WP for Blog Site CMS; One instance or two?

  • I’ve built my company’s new blog on wordpress, and love it. Now I want to migrate my entire site to WordPress so I can benefit from CMS, SEO, and plugins that let me do stuff that’d be WAY over my head outside the world of WordPress.

    All the advice I’ve seen says to handle the blog itself and non-blog-site with a single instance of WordPress. Appealing. But there’s some site content that it’d be cool to handle as ‘posts’ instead of ‘pages’ — namely press releases and job postings. That way when my PR and HR people add them, a category page would display excerpts just like the main page I have to create manually today.

    But I can’t have those posts appearing in my Recent Posts widget, on my home page, and in my RSS feed.

    I was on the verge of keeping them out of my sidebar and off my homepage, but the solution isn’t working across all browsers because of some weird </div> recognition. Haven’t looked into the matter of RSS exclusion yet.

    No way am I the first person running into these issues, but can’t find relevant info or threads. Maybe I’m a bad searcher. : (

    Are there any “best practices” for building a blog+site with wordpress? One shared instance or two discrete? Non-blog content as posts or all pages? Masking some categories of ‘posts’ from the blog experience — recent posts widget, homepage, rss feed, etc.

    Any advice or info is much appreciated.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • There is no general “best practices” rule – it always depends on the concrete situation, at least in my view.

    With a plugin like https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/advanced-category-excluder/ you can exclude categories almost from anywhere.

    I can imagine both solutions (1 or 2 installs), it would depend on the specifics of the whole site.

    There’s also a third potential solution, one install of WordPress MU… This way, you get both the flexibility of multiple installs and the convenience of single application to manage…

    Thread Starter gregbarr23

    (@gregbarr23)

    Thanks, that plugin would seem to be just what the doctor ordered.

    But I’m totally sketched out by any “one instance” solution right now because this morning I was testing another plugin that lets you assign categories to pages in the first place, and some non-blog pages got mistakenly added to my RSS feed for a couple minutes for some reason, and it seems that they’re unpurgable once they’ve hit a given subscriber’s RSS reader/cache. Blech. (one of the pages that I’ve since deleted was me and my kids playing Rock Band…D’OH!)

    Net-net, I’d appreciate any thoughts on the matter of 1 instance vs. 2.

    Here’s a description of my situation. I don’t know what other kinds of things might influence the equation.
    – Blog is brand new; 1 author, someday 5, expect 4-8 posts a month
    – Core site is 70 pages, 6 sections, pretty static, very low traffic
    – Half are press releases that I think I’d like to treat as “posts”
    – I’m considering also treating some other kinds of content as posts: news coverage, job postings, partner profiles, executive bios, etc.

    Primary questions:
    – One instance or two?
    – When to make content pages vs posts?

    Thanks again and in advance for help.

    Thread Starter gregbarr23

    (@gregbarr23)

    WordPress MU idea came up as I was posting this…interesting idea that I’ll look into, thanks.

    Thread Starter gregbarr23

    (@gregbarr23)

    Did some recon and WordPress MU is way overkill, and too much overhead, for my situation. Requires server configuration and stuff that’s way over my head and beyond my requirements.

    I’m still scared of crap popping up in my RSS feed but am going to (very carefully) try the ACE category exclusion plugin.

    I’m looking to do something similar. I have a site with a lot of static content, which I’ve created as pages and set the homepage to one, a blog section, which links to the default blog, obviously, and a third “News” section which I’ve been wondering how to integrate. I’d like to be able to post news just the way I post a new blog entry, but I don’t want them to get mixed up.

    I believe the way forward is to create a “News” category and use the ACE plugin to exclude this category from the main blog stream, and do the exact opposite in the news section…

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • The topic ‘WP for Blog Site CMS; One instance or two?’ is closed to new replies.