I’ve found a fantastic plugin that brings Wordpress much closer to being a full CMS system. TS Custom Widgets allows you to choose which pages and posts individual widgets are displayed on. Hoorah! Big thanks to that plugin developer!

However, despite it’s wonderfulness, it doesn’t allow me to hide the right side bar completely when I need to. For this, I need to do some more investigation…

Changed a few bits on the template. Although WordPress’ Appearance Editor is fine for making minor changes, I prefer to use a text editor (TextPad) and FTP for more important things. For a start, it’s easier to roll-back if I change my mind or make a mistake, and also easier to copy sections of code to move them about or whatever!

I’d like to easily decide what’s on at least one of the sidebars depending on what page we’re viewing, so that’s my next challenge and would bring Wordpress capabilities nearer those of Joomla!

I got a bit distracted developing a site for a good friend of mine. She’s not finished adding content yet, but it’s here for those who are interested: Amaryllis Wedding Flowers. It’s my first “proper” WordPress site and I was pleased at how adaptable the template system was. Claire wanted rotating images as her background to the home page and I was amazed to discover this wasn’t too difficult to organise. She also needed a shop, galleries and various static pages. I’m not sure yet if she’ll actually use the blogging facilities of WordPress which makes my choice of software for the project a bit bizarre perhaps, but it was very easy to put together. Just like any project I work on, I’ve written an instruction manual for this site, and it is much smaller than one of my Joomla manuals.

Claire, I hope you like it!