made. If an error was found, every page would have to be fixed. Invariably, this type of manual process is something that we try to avoid because its incredibly prone to error. We did it anyway, because its all we had and knew.
Greg and I had some discussions off and on over the years about how to best make use of a database. We had no idea what type of data we wanted to store but we knew that we wanted to store data. Subconsciously, I think we both wanted to NOT have to continue updating our HTML pages. We never really gave it much thought other than to keep bringing it up and hitting the road block: WHAT KIND OF DATA!?
A few years passed and as technology got better, the term CMS came into scope. A CMS (Content Management Solution) is a package that allows you to template your presentation while focusing on content. Essentially, you design the site how you want it to look…ONCE. The design is generic enough that you can then focus on the content. The back end of a CMS is database driven, in that the content and the properties of that content is all stored in a database. When the page is displayed, it looks no different than a typical web page, but behind the scenes, the CMS package processes the content and hooks into the template to display the data based on the template and the properties of the content. Certainly, there is a lot more to it than that, but generally, this is how a CMS works. The content is not limited to text. You can store pictures, files, and a variety of other types of content. Having a CMS solution driving your site is extremely powerful, especially when you don’t have a lot of time to maintain it.
I spent some time off and on looking at the different popular solutions out there and each time, decided that management of the CMS was too costly. Not to say the CMS solutions I looked at were bad. They were actually very good solutions to the problem, but when the majority of the content is text (along with some images), there isnt a whole lot of need to be so general, which both of the CMS solutions I looked at were. These were extremely powerful tools and to be quite honest, Mightor Industries didn’t need ALL of that power. I had considered WordPress along with these other solutions, but at the time, felt that our site didn’t really fit the mold of a “blog” and quickly dismissed it.
Fast forward to 2011. Greg and I really wanted to get back into working on the site, but knew that if things went stagnant, we were going to be in trouble. Each time we attempted to give MI a go, we always got stuck in the design phase and were never able to focus on the content. Greg had mentioned that he wanted to take a look at WordPress for the MP site and had asked for coding help, if it were necessary. Insert my queue to give WordPress another consideration. I was GREATLY impressed! Not only did WordPress satisfy my need of only focusing on the design once, there would be very little design I would actually have to do. Since there were so many freely available themes for WordPress, the only real decision I had to make was which one. We finally decided on a theme and tweaked it slightly to meet our design needs. We had this done over the weekend.
The next big question was how to integrate to our existing forum package. Since 2006, we had run a community forum on the site and didn’t really want to lose the data. My next big discovery about WordPress that impressed me was the ability to extend the product. Again, since the product was open source and designed to be extendable, there were all kinds of options to add additional functionality. The question was, how difficult would it be to find a forum package. After some extensive research, we found what we were looking for: the Simple:Press forum plugin. The plugin had all of the basic functionality of a forum package and most of the administrative functions we were looking for. Data conversion was the only road block and that issue was easily resolved with a little digging through the support forums. They had a data importer that we could use to import our data from our existing forum. I contacted the developers and requested a copy, to which they happily gave me. There were a few bugs along the way, but got them quickly ironed out. After testing the conversion locally, I decided that we needed to go live. The only fortunate part about having no following is that we were able to take the site down and make the conversion fairly quickly. Another success.
We added a few additional plugins for login and social bookmarking and went live with the site in April of 2011. As it turns out, we went stagnant again. However, in 2012, we decided to give it another go. The design had a few issues, so I went out looking for another theme to fit our needs and found the one we’re currently using. In addition to that, I also found several other issues that needed to be resolved. I added quite a few plugins to resolve those issues and improve upon the existing product we had created.
The extendability of WordPress, along with the ability to create and alter themes fairly easily proved to be exactly what Greg and I were looking for. Also, the documentation developed by WordPress, along with its huge following, gave us the confidence in the product that we were looking for in a CMS. In my estimation, minus some changes in design as the site evolves, every feature that is currently part of the site is exactly what Ive been looking for. Thus far, there have been no major issues and the minor issues that we’ve had have been resolved within a day (if not sooner than that) of finding the issue. No longer in my mind was WordPress just a blogging tool, but could be turned into a fully fledged CMS, allowing us to finally focus on the content of the site.
The design phase, in my mind, is never over. However, we now have the ability to bring to our readers the content we’ve been wanting to present for the last 10 years. The fact that its taken this long to get it right is pretty much attributed to lack of time and motivation. However, I think the wait was well worth it as the tools that are available now are far superior to where they were then and are really stable enough to allow someone to build a modern site that allows the administrators to accomplish their goals quickly, with piece of mind that the solution is stable.
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