A NEWS SITE USING PRiNZ BranfordMagazine 2.51
I created a news site for level journalism students using WordPress and PRiNZ BranfordMagazine 2.51 template. From a user-perspective it looks pretty good, although it's less flexible than Joomla! at the back-end.
There are many other news-stye templates that you can tailor to meet your needs. (See Revolution 2 Theme and Bram.us has a good list of others).
SUPPORT FOR THOSE USING THE TEMPLATE
1. The creator of the template runs a support forum (this does not take any new support requests, but the database is searchable).
KEY STAGES FOR CREATING A SITE USING BRANFORD
The stages I went through to get the site right are roughly:
1. Change the website header (Logo),
You need to find the name of the existing header graphic in the template files (it is known as bg-branding.png) and it's exactly 625 pixels w x 100 pixels h.Then go into Photoshop and create your own version. Finally, upload your logo to the same folder that has bg-branding.png.
2. Navigation bars
There
is a primary navigation bar that appears horizontally beneath the
website header. To add sections to this you simply create a page (NOT A POST). This will automatically be added to the navigation bar.
The secondary navigation runs vertically on the left of the page. It orders posts according to categories It is not standard to have a nav bar on the left for a news site, so this is not great.
You need to understand that categories in WordPress have IDs. To get categories to appear in the left navigation bar, you need to type these numbers into the template code. Annoyingly WordPress 2.5 hides IDs. That said, it's possible to get them to appear again, but you will need to download a plugin which is appropriately called Reveal IDs for WP Admin
5. Joomla! has module positions. And Brandford based on WordPress has its own positions
Now
is the time to write some posts (i.e. create some news articles). You
will then categorise these and these categories will appear in various
positions on the front page.
The positions on the front page are:
- Lead Article (this is what appears beneath the tabbed section).
- Featured articles
- Right Column Articles
As with the left nav bar, you have to type in the ID numbers of the categories containing content that you want to appear in each position.
ADDING IMAGES TO THE FRONT PAGE
It's
easy to get an image to go with a post, but you will also want any
story that appears on the front page to have an image as well. Unlike in Joomla!, WordPress does simply not take
the image from the post and stick it on the front page.
Instead any images you want to appear on the front page must appear in the CustomFields section of the post.
This is a complicated process. There is no easy way to change the
order of what appears on the front page (to get a headline story, you
would need to change the date on the post to make it the newest). This gets frustrating with large sites.
Joomla! has front page manager which exists so you can order front page content.
CONCLUSION:
WordPress is great for blogs and seems to be getting better all the time. But you may well outgrow WordPress quite quickly if you use it for a news site. Joomla! or Drupal could be a better bet!
