226 PART IV • Additional Features and Functionality
Pages and posts
◾ Do you need custom fields? How will you make them user friendly? More often than not,
adding meta boxes means that you’ll have to make them dead simple to use; otherwise,
the end user might get overwhelmed.
◾ Do you need to create Page templates to make parts of your site behave like you want? If
so, make sure that you’ve got those Pages created from the start.
◾ How should Pages relate to each other? What should be a top-level Page, and what should
be a sub-Page? Make sure that you know the hierarchy and how you will present the
various sections.
◾ How will you present the posts? Do they need any specific treatment to fit in?
◾ Will you use any of the post formats for custom formatting of posts? If so, should the
posts keep their custom formatting when viewed as individual posts?
◾ Do you need additional kinds of content that are separated from posts and Pages? In that
case, make sure that you have a plan for your custom post types and consider whether
they need to be portable across themes.
◾ What will be on the front page? A static page, latest news updates, or something else?Additional considerations
◾ Figure out your permalink structure right away and stick to it. You may need plugins to
tune it the way you want.
◾ Do you need specific shortcodes to speed up the publishing and avoid unnecessary
HTML code in the posts (see the “Custom Shortcodes” section in Chapter 13 for more
info)? If you do, what is your strategy for keeping this functionality when changing
themes in the future?
◾ Do you need any features that are not built in to WordPress? Can you use plugins to
achieve the necessary functionality? Will such plugins cause problems with upgrades in
the future?
◾ If your project requires localization, are the language features you need available? There
are plenty of language files for WordPress, but what about themes and plugins? Will you
need to do additional work there?
◾ How are you going to handle search? Is the built-in search good enough, or do you need
to add plugins, or perhaps even external search engines?
◾ What are your hosting and security needs? If you’ll have a large traffic volume, you’ll have
to look at caching — and if so, will a plugin do? Do you need SSL certificates to handle
traffic over https? Should media be loaded from a separate CDN?TRIMMING WORDPRESS TO THE ESSENTIALS
When you work for clients or other people within your organization, you’ll have to think a little
bit differently than if you were going to be the primary user yourself. Remember, you’re a savvy
user, but that may not be the case for everybody else. That’s why you need to trim WordPress to
the essentials and make sure that there aren’t too many options to confuse the user.