I'm a new user to Wordpress so I've been having a blast messing with for the last two weeks. I'm slowly pulling together some ideas for optimizing posts better, as well as other various tricks. Since I wanted to use Permalinks to get nice pretty url's for seo purposes, I was depressed to find out that the latest version of WP doesn't let you include the category within the individual post urls. For instance it would great to have.... Mysite.com/category/post-title-here/ So I've got two workarounds for this. 1. Install WP in a folder that has a title based on keywords. I will probably use a broad term like advice, tips, recipes, articles, or ideas (instead of just using a folder titled 'wordpress' or 'blog'). 2. Include your category theme in each post title. I've started adding the actual category within each post title; so a new post on "Pasta Melt" would become "Italian: Pasta Melt". Put all this together and you get a url such as... Mysite.com/recipes/Italian-Pasta-Melt You can also use the 'slug' feature instead of adding the category to the post name, but I like having those keywords in the page content, PLUS the page title tag, and in the url as well. That's my trick for the day!
This is why I love wordpress Thanks for the tip.. but isntead of installing wordpress to a folder named recipies, couldn't you just use the slug feature to add recipies to the beginning of the URL anyway? Josh
Personally I don't like urls titles with more than three words, I think it's looks spammy to have more than that (just my personal opinion). I did test using subfolders in the permalink structure. So you can also add keywords that way. Example... /gaming/%postname%/ Just depends on how you prefer your file structure. I think most people install Wordpress in a subfolder, so you might as well give the folder a keyword title.
Yeah, thats what I was talking about. You're right though.. most people do install it in subfolders. I don't, I have a domain specifically for my blog (I couldn't think of anything else to do with it ) Josh
I'm trying out both to see what I like better. I'd like to push it as far as possible to see how useful it is as a CMS and not just a blog script. I have a lot of clients who want simple sites and it would be great to let them loose on Wordpress. Out of everything I've tested (blog and cms scripts) it's definitely has one of the most efficient and simple admin panels. There are a lot of hosted programs that would work, but I want something that's portable and not tied to a single provider. I also want something that's easy to mod for designs so client's are stuck with one of those oh-so-obvious 3 column portal templates, or 2 column blog templates. I will keep posting any little tricks I come across, and my thoughts on using WP for content management. So far so good....
Agreed, I used to think that about blogger when I first started blogging. Wordpress is so much better and blows it away. It's like vBulletin vs phpbb
I'm also looking at using WP as a simple CMS, but I can't figure out how you could get a 2-level menu heirarchy in place- like mysite.com/category/sub-category. Anybody have ideas? As you say, the admin panel is clean and geekspeak-free. I looked at Mambo, Drupal and all that lot and they were are way overkill for what I need.
I bet there's a way to tweak the page setup to do this. Have you tried searching on the Wordpress.org forums? My first thought is that you could use posts with categories and subcategories. If you just want a single page then you can tweak the tags so it only shows one post. Dates and comments can be removed by deleting their respective tags. I've been playing a lot with different tags. I usually remove the calendar and date archives because I don't like their functionality, and I don't want my sites to look like every other blog out there. Most people search for info by topic so that's what I want to emphasize. THere are lots of ways to organize content....the reason why I'm really into WP is because their template system gives you lots of room to play with this. Where there is a will there's a way.