There are several plugins that make working with custom fields a little easier. Custom Fields Template,  Flutter , and More Fields are the popular examples. These plugins provide the ability to set up custom “write panels” with new fields added for inputting custom fields.

In the latest versions of Wordpress there is support for “post types” which should make it even easier to customize the post entry screen depending on the type of content you are inputting.

The alternative to this approach is Pods CMS. Pods is a Wordpress equivalent to the Content Construction Kit available to Drupal developers. Pods does not use custom fields, rather it creates new tables and completely new data types.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches to Wordpress as a CMS. And if you are serious about building a Wordpress site you need to understand those advantages.

Custom Fields

Pros:

• Native to Wordpress. Does not require plugin installation to function and all posts are immediately connected to other Wordpress plugins and functions
• All fields are text formatted, which means once you know how to output one custom field, you can output them all.
• Most plugins are already compatible with Custom Fields.

Cons:

• Queries with custom fields can be complex and convoluted. Sometimes you will need a “Custom Select Query” in order to accomplish your task.
• All fields are in LONGTEXT format, which means the database will be larger than it needs to be and this could put limits on the scalability of your site. (More on Custom Fields Scalability).
• End User support is still limited. The Wordpress Dashboard, even with the mentioned plugins, is not fully customizable.

Pods CMS

Pros

• Fully customizable backend. You can specify exactly what fields the end user sees for any given content type.
• Public form support makes setting up forms for adding content on the front end relatively easy. Though the form options are limited and can be buggy.
• Field formats are customizable, which means your database is only going to be as big as it needs to be. This also means your site will be more scalable.
• Fields are relate-able. This is the biggest benefit to Pods. In future posts we will see exactly what this means.

Cons:

• Not supported by Wordpress development team. This is truly a plugin and Wordpress is hesitant to support it and would rather CMS developers use Custom Fields and Custom Taxonomies. This means if the plugin developers get tired of working on it, then your site could be toast. The good news is the Pods user base is growing rapidly and the bigger it gets, the less we will have to worry about this.
• Pods content is not added to Wordpress posts table by default which means it is not available to native Wordpress functions, like comments and Akismet, and is inaccessible to many plugins, like WP-PostViews (Note: there is a patch that will allow integration, but not seamless integration).
• Because of the complicated relational database, SQL queries are more difficult than with custom fields. Though you can do more with Pods not using SQL than you can with custom fields using SQL.

Choosing between Pods and Custom Field based development is a big decision and there isn’t a universal answer. Much will depend on the site you are building and what your goals are. But here are some questions you should ask yourself before making the decision:

• Are your custom content types generally “post-like”? If so, consider sticking with Custom Fields.
• Do you need to fully customize your Dashboard interface for the end-user? If so, Pods may be your best bet.
• Do you need to rely on other available Wordpress plugins/functions? If so you’ll either need to patch your Pods install, or you should stick with Custom Fields.
• Do you need complex and relatable content types? An example would be an online journal where you need Volume, Issue, and article, each with particular information but also related to each other.
• Are you building a very large site with tens of thousands of entries? You may need to be concerned about scalability. Look at pods.

In most cases you will find your answers will be mixed. Your content is “post-like” but needs to be relatable. Or you are building a large site, but you need to integrate with other plugins. In most of my sites, I use a combination, deploying custom fields for basic post-like content, but Pods for more specialized content types like event listings.

As Wordpress develops as a CMS I expect these two solutions will come together. Wordpress cannot truly be considered a CMS with an easier way to (a) relate content and (b) customize content entry pages. Pods enables both.

Moreover, I was confused because Carrington Theme didn’t seem to make it any easier to turn Wordpress into a CMS! It made it harder because there was yet another layer of abstraction to worry about.

But my negative assessment was born of ignorance more than experience. It wasn’t until I was knee-deep into my first CMS project managing more than 10,000 pages of content with at least 10 different “content types” that I began to remember the Carrington Framework … and then click! it all made sense.

Carrington is a framework built to help developers manage sites with hundreds of customizations. I built my CMS site without Carrington and my sidebar.php file looks like Frankenstein on acid: include, conditional, biconditional, include, exclude, uhg. Sometimes when I need to fix a particular customization it takes me ten minutes to figure out which include file it’s in.

