So, I have been building a new site for my new employer, and I am learning lots as well as coming across various issues that have slowed my progress down.

In the first post, Insights into Building a Site from Scratch, I mentioned that I was having some issues with WordPress, and I wanted to talk more about them here.

The issues aren’t all with the software itself, but instead the limitations I am coming across that hinders my ability to quickly push out pages, organize them, as well as listing pages dynamically.

So the first issue I had come across is that if I go add a new page, select a page parent, and click publish before the auto-save has a chance to do its thing, then it would sometimes give me an error letting me know that the page I was working on couldn’t be modified. It was very frustrating, and the only fix that I could see was to wait another fifteen or so seconds for it to auto-save, thus delaying me from adding the next page, but saving me the time it takes to go back to manage pages, and re-select which page should be its parent.

In this project, I have to add hundreds of pages, and so adding them one at a time is very frustrating. I would love to be able to add blank pages in the same way that you can add tags or categories by creating a comma delimited list of titles.

This would help me flesh out the eventual page structure in a much faster way.

Thankfully, a plugin called PageMash makes ordering those pages relatively easy with a drag and drop interface, though again, to be picky, I wish I could select a whole section of pages and move them around easily.

Other than that, I have been having issues remembering how to dynamically show sub-pages in the content area of a page. I am sure there is a WordPress template tag or something, but I can’t remember it off the top of my head. And since I will continue to add pages, I don’t want to hard code lists of sub pages.

There are so many things I am learning through developing this site, but I have to admit that the data entry part is boring, and next time I will be subcontracting it out to someone else, so I can continue to focus on the interesting aspects of developing this site.

Look out for another set of insights as I continue on.

Originally posted on August 12, 2008 @ 11:15 am