Wordpress as a Content Management System
I currently use WordPress for many of my projects. Want to start a blog? WordPress is a perfect fit. Do you want to build a website on WordPress? WordPress can do that too. However, because WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform, there are quite a few tweaks that need to happen in order to get the most out of WordPress as a content management system (CMS).
Current State of Content Management Systems
- Most content management systems consist of hundreds of features
- Complex templating systems
- Complicated codebase prevents it from being extended through plugins by anyone less than a computer scientist
Why is WordPress an ideal candidate to use as a CMS?
- Lightweight
- User-friendly administration interface
- Rich, existing developer and user community
- Large number of existing plugins and themes
- Ease-of-use in incorporating media such as images, audio, video
Enter 2009 Google Summer of Code (GSoC)
Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 successful student participants and 2500 mentors from 98 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.
Building a Theme Framework
My proposal for the 2009 Google Summer of Code is a theme framework that provides a rich feature set of tools right out of the box to manage a website powered by Wordpress.
The focus of this framework is two-fold:
For CMS users: If I had to guess, I would say more than 75% of CMS users in most organizations and companies do not have any existing knowledge of PHP, CSS, and/or HTML. Creating or even editing a theme to function as more of a traditional website rather than a blog is a herculean task for this type of user. All the user needs to know is how to install WordPress to their server and install the framework.
For WordPress developers: The real power of this framework comes into play for those individuals who do use PHP, CSS, and HTML. The framework provides documentation on how to create or edit existing themes to work well with the CMS framework and extend functionality through the use of existing/custom plugins and widgets.
Features
- In-place content editor that allows for content updates without using the post or page editor in the administration panel
- Interactive theme/template designer allows for customization without code
- Customizable administration theme created for CMS
- A set of included themes that can be customized using the theme/template designer
- Installer script to easily add the CMS framework to any installation of WordPress
