I started my programming career with PHP back in 2003, but I’ve been a .NET-only guy for a few years now. Since I started this blog a few days ago I’ve been looking into using Wordpress for a few web application ideas that I have. The problem I usually have with starting ASP.NET sites is that it takes a while to get the basics up and running. I know… there are plenty of frameworks out there that get you up and running pretty quickly, but it’s hard to beat the simplicity of Wordpress. In ASP.NET, I always get hung up on the details – for some reason I always end up spending hours tweaking CSS before the site actually does anything useful. With wordpress, it’s easy to find a theme that’s *good enough* and get to work on actual functionality. In a single hour of setting up styles, permissions, users, databases, etc. in ASP.NET, I can have Wordpress installed, looking good, and actually *doing something*.
The *doing something* part is the key. Doing what? Well, I’m not sure yet, but I’ve just run across two plugins that make it easy to publish different types of content with Wordpress. They are Pods and Flutter. Both plugins are Drupal CCK-style content-type creation plugins. That basically means you do this with them:
- Create a new “Content Type” (not actually called “Content Type” in either plugin)
- Add some fields to it (like textboxes, images, checkboxes, etc.)
- Create a template for a page that will display the content type to your user
- Add some data
Flutter seems to make the most sense to me, but I only gave each plugin a five minute trial run. To be honest I probably won’t end up using either plugin for what I’m trying to do, but I can see how they would be useful for simple-ish data entry and display.
