offers paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text. digress.it is based on the architecture of weblogs, but is geared toward in-depth discussions of longer documents: article, essay or even book-length. With digress.it, you can annotate, gloss, workshop and debate on a fine-grained level, turning a document into a conversation.

I worked on the old Commentpress platform to get it running in English and French, and contributed some minor bug fixes, and really liked the idea behind the project, so this is an exciting development to see. I haven’t explored the plugin yet, but hopefully it will make the functionality much easier to integrate into an existing Wordpress installation.

I recalled having read something by Roger Johansson on the topic (Overdoing Accessibility) and dug up the link to get some expert opinion. One instance of improper tabindex use he pointed out was the following:

A good example is the comment form in a default WordPress installation. The form controls (input fields and submit button) all have tabindexattributes despite already being in a logical order in the source. The effect is that keyboard users will skip straight to the comment form when they start tabbing through the page. Very annoying and completely useless, though probably well-meaning.

After checking a few themes (including the default Kubrick, and Pressrow), I found that all of them suffered from this problem. Sandbox, on which this site’s theme is based, is slightly different, with tabindex 1 and 2 being set on the search form, and the numbers between 2 and 6 not being assigned at all. Still definitely not ideal.

You can check out this behaviour for yourself: go to a Wordpress blog using any of these themes and hit the ‘tab’ key on any page where a comment form is present, and you’ll be jumped down to the first field in the form. 

I plan to fix this on this site, and all the other Wordpress themes I’ve developed as soon as I can.

One of the blogs I’ve recently subscribed to is SEOMoz, which I like both because it seems to be run by real professionals and thus avoids a lot of the sketchier, black/gray hattish SEO techniques, and also because it seems to have fairly good user comment discussions.

I was particularly interested by a recent “Whiteboard Friday” post in which SEOMoz CEO and co-founder Rand Fishkin discusses an SEO issue with pagination that had arisen with a client. While the blog post title, “A Farewell to Pagination” may be going a bit overboard, there were some definite good points, which basically revolved around the notion that extended pagination in which a website may have hundreds of pages going back years that are all organized in reverse chronological (or some other order) and accessed via pagination can be bad not just for navigation, but also for SEO.

Diving deeper and deeper into the site this way successively dilutes your link juice for the search engines that are crawling your site, potentially leading them to abandon including the deeper/older pages in their index, leading to their exclusion from search results. Fishkin discusses some navigation workarounds that are improvements both from an SEO and user experience point of view.

Applying this to Wordpress, I wondered if there was a Wordpress filter hook that would allow you to create a simple plugin that could appropriately add the rel="nofollow" attribute to your pagination anchor tags, so that pagination is still available to the user but won’t have the deleterious SEO effects. Turns out there isn’t, but there’s another easy, though less elegant, way to accomplish this, which is by defining a function in your Wordpress templates’ functions.php file.

Just copy and paste the previous_posts_link and next_posts_link functions from wp-includes/link-template.php into your functions.php file, and make the following simple modification

function nofollow_next_posts_link($label='Next Page »', $max_page=0) {
	global $paged, $wp_query;
	if ( !$max_page ) {
		$max_page = $wp_query->max_num_pages;
	}
	if ( !$paged )
		$paged = 1;
	$nextpage = intval($paged) + 1;
	if ( (! is_single()) && (empty($paged) || $nextpage <= $max_page) ) {
		echo '<a rel="nofollow" href="';
		next_posts($max_page);
		echo '">'. preg_replace('/&([^#])(?![a-z]{1,8};)/', '&$1', $label) .'</a>';
	}
}

function nofollow_previous_posts_link($label='« Previous Page') {
	global $paged;
	if ( (!is_single())	&& ($paged > 1) ) {
		echo '<a rel="nofollow" href="';
		previous_posts();
		echo '">'. preg_replace('/&([^#])(?![a-z]{1,8};)/', '&$1', $label) .'</a>';
	}
}

With that done, simply use the new functions wherever in your template you want the nofollow functionality (e.g. in index.php). This is really only the beginning of a solution to this issue, as you’ll have to rework other aspects of your navigation if you really want to add rel="nofollow" to all your Wordpress pagination.

But first a word about plugin security. Unfortunately, Wordpress plugins have a bit of a reputation for being insecure, due largely though not exclusively to the lack of proper sanitation of user input. Neglecting to check whether a user has entered malicious code into an input field into a form, for example, or tacked it onto the end of a query string can leave your server vulnerable to SQL injection and similar attacks. With that in mind, it’s prudent to check around for any security issues with a plugin before you install. If you have the PHP skills, you perhaps check the plugin yourself for any code that might leave your system open to being compromised.

But that aside, there are many secure and well-tested Wordpress plugins, as well as many (perhaps most?) that do not introduce any user-interaction features beyond the Wordpress core and thus aren’t even really candidates for opening up additional security holes. The following is a list of just a few.

Forms

Whether you need a contact form, a form that allows prospective clients to get a quick sample quote, or even rudimentary e-commerce functionality, chances are your site is going to need a form somewhere along the line. Wordpress has a series of form plugins that all provide basically the same functionality, providing a simple GUI allowing you to create form inputs, buttons, and some amount of validation logic without having to know any HTML or server-side programming language.

The two that I have some experience with (FormBuilder and CFormsII) both do what is mentioned above, but the similarities pretty much end there. In my experience, CFormsII not only provides much more functionality, but also generates nice, clean HTML and has a helpful set of default CSS templates that can help layout your form pretty nicely without too much (or any at all) tweaking.

Sitemap

A sitemap is somewhat of an information architecture best practice. It can be a helpful last resort if primary navigation and search aren’t working for a user, or can even be a first resort for power users if they know how to use the sitemap to bypass several clicks through a deep navigation hierarchy.

