Information architecture question – ideas welcome

  • Hello all,
    Got a question, would love some clever ideas and suggestions…

    We’re looking at setting up WP to use as a CMS for our business. A key part of the site will be a list of case studies, but we want to be a bit cleverer with how we present them.

    essentially, we’re creating a matrix with the case studies, with multiple assets (sector, problem, secondary sector, solution, list of key skills) and we’d like to use this as a way for visitors to navigate to similar case studies in the site.

    For example, clicking on sector reveals other case studies in that sector, clicking problem would highlight case studies with the same problem, etc.

    I’m guessing this can we achieved with a combination of categories, tags and custom fields but would welcome input.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • I am relatively new to WP, and I don’t want to totally discourage you, but I have many years of experience in database design and programming. This is copied from an earlier post of mine concerning if WP is a true CMS:

    FWIW, it seems to me that a full CMS needs to allow the definition, storage and management of specified types of data: text, dates, numbers, images, etc, with rules about the acceptability of content and relationships among the different instances.

    WP allows mainly storage of undifferentiated blobs of text, with little control over the content and relationships. (Although you can provide some of the facilities with various plugins.)

    I would also add that, in my experience, WP is sorely lacking in built-in search capability. I don’t know of an easy ad hoc way to say: show me all posts with A and B, but not C or D.

    Now, I will say that a lot of this can be overcome with plugins or custom programming, if you are willing to put in the work.

    Just my opinion.

    Thread Starter jamesbfg

    (@jamesbfg)

    That’s really useful vtxyzzy, and I agree. As it stands, WordPress just isn’t cut out for this sort of complex relational database stuff. Having said that, I wonder what plug-ins could be used to allow it to work.

    Just interested to know of other people’s experiences and solutions.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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