Comments on: WordPress as your Web authoring tool

By: Teaching Online Journalism » MVPs for March and April

Teaching Online Journalism » MVPs for March and April — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:02:00 +0000

[...] WordPress as your Web authoring tool [...]

By: Mindy

Mindy — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:51:49 +0000

Thanks, Scot. I also think that the variety of plugins for WordPress puts it above the rest of the comparable options.

By: Scot Hacker

Scot Hacker — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:47:30 +0000

I manage more than 30 WordPress installations for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and 40 more for clients of my hosting service. I’ve found WP so flexible and quick to develop for that it’s become a way of life. We use it for everything from publication sites to knowledge bases and FAQs to the student handbook to blogs. And we use WP-MU when every student in a class needs a blog of their own.

TextPattern is great, but much of the key to WP’s flexibility is the enormous number of plugins available for the platform. For the upcoming Tech Training for Editors Workshop we’ll be running, we’ll have the fellows working in WP-MU. Plugins have made it easy to let them do podcasting, video embedding, audio embedding, Flash embedding, bi-directional Twitter feeding, etc. etc.

I recently managed a massive migration of China Digital Times from Movable Type to WordPress. Read about it here.

To help keep them all up to date, I check them all out via subversion rather than FTP, and keep them up to date with a simple management script I wrote.

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:13:40 +0000

I’m running quite a few news sites using wordpress and I have to say its the easiest open source, hackable, system I’ve tried.

I’m using the Mimbo theme (http://www.ukjournalism.co.uk/newsday/) and the Vantage and Structure themes from Justin Tadlock. Great themes and his new one, Options, looks good as well.

By: Drew Geraets

Drew Geraets — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:14:32 +0000

We’re using Wordpress for our NYCity News Service and it’s been awesome. It’s a great tool we have our students using and learning about. The biggest thing there is teaching them how to customize the layout and implementing plugins. That’s where good knowledge of xhtml/css and a familiarity with php comes in handy.

By: jsbadillo

jsbadillo — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:34:22 +0000

Hello, I,ve used BranfordMagazine template for Ciberperiodismo.org, and it’s been very usefull. I recommend it.

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:06:03 +0000

Since we mentioned books yesterday, one that might be of interest to blog/cms platform shoppers is Blog Design Solutions by Andy Budd et al. I have a copy.

By: Notes from a Teacher: Mark on Media » Rebuilding online

Notes from a Teacher: Mark on Media » Rebuilding online — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 05:46:49 +0000

[...] is Mindy McAdams’s WordPress as your Web authoring tool, which covers a lot of the arguments already made for WordPress and contains extensive links to [...]

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:12:48 +0000

Hey Mindy,

Thanks for the post. Honestly I’ve been trying to build my own wordpress blog for a few weeks. It’s going slowly because I want it to be original and look just-so. I get daunted.

I’m going to look at Textpattern. But since I’ve started on wordpress I have to tame the beast; pride issue.

By: Danny Sanchez

Danny Sanchez — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:16:41 +0000

It’s important to note that Drupal is a ready-made content management platform, while Django is a framework for developing web applications. It’s a bit apples to oranges.

Django requires plenty of programming knowledge to get started, while Drupal can be installed on a server and used almost out of the box (presuming you don’t want to do any crazy custom stuff).

Also, check out the Joomla CMS. That one is pretty cool too, and it’s open source PHP like Drupal.