What do you mean by Solution as opposed to my Data Structure? Before you dig too deeply into what kind of structure you might need, you need to think about what Content you’re going to be managing on your Web Application and how that content is going to be used by your Users and your Clients (or yourself).
This requires thinking about your Content Strategy and your Content Model. Each informs the other and informs what kind of technologies you’re going to bring to your final solution.
Some things to think about before going too far deep into coding or building a structure:
- Is what I’m thinking about better handled by an existing plugin? Don’t build something if you don’t need to.
- Before I break the rules, understand how WordPress handles these items by default. This is why it’s so important to understand the WordPress Hierarchy before you start digging into trying to get your pages to layout the way you “think” they might have to. The hierarchy is there for a reason; it’s logical and it’s SEO defined.
- Before I start building front-end forms to replace everything on the back-end, think about WHY you’d want to do that. Are you doing it because you think the back-end is confusing to a new user, or you have too many additional things in the back-end that might be confusing? Simplify the Admin. Remove any menu items that might be confusing based on the User’s role. Use a plugin to make the built-in table list for posts (which typically only contains title, date and author and taxonomy) show what is more useful for your particular post type. See if you can organize the post-edit screen to be more helpful for your end user. If they’re all used to seeing the ‘post title’ and ‘editor’ and they know what the Featured Image does, you’ve already handled 80% of what they need. Everything else is just your custom fields.
The goal of all of the questions you ask yourself is “Do I need to re-invent the wheel?”
