Turning WordPress into a full-blown CMS-ALEX YOUNG

About me

Work at Punchline Advertising

Currently studying at UVU

3 years web development experience

1.5 years of WordPress experience

1.5 years of Husband experience

Favorite band is Queen

4 years of World of Warcraft experience

A brief history of WordPress(ONLY THE STUFF THAT MATTERS TO THIS PRESENTATION)

2003 – WordPress was released

2004 – v1.2 was released (plugins)

What are plugins?

2005 – v1.5 was released (pages)

Page and Page Templates

2010 – v3.0/3.1 were released (CPTs and Post Formats)

Making WordPress even more CMS(ier)er

For the newbies…

Plugins

Plugins can either be your best friend, or that one friend who is kind of annoying.

Can really make your site beautiful, useful, and functional.

Also can make your site clunky, slow, and fugly.

Gives you a lot more bang for your buck

Saves you a lot of time

Some great plugins for newbies

1. Jetpack - http://jetpack.me/

2. Ultimate TinyMCE - http://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-tinymce/Sadly, stopped working in 3.9. - http://wpeditpro.com/

3. Column Shortcodes - http://wordpress.org/plugins/column-shortcodes/

4. Contact Form 7 - http://wordpress.org/plugins/contact-form-7/

5. WooCommerce - http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/

For the Developers

Some great plugins for developers

Pods.io - http://pods.io/docs/learn/what-is-pods/

Extend current WordPress post types (Posts, Pages, etc.)

Create your own post types

Create your own custom meta fields

Create ADVANCED content types(can still use get post meta)

Another plugin

JSON API - http://wordpress.org/plugins/json-api/

Great for making web services and apps

Works where Jetpacks’s API didn’t

Allows you to add your own controllers, methods etc without modifying plugin source code

Extends the CMS ability of WordPress into the world of single page html5/js apps

One last plugin for both newbies and developers

Backup Buddy - http://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/

Database or full-site backups

Offsite storage

Scheduled backups

Super easy site migration

So why WordPress?

Just a few reasons why I choose it

There are very few annoyances with WordPress

WordPress is constantly under active development

The WordPress community is excellent

WordPress is safe

WordPress is extremely forgiving and easy to use. A single person can run large sites

Questions?