Attention in software development

I’m kinda loving on WordPress MU. One of my recent projects required building web sites that pulled from a shared database. WordPress MU allowed me to create a one-button website builder for my client. WordPress MU calls them blogs, but my client will map a unique domain to each blog, and, well, doesn’t use them as blogs at all. So I’m calling them sites here.

By filling in three fields and clicking a button, my client creates a website that

• Associates metadata with the site that specifies filter criteria to select records from the shared database
• Sets the permalink structure for the new site to a custom setting
• Creates a key category for the new site, one that is used for the posts generated in a later step
• Sets the theme
• All the initial pages are created, including content. The “slug” is set specifically to support the URL structure we want. Page template is also set here because our design calls for a hierarchy of pages.
• If the PageMash plugin is active (it is auto-activated for all new blogs using Plugin Commander), certain pages are hidden, and a specific order is set so that page navigation comes out looking good
• The front page is set, because we are creating CMS sites, not blogs
• Several hundred posts are generated out of the underlying shared non-WPMU database tables

All of this takes something like 20 seconds, at which point the admin can visit the new site as a subdomain.  The theme has been applied, navigation works correctly, it is beauty.

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