WP: Efficiency & filtering categories

[yeoman]

Hello all,

Firstly, I feel I should mention that this may be the wrong forum to be asking my question(s)–my inquiry is fairly complicated–but since Chris’ screencasts have been so incredibly helpful for me throughout the pasts few months, I figured I’d run it by his forum members and possibly Chris himself.

Quickly:
I’m a radio producer currently setting up a WordPress site for my host. His current site (which I built in RapidWeaver) is simply too hard to maintain due to the large amount of content that needs updating throughout the week. RapidWeaver is a lovely platform for static sites, and, frankly, with its built in FTP client, has worked well as a pseudo-CMS. The problem, though, is that I’m the only person able to update the site, which is a huge hassle when dealing with a news junkie like my host.

Quicklier:
If you checked the site, you can see that there are basically three main divs within the content area on the front page. The top div is used for daily content (topics of the day etc.), the middle for advertising, and the bottom for weekly content (poll, video, etc). I have already recreated much of the site locally in WP using rather extreme HTML and CSS modifications to Justin Tadlock’s Hybrid News theme, a child theme of the Hybrid framework.

The Meat:
From what I know of WP and PHP, the following is the most efficient way to manage the content on the front page (please, if you have the time and know-how, inform me if/where I am wrong):

• The ‘Home’ will use a page-template containing all of the content that needs only weekly updates (poll, video, etc). Therefore, those updates can be performed via custom fields and/or widgets only once a week.
  [/*:m]
• The daily content (‘today’s topics’, etc), on the other hand, will be a post. In which case, either my host or myself can merely create a post for each day we’re on-air, fill out the main content area and necessary custom fields, and add/edit throughout the day as we see fit.[/*:m][/list:u]

  Anything wrong with that idea?

  If this is the most efficient way to manage our content, here are, in my estimation, the items I must accomplish to do so:

  • Query/filter all posts (because the he has an actual blog page on the site) so that the daily category only appears on the front page and nowhere else. Similarly, no other category should appear on the front page.
    [/*:m]
  • Disable the daily posts’ permalink, so it is has no single page and is not archived.
    [/*:m]
  • Identify/classify the daily category so that it can be styled differently.[/*:m][/list:u]
    I’m fairly confident this makes sense. So I guess the real kicker is: how hard is this to accomplish? My PHP skills are novice at best.

    Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you can advise me, it would be much appreciated. Let me know if I’ve left out any information.

    Thanks.

    Erik

[TheDoc]

Hi Erik,

First off, welcome to the forums!

Second, thanks for making such a detailed post. I’m a little short on time this second, but I’ll have a closer look at it later today (though I’ll bet somebody will hit it up before me).

[yeoman]

Thanks for the welcome, Doc.

[TheDoc]

Erik, that was all much more simple than the long post needed!

All of those things are pretty easy to accomplish. Your new best friend will become the WP Codex (specifically, the Template Tags section http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags ).

If you’re pretty comfortable with the Loop (you don’t need to have it memorized, just sort of know what’s going on), you should be golden to accomplish the tasks you’ve mentioned.

I highly recommend you continue with Chris’ screencasts on WP here, and also check out the Screencasts from the ThemeForest blog (viewtopic.php?f=10&t=3629).

[yeoman]

Thanks for the point in the right direction, Doc.

Cheers!

[Author]

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