Pushing WordPress to the limits of customization
My friend Lark just made live a site she’s been working on for a lot of the summer, the new Stripes Group website. She pushed WordPress to the limit, in terms of customizing it to achieve the kind of CMS that the client wanted. To get this much customization, she was helped by 3 plugins. The first 2 plugins allowed her to customize the backend dashboard:
These allowed her to customize the roles that the employees of the client would have when they log into the dashboard, and it also allowed her to control what they would see. The full WordPress dashboard has become very complex, more than the average employee would want to deal with, so these plugins allowed her to remove some of the unnecessary complexity, as well as specialize some of the roles that the employees will play.
The other plugin she used was More Fields.
I was lucky enough to get a glimpse of the work that Lark was doing on this site, and what she did with More Fields really blew me away. In the past, talented developers like Darren Hoyt have relied on Expression Engine when they’ve needed to create custom listings. But Lark was able to do nearly everything that Expression Engine allowed Darren to do in the past. Personally, this really opened my eyes to how far you can push WordPress. Lark turned it into a full scale CMS, able to handle a complicated site. With More Fields, she gave Stripes Group the ability to control most of the content on the site. For instance, she was able to create a custom type of data for the entries about team members. This gives the client the ability to control the content of the team member pages, update the info, and also control the order of appearance, both in the sidebar, and on the main team page.
Very impressive work.