FSI migrated her static website to WordPress, so she can now edit her content. The site utilizes new features in WordPress 3.0 with custom post types, so she can easily manager her media appearances, testimonials and announcements.

Through custom programming, FSI created a dynamic media page where users can easily navigate to view her videos, newspaper appearances, TV appearances, etc.

WordPress is wonderful for a basic content site, especially for blogs and personal stuff. Lots of plugins to add functionality, fairly easy to use right out of the box for a person with minor technical skills. With a bit of study, one can learn how to customize it and personalize it.

I used to use Joomla, and its predecessor Mambo, after years of building custom PHP-based CMS sites. With custom sites, I found I was re-inventing the same backend framework over and over again, and spending a lot of time dealing with security and browser compatability issues and other dull stuff. Joomla seemed pretty good at the time, but my experience was that the quality of contributed code varied wildly. Lots of it just plain didn’t work, or had dangerous security holes. Maybe it’s gotten better in the last few years, but I had a difficult time finding all the pieces I needed, and there wasn’t much in the way of support for lots of it.

I switched over to Drupal four years ago, and have been very pleased. The backend API is pretty amazing; it’s designed to allow customization at many levels. It’s like Unix in many ways; lots of small parts that all work together, with plenty of hooks to splice in your own code where needed. The core code and modules undergo heavy testing and peer review. Coding standards are enforced, there are routine security audits. There is a great sense of community and helpful support through many channels. Code quality is generally very professional. It has a very granular approach to access to content, which can be based on user roles, page contexts, even IP addresses. It has built in support for translations and internationalization.

While it is possible to build a very nice site without any custom coding, it is the flexibility in customization that has the greatest appeal to me as a programmer/developer. The downside is that it can take a while to get into the “Zen” of how everything fits together. Theming is probably he most difficult concept; it seems inside out in many ways; it is a combination of HTML templates and various places where the code is prepared for rendering. But once you figure it out, it is really neat. If you do it right, there is a wonderful separation of preparation and presentation.

What is the “best” system depends on your needs, interests, and skills. For simple sites, I’d go with WordPress, if it fits the bill. As a hard-core web developer, Drupal has great appeal to me for its power, flexibility, and stability. I don’t think there is another system with the versatility, availability of custom add-ons, openness, and support.

Thanks to Phil Glatz for this review.
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Here is another email on the thread from Stephen Britton.

WordPress.org: Best for blogs, although a lot of folks are using it for a CMS. Easy to install and very short learning curve. Huge community with 13+ million downloads of WP 3.0. Not good for e-commerce unless you plan to sell a handful of items – think small pottery shop, not an auto parts store. If you are putting together a large CMS with thousands of documents and requires strict access control levels, Joomla and Drupal are probably a better choice. But WordPress is by far the best blog with excellent comment and archive capability.

Joomla! : A pure CMS that with plug-ins, can be a blog. Has everything to create a basic CMS site out of the box. Easier to program and thempate than Drupal, but not as flexable as Drupal. Community is more designers than programmers. Ecommerce is limited. Free VirtueMart plugin is very buggy. Nice object-oriented programming language. Lots of components and extensions, many good ones cost money, but rarely more than $50. The excellent, JCal Pro is only $29. Joomla has a great forum extension and can also integrated with PHPBB.

Drupal :  The most flexiable CMS, but with a steep learning curve. You might want to hire a consultant to help on your first Drupal site.
Super stable. Can be used as a CMS out of the box, but requires downloading and installing extensions to get it running right. Admin control panel takes some time to get used to it. Community is the opposite of Joomla with more programmers than designers. Has the best ecommerce plugin, ubercart, but if someone wanted to build a large ecommerce site, steer them towards OpenCart, Prestashop or Megento before using Drupal for ecommerce. Big corporate user base. There are at least 5 Drupal job postings for each Joomla or WordPress job listing.

I personally find myself using Joomla more than WordPress and Drupal.
I find it easy to set up and create templates. It is easier to code than Drupal. Most of my sites are informational, magazine-type that need to be updated frequently and Joomla handles this well. Most editors and writers can learn the admin dashboard quickly. Also, the new soon-to-be released version of Joomla, v1.6 has improved access control levels.

FSI worked with graphic designer Michael Meyerowitz to create a custom design that shows off Gena’s personal approach and her slightly-sexy clothing lines.

The site was built in WordPress, allowing the client is easily able to maintain the clothing lines and testimonials, using WordPress’ new custom post types.

The best thing to do is do a bulk replace in MySQL.  The command is as follows

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content, ‘searchURL’, ‘replaceURL’);

<?php
// ———— added for events to show future
if(is_category(‘events’))
query_posts($query_string . ‘&order=ASC&post_status=future’);

while (have_posts()) : the_post();

if(is_category(‘events’)) {
if(strtotime($post->post_date) < time())
continue;
}
?>

A few years ago (2004), Yahoo would display up to 120 characters in the Title Tag. Can you believe it? So much has changed since then. Earlier this year, we had MSN. Now we have Bing. Do you know the proper meta description length displayed in Bing?

GOOGLE

Google shows 69 Characters (Including Spaces) for Page Title.

Google shows 156 Characters (Including Spaces) for Meta Description.

It should also be known that if you don’t include a Meta Description or if Google feels a better description for your page could be given by using a web snippet, then the description shown can be up to 320 characters. Of course, they won’t be the characters that you choose so they might not best represent what you wish your audience to see in the SERP’s.

