Customization

I work for a Medical and Aerospace design and manufacturing company as the only web-development guy for the internal, secure network sites. Obviously we have a lot of sensitive info hosted on these sites with multiple security clearances with each level of clearance having access to different links, docs, pay sheets and whatever else needs to be kept confidential. This also means that when different people log in, the page they see can be quite different from the guy in the next office or the guy in the lab. Currently whenever an executive wants to post a document, news flash, updated anything, they have to send it to me and I just insert it manually into the code because copy and paste has always worked for me (call me a traditionalist 😀 ). The current site was not designed by me, but by the guy proceeding me, and the code is horrendous to work with (hell I don’t think it could be verified for HTML 1.0 if they had a verifier for it). As such I spend most of my spare time trying fix and simplify some significantly overdone and over-abused code to keep the site scraping by. Constantly updating documents and files becomes tedious when I have site maintenance and new-site development I should be working on.

However I’m designing a totally revamped site, one thats gonna be XHTML transitional with increased used of javascript for the security layers, so as all the sites have the same basic layout. As such some of the executives requested to have the ability to update basic news updates and such to the new (internal-secure) homepage without having to look at or touch the code. I just now got the chance to look into some ways to do this, and being a big fan of open source software, WordPress caught my eye. However there are a few concerns I have about the program/software/code (whatever it is).

1. Is it customizable to the extent that it can be made to be a very professional looking News section on a homepage?

2. Assuming it can updated code-free so to speak, do the updates take place client-side then get uploaded to the server, or do they take place server side? How secure is the update process if it is server-side or on the live web?

3. Can your average executive type use it without getting a stroke?

4. What code is the applet written in when it is applied to your page’s main source code? (html, js, or just fancy css and html?)

5. Can it easily be made to a)remove the previous news article from the page, and b)relocate the article to a different location?

Sorry for the long drawn out post and using the wrong terms in some spots (brain farts), its 1am and I’m busy working on a side project when I stumbled upon this site. Suggestion: Put in a FAQ ;-).