Making WordPress Easier for Clients

  • Hello, Im relatively new to WP and trying to use it as a CMS for my business. I would like to strip it down to the minimums for my clients to manage their pages as easily as possible and I’ve found some plugins that work great for the most part, though I run into a problem with more of the complicated things.

    Say I have created just a typical static page for three staff members and their short bios. I’ve used the HTML editor to block and style things I want it but I never want my clients to have to see this, furthermore switching over to the visual editor tends to decide that it knows better about HTML an usually destroys my structure.

    How would I go about creating an environment with a text-box and possibly a header entry to insert the text right into the divs I’ve already created?

    I understand this is a pretty specific question but any details on the paths I can pursue or things to learn how to do. Am I going to tear apart the theme or create a plug in or approach this in a completely different way? Thanks so much!

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  • It seems like a complicated question with a number of possible options.

    The general question is: what has to be open for editorial from your customers? Should they be able to edit this page, if yes – what part of it? Can they edit existing customers, add more, remove, change style, etc?

    As for the implementation options:

    1) Custom post types – register a custom post type for staff members, they can add it just like posts (title, content, featured image, some data). Then you can create a loop that fetches all clients and places them in the styling that you need. Drawbacks: requires a bit more coding and management of the input data.

    2) Page template – if the content is absolutely static, you can create a Page Template and style everything being read only. The content won’t be editable, but it can’t be broken from admin as well.

    3. Shortcodes – design snippets such as [staff_member title=”Title” image=”someimageurl”]Content for the staff member[/staff_member]. This way you will have control over the styling and customers could add/edit many components. It has a bit of overhead on both sides, but is flexible in terms of editing and adding new members.

    4) Widgets – if you place a widget area in a page/sidebar and create a widget, this could be accomplished in the same way.

    There are probably other good options too, but the question is open to discussion (and the better implementations require some coding experience).

    Hi,

    We wrote a ebook on exactly this subject: “A Better WordPress For Clients”. You should check it out:

    https://www.videousermanuals.com/blog/report/

    I does not answer you question specifically but looks about the broader issues of making the WordPress CMS better for you business clients.

    Good luck!

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