The website that has been taking up my time and my passion, to the extent that I have not been posting here as often as I would like, is launched. The Fragile X Association of Australia now has an interactive site built around WordPress.
From posts I have written before, you may know that I have a son with the condition and, at the time he was diagnosed. little was known about it – despite Fragile X Syndrome being the most common form of inherited intellectual disability and the own known genetic cause of Autism. I have since been on a bit of a mission to ensure as many people know about it as possible so that other kids and carriers are diagnosed and get the proper treatment. Male and female carriers may have their own distinct health issues that are quite distinct from those affected by the syndrome. Some males are being incorrectly treated as having Parkinson’s disease for example.
As well as standard WordPress pages with information relating to Fragile X Syndrome and the support and services offered by the Association, the blog section will enable them to update the site frequently with news of Fragile X and the various activities run by the Association and its State Support Groups. Pages can be easily added and edited when more information is needed. With frequent advances in research and treatment trials anyone interested can be kept up to date. Although I am going to be around to teach and help with the system, the Association’s office manager and committee members will be able to operate the site themselves.
More technical aspects:
I chose WordPress as a CMS system over Joomla and Drupal because of its easy of use and administration. Other CMS systems can be quite hard to learn and WordPress has all the features needed; either inbuilt or via plugins. Although I am very familiar with Joomla in particular adding content is still more time consuming than WP. I have found that despite all good intentions the clients I have built Joomla systems for add very little new content, or ask me to do it for them.
I did have to add some coding manually rather than use plugins to get the navigation system to do what I wanted, so that only certain pages showed in the main menu and specific menus appeared on particular groups of pages. Despite having very little practice with PHP this was not too hard because of the excellent documentation on the WordPress.org site. If anyone would like to know how I created any particular aspects of the site, please let me know.
My last addition to the site was the forums, which I did not want to configure until the site was being hosted on the proper domain. The rest of the site I had created in a subdirectory of my own server and transferred over afterwards, with a bit of editing of the database. I used SMF for the forums because of the extent of features available. I still need to redesign the template to match the rest of the site.
A request
Please visit the site and have a bit of a read – your knowledge may possibly be of great help to someone you know. If you have the time please leave a comment on a news item – it will give the site editors some practice with the comment section and encourage those who are not used to leaving messages to do so. If there is anything particular you would like to know that you cannot find within the main site, drop by the forums and ask – or leave suggestions for content or feedback on the site.
Now I will do some catching up on what is happening in the blogging world to again bring you news of new tools, software, social networking and other stuff that will hopefully be of use to you.
I use WordPress for a CMS on some of my sites that aren’t really blogs. It’s just so easy to get things up and running the way I like it…plugins + themes etc. I think it’s a great option.
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I would like to see your other sites WP CMS sites – please contact me if you are interested in showing them to me.
Sueblimelys last blog post..The WordPress CMS Site is Launched
Looks like your new blog has a good design. I have visited it and left you a comment there.
Good luck with your new blog and thanks for sharing information about Fragile X information as this is beneficial to all of us be aware with the disease.
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Thanks, glad you liked the design and that you took some time to read about Fragile X.
Sueblimelys last blog post..The WordPress CMS Site is Launched
I think wordpress is the best content management syetem
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I agree although I am now looking for something like Ning for another site I am creating. A social community site where being able to add pictures, video, music would go down well.
Sueblimelys last blog post..The WordPress CMS Site is Launched
Thanks for another readable and very readable post!
I’m happy with my WP too
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Thanks Renny
Hopefully I will have some time now to come and visit yours and Diane’s blog.
Sueblimelys last blog post..The WordPress CMS Site is Launched
Good work, i’ve toyed with the idea of running a site using wordpress as a cms. It’s ease of use trumps most other cms systems
I also chose to use WordPress as a CMS over Joomla and Drupal. WordPress is much easier to use, is great for SEO, and has a strong developer community.
The site looks great. Nice work!
Hi Sueblimely, I have been studying ways to use the power of WP as a CMS and I found 2 plugins you might like to experiment with. (Like I am).
