Support » Fixing WordPress » wordpress is so bad at handling a library of documents?

  • Resolved dullmau

    (@dullmau)


    I’d like to make a small library and I like the simplicity of wordpress. But when i search the opinion in google, many said that it’s not recommended using WP as a cms for managing a library of documents. Joomla would be better at it.

    I’m not sure if they’re right, so I’d like to hear the advice from you guys. How do you see it?

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Joomla is certainly an impressive application but I wonder if it would be a little too high-powered for a small library?

    Thread Starter dullmau

    (@dullmau)

    yes, I thought of this too. WP’s forum is good enough for my community, and i don’t need anything about ecommerce too. I’ve heard that, as Joomla is too powerful, you have to spend many hours to modify the code to show the appearance you want. So I want to make sure if WP is really not my choice. It’d be a great regret for me if I found WP could be my choice but i had taken joomla….

    So all WP experts, please advise me. My small library has about one hundred fictions, some of them can have more than 50 chapters. It seems to me that WP is not good at handling these fiction-style page (with chapters). What do you think ?

    Thanks a lot!

    Install WordPress, even on your local computer, and try using it for just a small sample of what you want to do.

    See Installing WordPress and the section on installing on your local computer.

    When I read “library of documents” I’m imagining you want a directory structure where you can store downloadable documents??? How are you wanting to display the library of documents?

    Thread Starter dullmau

    (@dullmau)

    sorry for being exaggerated. It’s not really a library, but it’s just 200 fictions written by our community. Some fictions have as many as 50 chapters.

    When people open a fiction, i want them to see a chapter list first, which can be made easily by HTML.

    Now they can click a particular chapter and the content is shown.

    What’s tricky to me is that I want to show a chapter list in each content page of a fiction too.

    On the front page, I also want to let my users to sort the fiction list by popularity, date added, and even writers’ name.

    Is it possible to do it with WP?

    I’ve installed WP (and joomla too) before this thread actually. What’s impressive is that WP has extra-ordinarily simple and minimalistic style for the whole installation process.

    When I took a look on some PHP scripts, it seems to me that further modification on PHP is a lot simpler in WP than in Joomla, although not 100% sure yet.

    I’d say WP is the easiest to code for, and what you want to do is defiantely possible, though i couldn’t say how easy it will be for you…

    You can use <!--nextpage--> in posts which creates a paged version of the post, this would easily suit chapters. I’ve not used it extensively so can’t comment how easy it is to grab ‘pages’ or ‘chapters’, nor whether a simple function exists for grabbing a given page or post’s list of chapters/pages.

    Sorting articles is straight-forward enough, the query_posts function can be modified easily, updating that on a user clicking, lets say “sort by date” is easy.

    Ordinarily you’d just have this in your given template file (theme file).
    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

    followed by various pieces of HTML etc…

    Of course you can narrow down the results for the posts being shown by simply doing …

    <?php query_posts($arguments); ?>

    Where $arguments is actually a series of supported arguments, as explained here.
    http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts

    All you’d need to do is change that line depending on what is clicked, here’s a very basic example..

    <?php
    $sortord = isset($_GET['order']);
    
    switch ($sortord) {
      case 'date' :
      $some_query = query_posts('orderby=date');
      case 'category' :
      $some_query = query_posts('orderby=category');
      default:
      $some_query = query_posts();
    }
    ?>

    That’s totally untested but the method is still valid in any case..

    Going on the example, order would be change by clicking on links like so..

    Order by date:
    http://someexample.com/?order=date
    Order by category:
    http://someexample.com/?order=category

    Thread Starter dullmau

    (@dullmau)

    thanks everybody and t31os! I think i’ll go for WP and try the code you said.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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