Long Beach City College, COSW 240 - Intro to Content Management Systems
In our spring 2018 Content Management Systems Class, we set up a WordPress Site. WP is the number one CMSContent Management Systems, and about 30% of websites on the Internet are powered by WordPress. My site, Cycling: DIY Maintenance and Repair, is no longer active, but while in the class, I setup another WordPress Site, Industrial Polymers, LLC. The purpose of each student setting up a WP Site was to become familiar with CMS, and because I cycle and do my own maintenance and repair, I thought it would be fun to set up a cycling maintenance and repair BLOG.
After setup, we customized the settings:
- added images
- added navigation
- updated all default text
Next we added plugins. I used plugins like: contact form, social sharing, forum, and user submitting post or joining the site all from the front end.
Moving forward, we tested adding users in the back-end. It is a powerful feature for assigning roles to website editors, but for subscribers it is more realistic to allow them to sign-up via the front end.
And then we explored themes, and how they support the content. I used a theme called Responsive; it supports my content well, and I can use it as a starting point when I write custom server scripts for the theme support files. I haven't started yet, but it seems logical to me since I've successfully done those types of things 25 years.
Standard post data types are great, but not always enough so we used a plugin to customize the database fields and the theme. I've been working on databases 25 years and wrote custom output pages when I was a professional back-end database programmer, so I appreciate all the technical things the plugin does behind the scenes.
Finally, we added SEO and Analytic plugins. I'm looking forward to seeing positive results using them...