dangerouslyawesome

I'm Alex Hillman, the co-founder of IndyHall and a guy who makes things better in Sunny Philadelphia.

I work on Beanstalk, Postmark, and DynamicWear.

I think technology is cool, but people are infinitely cooler.

Not your everyday WordPress

Originally posted by lukeisnice

I’ve already posted a thumbs down article for today…perhaps I should try one with a thumbs up?

So some buddies of mine over at Concept64 are doing some great work…and on top of an advocacy for clean, maintainable source presenting a cleverly designed site layout, they do something pretty cool on the back end that I thought should get some recognition. (also, not that it really means a damn thing, but I went to High School with these guys, and its really refreshing to see some people who got out of my high school and are actually doing something with their lives. Only a handful of the people I’m still in contact with, and it’s a pretty small handful, can have the same said about them).

I’ve become a supporter of WordPress as a blogging tool, hands down. It’s got the cleanest user interface of any I’ve used, is simple and widely supported to install (dreamhost includes a quick-installer in their control panel), and overall, is a FUN tool to use. Well, if you look closely at the most recent site that they developed (in conjunction with my team at work), you’ll find what really ends up being a very, very cleverly pieced together WordPress theme, effectively allowing the client to log in and change appropriate content pieces without needing a developer’s intervention. In this case, it’s most appropriate use is the articles in Cyclopedia. If you look closely at them, you should see a familiar comments field at the bottom. yep, its wordpress alright!

I’ve spoken with Ryan, the developer on the project, about his decision to use WP as a content management system of sorts. His words were,

WordPress isn't the best as a content management system, but it's the best lightweight PHP CMS I've seen, especially considering it's open source

And ya know what? He’s exactly right. Sure, there is probably a better tool out there for the job. But odds are, it’s costly, or it’s full of crud.

If you can get good at using wordpress page templates like they have, why not provide a fairly robust content tool to your client that, if you’re lucky, they may already be familiar with! Oh, and definately check out the rest of Concept64′s portfolio, as they’ve got some great creative work going on. And, to top it all off, their own site’s CSS Refresh 2006 layout was featured on WebCreme (one of my favorite daily inspirations). Nice work guys.

Back to my original thumbs up/thumbs down…i noted that the thumbs up tag feed from flickr has a lot of really fun pictures…does anyone have any particular favorite tag feed keywords for flicker that are worth checking out?

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