February 2016 WordPress Meet-Up

Managing Content in WordPress

WordPress can be an excellent CMS, but content needs to be structured properly so it can easily be managed long term as your content and website grows.

WordPress has many different ways of adding information to your site. This includes:

• creation of posts

• assignment to categories and other taxonomies

• use of widgets

• general website options

It is important to use these different methods of creating content and overall, adding information to your website appropriately. If the wrong approach is taken to add content, it can cause problems of all sorts. For example, you may have to tediously update the same snippet of text in 50 places, possibly missing some areas. Poor content structure can also lead to a lot of unnecessary work. Maybe you manually created an archive page of posts and you now need to update the page content every time you create a new post. If a proper content structure is in place, this, and many other components, should update automatically.

For this presentation, a custom demo website will be created which will demonstrate various ways of managing content.  The pros and cons of each method will be discussed as well as appropriate use cases. It will show that although all the different methods produce the same output visually, how the content is managed “under the hood” can be vastly different.

Presented by: Steve Puddick.  Steve is the primary web developer at the Liberal Party of Canada where he works on a highly customized, large scale instance of WordPress. During this past election he lead the development of liberal.ca and realchange.ca.

 

Agenda

6:00 – General announcements

6:05 – Presentation(s)

7 ish – Questions

7:30 – Open help session “Happiness Bar” – get answers to your WordPress questions.

Meeting Details:

LOCATION NOTE:

We have a private space reserved downstairs. Enter the main doors, turn left, and down the stairs.

No donations for this meeting!  If attendees buy enough food etc. from the pub it covers our tab.  (We normally ask for a $4 donation to help cover the cost of the room and our Meetup fees, which total about $150-450/year)