I've completed the move to WordPress, or at least, I've completed it far enough to take the website live, anyway. I'll blog another day about why I moved to WordPress from Drupal, but for now, I'm just going to make a quick run-down of the new features of the site.
Streamlined Menus
I hate to admit it, but LDS.org may have gotten this right. Less menu options is better on the top-level pages of a site. For the past ten years I've usually put all the menu options on the site, linking to all of the main pages, but at this point when I've got thousands of pages of valuable content to link and index, the time had come for a change.
Operating under the assumption that the people who visit this site are looking mainly for two things: lesson planning help and calling help, I've rebuilt my menus to help people follow that organizational structure. Things are much simpler, and I've created new page templates that load menus based on the top-level items.
No more custom posts
I've eliminated custom posts for now, and I'm not likely to go back to them. It is an extremely time-consuming activity to try to theme for multiple content types. I've gotten rid of that convention now, and I hope that it'll make my life easier.
Category Counts
Now that I'm not grouping content by post type, I'm using categories to group content. I've included a link to the archive of each category at the bottom of the page along with a count of the numbers of content available in each category.
Same links/tags
I'm keeping the same link structure as the old site for SEO and legacy linking purposes. While tag names have, for the most part, not changed, the links won't work any more because of the way WordPress handles them.
Still RSS feeding
I'm still using RSS to help index more great content posted out there, but a significant addition has been the new RSS feed from our Seminary Facebook page. Finally, seminary teachers will be able to find ideas by scripture.