The whole point of Carrington is to make 90% of that conditional code unnecessary because so much of it is predictable. If you’re building a CMS, you can pretty much guarantee that you want change the sidebar depending on the context of the page, right? Carrington just makes it simpler to do so.

Perhaps the confusion over Carrington is that it markets itself as a “CMS Framework”. But in fact, it’s a THEME framework for CMS builders. If you are using Carrington, you will still need to know how to use Wordpress custom fields and write panels etc. But the theming will be 100 times easier.

For one, you may be a template designer and want your templates to come pre-installed with this SEO friend feature.

Second, you may be having issues with Facebook link sharing not working. Wordpress plugins use the wp_head() hook to access your template. But you have no control over the order. If you are using more than a dozen plugins your meta tags can get buried under tons of other code. This can prevent some bots from finding them. Indeed on several of my site Facebook’s bot was not finding them.

Third, it is just always good to do things without plugins if possible. Call it Occum’s Razor of web site building, the less code you use, the better.

Luck for us, it is extremely simple to add code for meta tags and descriptions without knowing much about wordpress or PHP.

Open the header.php file in your theme and paste in the following code:

<?php if(is_singular()) { ?>
<?php
global $post;
?>
<?php $recent = new WP_query('p='.$post->ID);
while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post(); ?>
<meta name="title" content="<?php the_title(); ?>">
<meta name="description" content="<?php the_content_rss('', TRUE, '', 50); ?>">
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php } else { ?>
<meta name="title" content="<?php bloginfo('title'); ?>">
<meta name="description" content="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>">
<?php } ?>

So what’s going on here? First, we’re checking to see if the post is a single post using the Wordpress Conditional tag <?php if(is_singular()); ?> because we’ll to pull the title and the description of the individual post for our meta tags. But to do this, we need to get some information about the post, which is why we use the call global $post. This will give us information about the current post. Particularly it allows us access to $post->ID to query information about the post using WP_query.

The query we us looks like this:

$recent = new WP_query('p='.$post->ID); 

Once we have the query we put it into the standard wordpress loop:

while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();

Then we use the standard Wordpress tag <?php the_title(); ?> to pull in the META TITLE and <? the_content_rss() ?> to get the description. Notice, we are not using <?php the_excerpt(); ?>. This is because this Wordpress tag prints the excerpt with a “read more” link in it. This will seriously screw up your theme. Using <?php the_content_rss(); ?> allows us to specify how many words of the content to pull in. But the second parameter has to be set to TRUE to avoid pulling in a “read more” link.

The highlights:

Tip #2: Users focus on faces

This doesn’t mean you should redesign your website into a big face, but when you are using pictures that include faces think about things like where their eyes are focused.

Tip #4: Most users don’t scroll

Which begs the question, is it better to more pages that are shorter and require less scrolling? Probably.

Tip #5: Blue is still the bet color for links.

I’m a habitual transgressor of this rule.

Tip #7: White space improves comprehension

If you were tempted after reading tip #4 to cram everything in your site into the top third of the page, well think again. Crowding a page can crowd out the user.

Read the full article.

Here’s the problem, I have a theme that is built to make Wordpress a CMS, so it requires a few steps to set up. But I just got an email back from the Wordpress clue in which it was clear that the theme tester, effectively the gate keeper, didn’t even bother going through the steps.

My Onstage Theme for Actors uses ‘/home.php’ to display a headshot, and only a couple of excerpts from the blog. Users have to create a page for the blog template that is included. But the theme tester didn’t even bother to set it up. Instead he complained that the posts weren’t paged and there was no sidebar, both of which are part of the blog template.

So how is Wordpress to become recognized as a full content  management solution when the Wordpress theme directory seems to expect a cookie cutter installation process?

In many ways, the technical aspects of SEO are becoming automated. If you use an open-source content management system, or a custom system built within the last two years, chances are you are already well optimize … at least technically.

The real competitive advantage lies in developing good content that people want to read, that has “viral” potential, and yet still advances your overall mission.

