Using WP for a magazine?

  • I run a mag called Mississippi Review at https://www.mississippireview.com. I’m thinking of leaving all that is presently in the mag (800 pages) as is, and converting the new version of mag to a WordPress-based content management operation. The reason? I want ANYONE to be able to manage it in future, instead of having to have a coder, or a Dreamweaver person, or a FrontPage (or whatever MS calls it now) person.

    Trouble is, I can’t figure out how to do it, and it doesn’t seem like WP is well-suited to a project of this size (if we’ve accumulated 800-odd pages since 1995, you can see that we need that again for the next decade).

    The key element is I want to be able to turn over the magazine to a person who is not particularly conversant with Web pages, and I also want to avoid having to hire a Web-hero to set up the site, cause as soon as you do that then when he/she leaves, you’ve gotta hire another, and they’ve got to be versed in the same design programs and systems, etc. etc.

    Any ideas here? Am I right that WP is not the right vehicle?

    Thanks.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • What alternatives are you considering (in the line of software/CMS)

    WordPress is going to be able to handle it.
    There are plenty of magazine-style Themes out there and it is no big feat to create one yourself. The keyword being “categories” – you write posts and categorize them.

    I’m not considering other alternatives. have done this in Frontpage and before that various other WYSIWYG editors, and before that I can’t remember.

    Are there other alternatives to consider?

    I had assumes I could use categories for Volumes, and have Issues beneath categories, but I can’t figure how to make something posted ONLY to the category and not to main page.

    I was starting to do a mock up here https://tc4w.wordpress.com/ before moving (eventually) to actual site.

    @fbx … you need to make your front page exclude certain categories, which involves theme editing. It’s probably better to turn it around and show only a certain category or two on the front page. Read up on query_posts and you’ll be set.

    front page. Read up on query_posts and you’ll be

    Looked at this and got instantly lost. Will try gain. But am committed to this course, so am going to try to move the site that I made here
    https://www.mississippireview.wordpress.com to my own url https://www.mississippireview.com soon, if I can figure out how that’s done.

    I’m not entirely certain you can do extensive theme editing on blogs hosted on wordpress.com.
    It all depends on your theme.
    SOme themes use the index.php only for the start page (and have page.php, single.php, category.php etc. for the other “parts” of the site), and other themes cram it all into the index.php and use template tags like if (is_home()) {} to specify individual layouts.

    Basically, you want to look for something like while

    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post();

    This is where the loop starts.
    So, right before that, insert

    <?php
   if (is_home()) {
      query_posts("cat=-3");
   }
?>

    where “3” is the category you want to exclude.
    Or, like I said, turn it around and say you only want a “News” category to show up, use

    <?php
   if (is_home()) {
      query_posts('category_name=news');
   }
?>

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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