JWTHF: My first big WordPress project

JWT+H+F is my first full-scale customisation of WordPress for a commercial website. The site launched earlier this week as a ‘Conversation Website’ for the Swiss advertising agency JWT+H+F, the idea being a sort of a cross between a traditional agency portfolio and a blog. We’ve got a couple of writeups already and it’s good to see we have a growing number of comments, although I’m not exactly sure what’s being said as it’s all in German.

The site is ground-breaking for a commercial agency portfolio in that it allows readers to leave comments on the work, as well as pulling in other related advertising content from the blogosphere.

The visual design and most of the initial HTML/CSS for this site was done by Henning von Vogelsang, otherwise known as Core, while my job was to create the WordPress template and change bits of the PHP until it did what we wanted. The WordPress backend provides a full content management system where the client can write new articles, upload images and approve comments.

My experience with WordPress in this case was that it is generally well thought-out and constructed, and very stable. However, things are a bit ragged around the edges, especially in areas like image uploading which are maybe not considered core to the blogging functionality (looking forward to improvements in WP version 2.1 though!).

As is typical of these sorts of Content Management Systems, the more you try to deviate from the pre-packaged functionality, the more you need to resort to ugly hacks. If you need to build a blog with a fairly standard structure, then WordPress is an excellent choice. If you need to make something a little more complex, particularly if it involves different sized images on different views, then be prepared for a lot of work. In fact, you might want to consider a fast prototyping framework like Ruby on Rails or CakePHP instead.