The design is pushing the boundaries of CSS a little bit and its also using transparent PNG backgrounds like before, but now the box sizes are flexible to accomodate a fluid width design!

So having gotten the site to a reasonable state of operation, I’ve turned my attention to experimenting with CMS‘s. Open Source CMS has proven invaluable in finding out what is on offer, as well as a few subtle hints from a friend who has been working with them since the start of his placement year.

And basically, if you want a CMS I would now say go with Drupal. It will let you create a very complicated site in a matter of hours, the setup is obscenely easy (I seem to recall a single installation page) and anyone who knows what they are looking for from the site can figure out what to do via the admin interface after a few hours of playing with it. Additionally, I used the Ubercart with Drupal installation specifically, since I was looking for a way to create a site that handles everything all in one – the Ocean Addict Community section (user-centric forums, news, blogs, image galleries) merging seamlessly with the Ocean Addict online shop.

Most brilliantly of all is the way the admin interface, and all the sections of the site use the same standards-compliant XHTML and CSS markup via the same template, helping form what I would consider a true community driven site.

To sum it up then, Drupal is absolutely insane! (in the good sense). But that is not to say I like WordPress any less, just perhaps it should be used only in the capacity as the outstanding blogging tool it is. Instead I wish I had known about Drupal sooner.

While this side of things worked exactly as expected it threw up a unique issue I hadn’t considered.

While viewing the Category through the file Archive.php, for example http://www.oceanaddict.co.uk/category/sailing-yachting-and-dinghy/ the pages were displayed in exactly the same form as posts which put simply was something I didn’t want to happen. I had to find a way that pages and posts could be displayed differently in the archive page.

Initially I would have thought this would be quite easy for wordpress since it sends other variables to the template like the_ID(); and the_author(); and even a promising-sounding is_page();, but after a LOT of searching I found there was no method of determining the page type value after the SQL statement had run from the variables sent by wordpress itself.

Eventually I came across the solution:

if ( $post -> post_type == 'page' )

So there we go, if you wish to differentiate between pages and posts in your template, this is the line to use.

I quickly found http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smf-a-simplemachines-bridge/, which seemed ideal. That is until after diligently following the installation instructions the plugin caused the entire site to break. Fortunately WordPress’s plugin system can be rescued by simply deleting the offending plugin.

Searching for much longer wielded a solution based on the first. The stuff that can be found at http://www.earthorbit.com/opensource/ DOES work and works well.

An excellent page bringing together a whole range of resources to do just this can be found at:

http://www.graphicdesignblog.co.uk/wordpress-as-a-cms-content-management-system/

Before now I have experimented with the nextgen gallery wordpress system and the wordpress simple forum.