I’m using Dagon Design’s sitemap generator for a site I’m currently working on and, while it doesn’t have a lot of functionality nor does it provide particularly fine-grained control over the output, it gets the job done (which is more than I can say for all the Joomla! 1.5 sitemap plugins I’ve tried, though my last effort at that was about 4 months ago).

Page Order

No doubt about it, if you’re running a CMS you’re going to need to have control over the order in which your pages appear in lists and menus. Wordpress has a built in system for doing this, but it’s a very recent addition and is pretty unwieldy (though I’m sure they’ll be improving it in the near future). The My Page Order plugin provides a simple way of getting the control you need.

Incidentally, plugins aren’t the only way you can easily get more control over how pages are listed (or other core functionality). One way (hackish but it works) is to take the Wordpress function you want to tweak, copy+paste the file into your template’s functions.php file, change the function name (e.g. if your theme is called greattheme you could change the wp_list_pages() function to gt_wp_list_pages()) and make whatever little alterations you need.

For example, in a site I’m working on, the standard wp_list_pages() along with some key/value pairs (wp_list_pages(array('title_li' => '', 'meta_key'=>'page-type', 'meta_value'=>'global-nav'))) was working for me, except I wanted to put a link to the homepage at the beginning of the list.

The easiest way for me to do this, without hard-coding the list into the template (and thereby losing Wordpress’s handy way of adding classes to the currently active page and its parent/ancestors) was to copy wp_list_pages() into my functions.php and insert the following line:

$output .= '<li class="page_item"><a href="'.get_option('home').'">Home</a></li>';

Semantic Web

There is a small but growing offering of Wordpress plugins that can add some Semantic Web goodness to your site. One of these is the Dublin Core plugin, which offers a no-nonsense implementation of a subset of the Dublin Core Metadata Terms for your Wordpress site.

While Wordpress is certainly not your best choice if you’re looking to create a complex site powered by a set of linking rules that relate pieces of content to each other via metadata, I think implementing the Dublin Core is a good idea even if you don’t find some clever way to directly take advantage of it: even small steps like this take us further towards the semantic web (or Semantic Web, if you like).

That’s it

That’s it for now. There probably won’t be another post in this mini-series, but I’m thinking of doing another comparing Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal and discussing the situations in which they would be appropriate CMS choices. That probably won’t happen for a while, though.

For examples of how to do this the right way, you could point to the web apps done by 37signals (e.g. Backpack), or to Wordpress. Over the years, Wordpress has continued to grow and to integrate new features, but has done a fairly good job of not allowing them to clutter core functionality. Following good usability principles like progressive disclosure means newbie users can jump right in and do what they want, while you don’t alienate advanced users by babying them with an impoverished interface.

A quick Google search for the terms “wordpress cms” reveals a plethora results, and the Wordpress developers are aware that many people are using Wordpress for much more than out of the box blogging. With that in mind, they continue to roll out functionality that makes it easier to use the platform as a content management system that can accomplish most of what you would want from your CMS.

Some of these features that you will find useful if not crucial to using Wordpress as a CMS include:

• the option to set a static or fixed homepage
  Prior to Wordpress 2.1, you had to either hack around and create and upload a new homepage, or use a Wordpress plugin to accomplish the same thing in a slightly more graceful way. Now, setting up a static homepage is as simple as going to the Settings > Reading panel and making the choice there. For more information, see Creating a Static Front Page
• custom fields
  custom fields allow you to associate information with a post that goes beyond the parameters given to you by Wordpress. Suppose, for instance, that you’re creating a Wordpress site in which certain products for sale will be entered into the database as posts. Well, you’re going to want to store a bunch of particular information that will be associated with each product/post, including cost, availability, shipping, sizes, and so on.
  Using custom fields, you would type in a new key (say, “availability”) and then under the value, you would enter either “available” or “sold”. Then, when editing say, single.php (the wordpress template for single posts) you would access the data like so, from within the Loop:<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'availability', true); ?>If you wanted to make this data available outside of the Loop (e.g., in your sidebar), you would just type <?php global $availability; $availability = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'availability', true); ?>And then in sidebar.php, you would include <?php global $availability; echo $availability; ?>
• page order
  Wordpress has only recently added the ability to define the order of your page manually, rather than using the options Wordpress provides for wp_list_pages(), which are to sort by alphabetical order, or to sort by id. Though the functionality is new (and still a bit “janky” according to Wordpress), it’s nice to know you won’t have to rely on third party plugins for such standard CMS features

In the next installment, I’ll discuss a couple more essential pieces for using Wordpress as a CMS, including page templates, and also go further into third party plugins.

One powerful reason to make wordpress your CMS of choice is its ease of use. While Joomla!, Drupal and the like are all excellent CMSs, none of them prioritize simplicity to the same degree that Wordpress does. This isn’t as much of a criticism as it sounds like–there is an inevitable trade-off between the available features and power of a piece of software and its out-of-the-box, so-easy-your-dog-could-do-it usability. Wordpress is a platform for the unwashed blogging masses, while Joomla! and Drupal are fully-fledged CMSs that compare favourably with any enterprise-level solution you’d pay thousands of dollars for. Each understands its user-base and its niche and guides software development accordingly.

But in addition to being suitable for the masses, Wordpress is a great choice if you’re doing a website for a client who either is a) not as comfortable with new technology; or b) has little time and is someone for whom the need to learn how to navigate a complicated CMS admin panel will be a significant barrier to actually using it. You can easily teach someone the Wordpress “basics and then some” in an hour, which means satisfaction both for the client and for you (imagine all the support email questions you *won’t* be getting!).

That’s it for the first part of this mini-series. In the next post, I’ll dig in to some more technical issues and look at how recent advancements in the Wordpress platform are increasingly making it a viable CMS solution.