Tag Archives: wordpress

WordPress, Drupal or Roll Your Own?

When should you use existing CMSs as WordPress or Drupal and when should you build one yourself?

Of course, building a CMS from scratch would be insane but with emerging technologies and standards such as git (for version control), Markdown (for editing), Neo4J (for metadata) and Solr or ElasticSearch for indexing the data, you can get extremely far by putting the pieces together yourself.

Add to that the recent rise in popularity of Javascript frameworks such as AngularJS or Backbone, with which you tend to get a cleaner split between REST-API and UI, and you don’t even have to render the web pages on a server. Static HTML-files with Javascript are fine.

So maybe the time has come to say goodbye to the web CMS that tries to do everything and say hello to a toolbox of world class, open source and free components that you put together yourself to build a framework?

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SEO-friendly titles in WordPress with Atahualpa theme and Headspace plugin

The Atahualpa theme for WordPress is a really powerful theme with lots of settings. But it doesn’t give you full control over the titles of posts and pages the way the Headspace plugin does.
How the titles of your blog posts look like is important for search engine optimization. If you want your post to be higher ranked in the search result (and who doesn’t?) the title is one of the most important factors to consider.
The Atahualpa theme and the Headspace plugin doesn’t work together without a minor modification to one of the helper php-files in Atahualpa. Look in the functions directory of the theme for the file called bfa_meta_tags.php. Open it in an editor and look for the line that says:

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

Change it to:

<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>

Now you can enable the Headspace plugin and go to Settings -> Headspace and define exactly how your titles should be generated.

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