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In this edition of the continuing series on using WordPress as a Content Management System — CMS — we take a look at GreekCare.org — a non-profit resource site using a handful of key plugins and some custom programming to meet its mission online.

by Scott Frangos

The Greek Care website (GreekCare.org.au) is a service for Melbourne, Australia’s aging Greek community (the largest Greek population outside of Greece), and WordPress was used as the CMS (Content Management System) solution to create the site, by Jason King, a web developer, at KingJason.co.uk.

it’s easy to write new articles and news items in WordPress. The write and manage screens seem similar to writing an email or Word document, so it doesn’t take clients long to figure it all out.

Key Plugins Used:

• Angusuman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin — prevented the site from being accessed while it was being designed.
• Search Reloaded Plugin — to list search results in order of relevance.
• Dagon Design SiteMap Generator - To help users easily navigate through content including over 80 articles specially written for heal and social care professionals to help them understand Greek culture.
• Breadcrumbs NavXT plugin - To help visitors navigate around the website via a link hierarchy at the top of the page — a “breadcrumb” trail.
  Above, you can see the Breadcrumb trail plugin at work with the link series at the top of the page.

A graphic artist designed the banner at the top of the page and based on that design, and Jason created a WordPress theme, coding it from scratch, “rather than using a free, pre-made WordPress theme — great for blogs, but we were going to use WordPress mainly as a CMS.”

I asked Jason what his clients like best about the website, and he told me that, “it’s easy to write new articles and news items in WordPress. The write and manage screens seem similar to writing an email or Word document, so it doesn’t take clients long to figure it all out. However, I still like to provide some training or at least oversee the initial content creation to make sure it’s being done right.”

Above, the SiteMap generator automatically creates pages of links to your content.

Custom Database Creation

The team wanted to publish a searchable directory of Greek-speaking services, and also have a list of Greek Saint’s days that was searchable, with upcoming dates listed on the home pages. Since this wan’t something that WordPress was built to do, Jason created two custom MySQL databases and uploaded the content (smple comma-separated text files) after exporting from an Access database and Excel spreadsheet. Then he created new pae templates using “relatively simple” PHP code to connect the databases and display the appropriate data.

On reflecting, Jason believes that these databases, “could have been tackled in other, perhaps better ways. If, for example, we’d used Drupal instead of WordPress we could have stored page content, blog, directory entries and saints’ days in a single database and edited them through a common interface. But Drupal is substantially more complex and time-consuming to develop for than WordPress.”

Finishing Touches

One final touch was using Yahoo Media Player to play audio clips of Greek Phrases (try it yourself at this page). Jason inserted two short lines of Javascript code to invoke the player, which automatically inserts a play button for every MP3 file linked to a page set with the code.

And, Google Analytics code was inserted into the theme’s footer so that the client and Jason can access those valuable website usage statistics.

Well done. WordPress is a quite flexible CMS solution, and clients enjoy its ease of use. And, Jason proves that with a little PHP know-how, with AJAX coding thrown in for good measure, just about any client need can be met.