For the last few months I’ve been on the WordPress train.  This is a pretty big step from my background as an ASP.NET programmer.  I know,and trust me – the nightmares came back when I found out php was TOO much like classic asp. 

Why WordPress?  I think it is a brilliant platform.  I have never seen anything quite like it.  From the elegance and completeness of the platform to the insane dedication of the community…it’s comm-plee-teet.  And please do not get me started on the plugins.  It took me a month to find something no one else had built yet to learn how to build one?

So what…you like it Tom, ok – I get it.

That brings us to iowa.com.  I work at Gazette Communications in the WebDev group.  We’ve been working with a team of   are trying to break free of the traditional media ties and begin to make new roads (at least of old media people) on the “internets”.

There are many plans laid for what iowa.com will be – basically they can be put into two categories:  content or engine.  The engine part is most exciting for me – we have a calendar engine, a blogging engine and a few more which we have to keep under wraps for a bit.  This is very cool and it is letting the WebDev geeks get some kung-fu going, but that is not the part that has me worried.

It’s the content that worries me.  Yea – content.  Why, we’ll it was my suggestion we used WordPress in setting up the site.  Then I had another brilliant idea – enter all content into the site as pages, I hope that one doesn’t come back to haunt me.  I only figured out a month later that pages in WordPress cannot be categorized.  (Now, in perfect WP community fashion – there is a solution to this problem.)

So here we are – the site is pushing 125 pages now…I used to think think that was big, but then I realized this site has 300+ posts.  If things get nutty – we can always leverage WP-Cache, and that should solve any of the serving issues.

I’ll keep you up to date – just keep me informed if you take a look at the site…please be honest.  Also – I’m looking to talk to anyone else who is using WordPress as a CMS and hopefully with some fairly significant traffic.

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