New Design- Dynamics

This is part 3 of 5 of the mini series for my new design. In this part I will be talking about the dynamics of the site and using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS).

A change made more on the back end of this site is all of the pages on the site can now be edited through WordPress. This makes it much easier when I want to update things like my resume, the about page, etc. One of the reasons I never did this before was I did a lot of PHP stuff on the seemingly static pages, and there was no way for me to integrate PHP code via the WordPress admin panel. To fix that problem, I found a plug-in called runPHP.

This handy little plug-in ads a check box to each post asking if I want to run the post or page thought the PHP preprocessor. All I do I add in the php code (with normal tags) and I’ve got dynamic, easy to update pages. This comes especially handy on my projects page, which calls a number of custom functions. With runPHP I can easily change parameters or function calls right from WordPress.

On the same token, my projects page is also completely dynamic. I will talk more about the plug-in I wrote in the next series, but I would like to touch on the fact that this was something I had been planning for a while. I needed an easy way to add, edit and delete projects from my resume site, Casabona.Org. With WordPress, I was able to add another set of pages to the admin panel to do just that. In the coming months I will be combining Casabona.Org and this site, making them fall under one roof. This plug in will make it much easier for me to manage my projects.

Using the power of WordPress, I am able to quickly and easily manage my site, transforming the open source blogging system into a CMS. Now, this site is updated more frequently with some very rich content.