Content Strategy for WordPress: Case Study

Editor's Notes

1. FAZD is the National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense – a research group at Texas A&M that researches new diagnostic tools and vaccines for animal diseases like bird flu. The site lists their current research projects as well as the tools that have been developed in the past. It also has profiles of their researchers and a resource library as well as the usual information. The organization of all this was a mess.
2. How do we get there from here?
3. First of all, let’s not sit around copying and pasting IDs and titles and URLs and categories into Excel.
4. Content Audit lets you build your inventory right in the WordPress edit screens.
5. Because I use Content Audit for my inventories, I often import external sites into WordPress *before* doing the inventory. This is the reverse of the usual recommended process, which is to migrate only the content you want to keep.
6. Most of your analysis is going to have to be done outside of WordPress, with people and meetings and discussions about priorities. But you can use your traffic logs to make some decisions about what content is effective. I like Dashboard Analytics, which shows you a sparkline based on your Google Analytics data for each page. Use it sparingly, though – it will slow down your page lists considerably.
7. Your analysis should include a look at the structure of your content.
8. Lumping lots of different pieces of content into one big post body makes it difficult to work with. You can’t easily extract parts of that data and do things like sorting or moving them around in a responsive layout. Even if you’re not a developer, you can take advantage of custom post types, custom fields, and custom taxonomies to break things up in a more modular and logical way.
9. In some cases, you can use user profiles to store this data simply by changing the built-in contact fields. (I have another plugin for that, User Contact Control.) But on most of the sites I’ve worked with recently, I needed to include people who weren’t users, or whose data we’d want to keep around if they left the organization. Tying that information to a user account would force us to keep accounts active – even if they didn’t have permission to do anything – for someone who really shouldn’t have access to the site anymore. That’s very bad from a security standpoint.
10. Diagram: bio post type
11. Changing the placeholder text (or the field name) using Peter Westwood’s “Mangling Strings for Fun and Profit” article
12. And none of these things belong in the main news page or RSS feed!
13. And none of these things belong in the main news page or RSS feed!
14. Complete content model! Post types: research projects, tools, people. People are connected to their research projects and tools via Post 2 Post. Taxonomies: topics, institutions. The taxonomies are used for both research projects and tools. Institutions partnering with us on a research project are added to the project when a user tags them in the Edit Project screen. The institutions taxonomy is also used for the People, to indicate which one a person works for.
15. Once you’ve created your new custom post types, you probably need to migrate some old posts or pages. I created Convert Post Types to do this in bulk.
16. For changing one post type at a time, or just a handful using Bulk Edit, Post Type Switcher is great.
17. Post 2 Post allows you to create connections between post types. This is how I hook up my people to my research projects. This plugin’s developer has recently announced that he doesn’t plan to keep working on it. However, it’s so widely used and loved that I expect its development will continue with someone else, or by the entire community via GitHub.
18. This is another plugin from the developer of Post 2 Post. It’s great for changing a term from one taxonomy to another. If you’ve created a new taxonomy and you need to move over some old tags or categories, this will do the job. It’ll also help you clean up your tag list; if you have duplicates, like a singular and plural version of the same tag, you can use this to merge them.
19. Media strategy: How are you going to handle responsive images? How will you ensure that transcripts are provided for audio and video content? If your organization already has a project management tool, there’s no reason to set up a separate one for the website – it would never get used. But if you don’t, there are a couple of plugins you can use to manage the site’s tasks within the dashboard.
20. We talked about using Edit Flow to set up a chain of submissions and approvals, but this office decided the built-in roles and statuses would be enough if they had email notifications of pending posts. We added Peter’s Collaboration Emails instead, which simply alerts admins and editors when pending posts are submitted or approved.
21. Revising without publishing immediately, with editorial review of the changes: Revisionary
22. You can schedule the changes!
23. Back to content audit: you can use it for ongoing content management. It can automatically mark content as outdated after a certain period (you can override this with per-post expiration dates), and send emails to the content owners listing their outdated content. (To remove something from the Outdated list, just uncheck that category and update the post.)
24. Again, Edit Flow was overkill for this site. We used Editorial Calendar, which is simpler and a little more polished.
25. You can use WP Help to build in any documentation you need – like your style guide, or brief reminders on how to use all the extra custom fields in your new post types.