Inside the new site: back-end

A few words about my CMS: When I built my previous blog site, www.redesignblog.net, I did some research on Content Management Systems, with which I had had very little experience. I looked at tumblr, but decided I wanted more control of things like URL structure. I gave textpattern a spin, but found it pretty darn complicated. I looked into Expression Engine, but was sheepish about paying for a CMS. Finally, I settled on WordPress. WordPress uses a system of predefined tags. This system is pretty powerful, especially with the many available plug-ins, but has a significant learning curve and is a bit limiting. So, with REDESIGNBLOG I deviated from the tags in a few places with some PHP hacking of my own. Now with this site, I abandoned the built-in WordPress tag system altogether.

The front-end (input) interface in WordPress is superb. It’s easy to use and allows a lot of customization (and there’s even more if you don’t mind wading into the MySQL database a bit). Tagging and categorization are easy, controlling drafts is a snap (and powerful), I can add custom database fields, etc. So I’m using this interface as my CMS front-end for input (the front-end to my back-end, I guess), but all the PHP used to spit the data back out is hand-coded. For me, this is the best of both worlds. I’m good enough with PHP to make this work, though the database structure requires some tricky MySQL joins, and I can use the HTML input mode so I can add style where needed and make sure all the quotes are smart quotes, etc. I’m really happy with this solution.