macdiggs.com

WordPress is thought of as just a personal blogging system, mostly, and many people don't think about it as of a system you can use for building a full-fledged corporate site. Well, although there may be other system more oriented to building corporate sites, WordPress was doing just fine for us.What we have created with WordPress:

• Pages based static pages structure to present static content. Pages are organized into hierarchy, and Fold Page List plugin is used to auto-unfold list of subpages of the selected category.
• There are 3 different page templates used in total (top level, and 2 templates for showing 2nd and 3rd level pages); as well there are special templates for displaying contact forms (totalling 4 on the site).
• Forms are not easily processed by WordPress (you do have an ability to get an ordinary contact form processed, but there are no plugins to process free-form content forms), so I had to write a special form processor, which I will hopefully make available to public after some code cleanup and translation to English :) These forms are all processed without a single page refreshes using the AJAX technology. You can see an example if you click this link.
• We have also used Google Maps to show location of company offices, as you can observe at this page. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any easy to use Google Maps plugins so I wrote one myself, and you can get more info and download at this link.
• Also, as it turned out, there was no easy to use Flash embedding plugin, so again I wrote one myself. You can see the real-life example here, and download the plugin here.
• We have added the auto-updating sitemap page to the site using Dagon Design Sitemap Generator (by slightly modifying the source, though..)
• There are Google Sitemap support added by means of fantastic Google Sitemaps plugin.
• In order to show closeups of pictures in posts, we have used the cool Lightbox 2.0 plugin.
• In order to show thumbnails of pictures of a post on front page, we have used (although it needed to be heavily modified) the Post Image plugin.
• There are also other plugins we have used to show various content in user-accessible area, like Author Image(s), Fuzzy Recent Posts, Fuzzy Recent Comments, and Fancy Excerpt.
• There are several simple support functions I had to write in order to add various functionality to the site, but the total line count is about 150 lines of PHP code, so it is not really a big deal (and you can get away just fine without these functions in most cases).
• Regarding administrative area, I have used the following plugins in order to track statistics on the site: Counterize, WP-SlimStat.
• Since there is also a "Staff blog" set up on the site (and blogs, even on corporate sites, even if nobody actually reads them, are good because they keep search engines attention on the site, and if updated regularily, can be a very good tool to rank up the site on search engines listings). So.. since there is also Staff blog updated to several different people, we needed to limit access of these people to any categories except for blog, and news (news is just a blog category). Moreover, only one person is allowed to make posts to news, and all others are just allows to post to blog. I have used the Limit Categories plugin in order to implement this functionality.
• There was just one more problem with WordPress admin panel - all users could see each others posts, which is not a very good thing (they couldn't edit each others posts though, but could see them in listings). I had to hack the WordPress code a little bit in order to "fix" this problem You can read about it following this link.

So.. it might be a long entry, but the point is - you can build pretty complex sites in WordPress, and it is actually not very hard, and doesn't take lots of time to do that, once you understand the basics of how WordPress works.