Also, check out SEO Tidbits to see a Google engineer explain why Google does not use Meta key words at all.

Yahoo

It appears that Yahoo shows up to 72 Characters (Including Spaces) for a Page Title. (PDF’s up to 75 characters)

Yahoo shows up to 161 Characters (Including Spaces) for Meta Description.

Bing

According to the Bing Webmaster Blog:

Bing shows 65 Characters (Including Spaces) for a Page Title Tag.

Bing shows up to 150 Characters (Including Spaces) for Meta Description Tag.

However, as you can see in the example above, Bing will readily show 69 characters for the Title Tag and up to 185 for the description.

Ask.com

Ask shows 69 Characters (Including Spaces) for an SEO Page Title.

It appears that Ask.com pulls a snippet of text from the page and can commonly display around 312 characters for a description.

Credit: SageRock

Here is a useful short video from Google saying they don’t use meta keyword tags at all:

http://www.mattvarone.com/wordpress/is_subpage-function/

A useful companion item is to create a template for a parent page where you only want to redirect it to the first subpage.  Sometimes you don’t want a page for the parent at all, just the children.

From WPRecipes:

http://www.wprecipes.com/wordpress-page-template-to-redirect-to-first-child-page

The T-SQL below creates a cursor on a table and then steps through each record and updates several fields.  This ended up taking about 4 minutes on an 18k record database, which is small, but would take 20 minutes just to update 200 records in the same table with an update query.

ALTER procedure [dbo].[sp_updateDemoData] as

declare @mallId nchar(6)
declare @RowNum int
declare @showme int

set @showme = 0

declare malllist cursor for
select mallcode from mall_exp_trend_2010 where pop_20 > 0
OPEN malllist
FETCH NEXT FROM malllist
INTO @mallId
set @RowNum = 0
WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
BEGIN
set @RowNum = @RowNum + 1
set @showme = @showme + 1

Update e set
e.NUMBER_OF_HOUSEHOLDS_10 = ns.HH_10, e.NUMBER_OF_HOUSEHOLDS_20 = ns.HH_20, e.NUMBER_OF_HOUSEHOLDS_5 = ns.HH_5,
e.AVREGE_HOUSEHOLD_INC_10 = ns.INC_10, e.AVREGE_HOUSEHOLD_INC_20 = ns.INC_20, e.AVREGE_HOUSEHOLD_INC_5 = ns.INC_5,
e.MEDIAN_AGE_10 = ns.AGE_10, e.MEDIAN_AGE_20 = ns.AGE_20, e.MEDIAN_AGE_5 = ns.AGE_5,
e.POPULATION_10 = ns.POP_10, e.POPULATION_20 = ns.POP_20, POPULATION_5 = ns.POP_5
from mallsysNetT1.dbo._mall e, mall_exp_trend_2010 ns
where ns.MALLCODE = e.MALLCODE and e.MALLCODE = @mallId;

if @showme = 100
BEGIN
print ‘processed records: ‘ + cast(@RowNum as char(6)) — + ‘ ‘ + @mallId
set @showme = 0
END

FETCH NEXT FROM malllist
INTO @mallId
END
CLOSE malllist
DEALLOCATE malllist

When installing WP using Fantastico, make sure the permissions are secure after installation.  Fantastico usually sets permissions on the public_html directory to an incorrect “755″.  Make sure they are “750.”

Make sure the wp-config.php file permissions are set to “400.”

I’ve had two sites hacked into soon after installation so this is not just an academic exercise.

Settings

• Definitely change the permalinks.  I don’t know why they default it with a URL (?p=123) format.  You want smart names for your links. If you are going to add lots of posts, you may want to select the “Month and name” format.  If not, go to custom Structure and put in /%postname%/
• Under media, you will likely want to uncheck the “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders”, unless you will have messloads of images you’ll be uploading.  Definitely check the settings for sizes of images in medium and large.  You will likely want to reduce the large to something like 800 px max.
• Reading — Unless this is a straight blog, you’ll probably want to create a page called “home” and one called “blog” and then go to the reading panel and set the front page display to static and set the home and blog pages.
  

Here are some must-have plugins:

• My Page Order — Great for setting order of pages in menu.
• All in One SEO Pack — Most popular and robust plugin for SEO
• Google XML Sitemaps — Will keep your sitemaps xml file up to date
• Reveal IDs for WP Admin — Useful admin tool
• List category posts — Useful if post categories are used as a taxonomy, and you want to get a list of specific categories.
• Theme My Login — Creates a nice login page based on the active theme.
• NextGen Gallery — The best in managing pic galleries
• Exclude Pages from Navigation — Excludes pages if desired
• Theme Switcher Reloaded — Great for development, allowing clients to view various themes.
• Custom Post Type UI — This takes advantage of WP 2.9+ custom post types.
• Members — This plugin allow the admin to manage roles for different levels of users.
• White Label CMS –This customized the admin section.  You can minimize to the items you want the user to see.
• CMS Tree Page View — This will insert a new menu item under page which gives a tree view of the pages.  For sites with lots of pages and subpages, this is a better way to navigate pages in the admin section.
• Google Analyticator– There are several Google Analytics plugins, but this seems the best, which includes a nice dashboard widget/panel to view analytics from WordPress.
• Simple CMS — This is a basic plugin that simplifies the admin page for Editors and below.  There is no way to change the settings, but it is a quick way to reduce the clutter for clients.