Leancode

I’ve used a bunch of CMS systems over the years: perforce + raw HTML, wikis, zope, sharepoint, textpattern, etc.

But with leancode, I needed to strike a balance where the site had to be great for time-oriented information (blogging, project news) while being functional enough for static pages. WordPress seemed like a good fit, but it required some customization. Here’s what was done:

1. Followed textdrive’s instructions for installing wordpress
2. Chose the andreas08 theme from themes.wordpress.net because it combined a navbar based on the sites ‘pages’ with a clean, functional design.
3. Followed instructions for using a wordpress ‘page’ as the site front page including making blog appear in non-root folder, creating a ‘blog’ page, and changing the permalink definition as described
4. Installed the static front page plugin for wordpress (again, a wget from within the target directory on the hosting site), created a ‘home’ page for it in the wordpress panel, and activated the plugin so that this home page became the new front for leancode.com
5. Went to the theme’s directory (under wp-content/themes/andr*), and edited header.php to remove the extra list element in the navbar for the duplicate ‘home’ entry on the menu
6. Changed the wordpress page order to reflect the home, blog, about order I wanted.

The result of all this is a wordpress install which is only slightly customized (theme with one tweak, and one plugin), but which otherwise can be managed from the wordpress control panel. And it looks and behaves enough like a website done with a more sophisticated CMS.
Some paths I went down and rejected:

• Having a static front page which is not a wordpress ‘page’ This would have meant hand-maintaing the nav menu, and having to edit content outside of wordpress. The method I eventually chose has eliminated those special cases.
• Giving wordpress its own directory. I think I could have got this to work, but since the whole site is in wordpress, it didn’t buy me anything right now.

Things that still bother me

• The URL for the blog is leancode.com/blog, but the URL for the feed is leancode.com/feed. I would have liked to see clear separation of the blog feed (e.g. leancode.com/blog/feed) from the other content on the site that one might subscribe to

Any suggestions on this or other aspects of the site design are welcome …

Thanks to all the creators of wordpress, andreas for the theme, and all the others involved in the deep stack of open source software who make this stuff work.