WP-O-Matic and SimplePieCore. The 1st I think requires the second. What WP-O-Matic does is pull RSS feeds and make automatic posts with the articles. So you can take every Yahoo News RSS article that contains the words “Fragile X” and pull them into your blog.
You do not get original content with this but you do get focused subject material that is of interest to your readers.
Cheers – good luck with your projects !!
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Thank you so much CD, I was looking for a way to bring in a feed of Fragile X news feeds. I tried to find a way of adding google alerts to the site with no luck. I will give the plugins a go.
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The new site looks great and you can never go wrong with WP. I think it is a really great thing that you’re doing. The best of luck with this.
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Thanks John. WP is great although I am going to check out Injader for use in another project. It has an easy to use interface as well as some features that are not available to WP such as mutliple RSS feeds.
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you have done a great job the Fragile X site Sue.
Several members of my Sister in law’s family have fragile X – including her sister who is quite affected, along with a cousin and twin uncles.
Sadly her twin uncles spent (one alive still about 50) their lives in an institution, her mother raised her sister (and the cousin too for many years).
Her mother was one of 13 children … a carrier along with her ? mother ? father.
My SIL was tested to make sure she wasn’t a carrier before they started their family.
I told my SIL about it and I will send her the link.
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Thanks Trish for the comments and for referring your SIL to the site. Although the site itself may not offer much information to the family that they don’t already know because of their experiences, they could likely benefit from the forums. I will be updating the site with any news on the research front too as well as on Aussie disability news.
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a good looking site. nice and clean. i wanted to leave a comment, but it said i needed to log in in order to do so, so i hesitated.
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Not being to comment was an error on my part and is now corrected. I set the site up for no comments globally when I was testing it out on my own domain and forgot to change it when I transferred the site over. Thanks for letting me know, I really appreciate that.
Many of the readers of the site may not be familiar with blogs and leaving comments so it would be good to get some from bloggers to encourage them to give it a go too.
Sueblimelys last blog post..Productivity Tips – Downloads
Thank you so much for a very interesting and useful post.I really like your site. Cheers!
Nicely written. WordPress has many things we all discover as we go alone and build the sites. Great post
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Thanks Alex and I found your Intense Debate post interesting. I do hope that our freedom to choose comment systems within WP is not taken away from us.
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Sorry to hear about your son. I have a nephew who is autistic and I have seen the efforts his parents have made to get him into the mainstream. Its been a heartening journey to see that child’s development.
All the best for your mission in spreading the word.
I am pleased that your nephew is showing good progress. Although my son is never going to achieve many of the things others do when he does achieve something however small it is so heartening and I am so proud of him. It can be difficult mainstreaming and you have to be very pro active as a parent. I followed this path for the first 6 years and then opted for special ed and feel Alex got the best of both worlds.
Sueblimelys last blog post..Productivity Tips – Downloads
I have used WordPress as a CMS on a number of sites. It is excellent. You just use Pages instead of Posts and set a particular page as your homepage. The great thing about recent versions of WordPress is you can use WordPress as a CMS and then add a blog (e.g. at domain.com/blog/) in a matter of seconds. This allows you to start the site with the option of adding a blog later.
I’ve used Drupal and Joomla. They have their benefits, but the simplicity, clean code, and efficiency of WordPress makes WordPress a great choice for those needing a simple CMS.
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Thanks so much for your blog, and for bringing attention to this important issue.
Very useful information. Thanks for this. You got a great blog .I will be interested in more similar topics.I’m very interested in CMS and all its related subjects.
Im sorry to hear about your son
but you have really done a great job on that website!
Till then,
Jean
Anyone where I can start my own blog.
its very nice and amazing projectect.
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I think there might be a little too much going on on the initial load of your blog. I see just the background for a couple seconds, until the page is finally up. But excellent info worth waiting for
). Definitely ‘two thumbs up’.
It’s interesting how WordPress was created for blogging, and yet, today it is one of the best platforms for small websites, regardless of whether there is a blog on that website. I have setup countless WordPress websites that have no blog; the website owners use the “Pages” portion of WordPress to create all content on their website. The website owners, who are often small business owners, love the ease of WordPress.
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your new blog has a good design. I have visited it and left you a comment there.