Monday, 19 July 2010

Wordpress as content management

Blindingly simple idea ...

Most corporate websites consist of some pretty pictures and some text. Some of the text never changes, some of it does, either to a set frequency or not.

The blindingly simple idea is to replace the text that changes with an rss feed display of a blog content, and any rapidly changing stuff with a twitter feed display, a little like the twitter feed on this blog, ie use wordpress and twitter to feed the dynamic content and leave the static content alone, which can be managed using something like plone.

Advantages:
  • content comes from a qa'd source
  • content can be reused eg Arts website might want to show last three posts, central only the last
  • content creation is simple and straightforward
  • can use tools like live writer if necessary to simplify content creation
  • content can be updated from just about anywhere
  • can easily segment content and authorship reponsibilities
  • central display website is easy to maintain
Disadvantages
  • perhaps slightly more restrictive than other ways
  • still need to maintain static content repository using a product such as plone

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can think of comic sites doing this in various ways, in fact; one I read has an embedded chunk of LJ and and a shoutbox, but there's also a Wordpress variant called Comicpress which I believe makes this kind of thing a lot easier. Presumably they have more business-minded variants too, they seem quite alert to selling stuff...

dgm said...

The ANU news site does a version 0.9 of this - news stories are lifted from a feed from the ANU news blog on a wordpress MU site - however the static elements are not delivered from a content management system ... (yet)