Clean URLS

In general the url of your page should reinforce the keywords you are trying to target. The link to this post is “http://www.mikevanwinkle.com/marketing/seo/seo-basics/”. Notice the term “SEO Basics” is included and that my url reflects a ration (human centered) organization.  An example of a bad or “dirty” url would be “http://www.mikevanwinkle.com/?p=23&permission=1&rel=12312092“. If your links aren’t clean, talk to your website provider. It should be relatively easy for them to give you the necessary capabilities.

Title Tags

Title tags tell google what to put in the browser window title when the page is open. For instance, the title of this page is “SEO Basics | Mike Van Winkle”. That title is controlled by the following tags, which you can view in the source code.

<title>SEO Basics | Mike Van Winkle</title>

Note that the keywords are first in the title, the name of the site is second.

Meta Tags

The most important meta tags are the “Keyword” and “Description” tags. Here are the tags for this page.

<meta name=”description” content=”This post reviews some of the basics of SEO for small organizations and non-profits. I review meta tags, title tags, and no follow links.” />

<meta name=”keywords” content=”meta tags,search engine optimization,search engines,seo,seo basics,title tags,web marketing” />

How do you change the meta tags for your page? Unfortunately this is something that must be provided by your Content Management System. Many open-source systems like Wordpress and Drupal have capabilities for this built in. Custom content management systems, which I strongly discourage, often require custom programming to enable this capability.

Heading Tags

Heading Tags set of headings and subheadings in your content. In general you should try to use these tags to reinforce your keywords, but without annoying the heck out of your readers.

<h1>SEO Basics</h1>

<h2>SEO Basics</h2>

<h3>SEO Basics</h3>

Keep in mind that your heading tags will also change the formatting.

Anchor Text/Link Attributes

We also discussed anchor text and link attributes, like titles and nofollows.

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com” title=”LINK TITLE” rel=”nofollow”>ANCHOR TEXT</a>

The link title is a great opportunity to reinforce your keywords. The title for this link might be “More SEO Basics” or something similar. The same goes for the Anchor Text. Most content management systems have this capability built in. You can tell whether a link is title by simply putting your mouse over the link. Titled links will show the title in a hover box. Mouseover this link to see what I mean: SEO Basics.

You want to pay attention to the anchor text you are using to link to other pages within your site, as well as the anchor text other sites are using to link to you.

Image Alt Attribute

Similar to link titling, the Image “alt” attribute gives you an opportunity to reinforce a specific keyword or set of keywords. For instance, if you put your mouse over the image below you’ll see that a hoverbox with the terms “Seo Basics” pops up. This is because I have set the alt attribute in the image code. I can also set the image title to reflect the same keywords. Again, most content management systems these days give you the option to set these attributes as part of the normal course of posting an image. If yours doesn’t, call your provider and demand that it does.

<img title=”seo basics” src=”http://www.mikevanwinkle.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/google.page.rank.explained-300×281.jpg” alt=”seo basics” width=”300″ height=”281″ />

SEO Basics Resources

Google Trends: http://trends.google.com (hot keywords)

SEOMoz.org: http://www.seomoz.org (overall SEO resource)

Yahoo Site Explorer: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ (Who’s linking to your site)

SpyFu: http://www.spyfu.com/ (research your competition)

Admittedly, I’m biased. You can read my review of Wordpress Pods CMS here. But here’s my two cents anyway:

1. If all you’re looking for is a way to add a new content type, and it’s ok that that content type is mostly based on the “post” format, then flutter will probably get you there. Flutter basically customizes the user interface for entering custom fields. Theoretically you could even get rid of all the default fields and use all custom fields instead.
2. But if you need to create all new content types and need to have complete control over the end-user experience then pods is a much better choice. Pods is especially powerful when creating directories where you need to cross reference fields. For instance, you want to create a list of events where the end user can click on the speaker’s name and see all other events with that speaker. Trying to do this with flutter would be a nightmare. But with pods, you create a pod table for events and one for speakers, set up a template, and your done. Well, it’s not quite that easy … but it’s close.

The advantage of pods is that it’s robust and dynamic. Flutter is essentially just an advanced hacked. Pods is a true extension. But the disadvantage of pods is that, at least for now, it is still a tool for developers who know their html and at least a little bit of PHP. A novice user is going to find Pods maddening!

More info on Pods and Flutter.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Link Quality vs. Quantity from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.