Using WordPress in an entomologist project

By
yann
Posted in: Blog

To share my discovery with the largest audience I choose WordPress as my CMS.

I’m at all en IT person and I’m a pure end user of Worpress. In this post, I will share my choices.

Why WordPress ?

  • It’s a CMS I already use.
  • Very « end user friendly ».
  • The skill needed for the first installation are rather low.
  • Rich CMS in the Taxonomic field.
  • A large collection of themes from which to choose
  • Search engine friendly. Google and other can index easily your content.

Choosing a theme.

There are a huge quantity of free themes available in the WordPress Codex. I’ve chosen Arras but I haven’t done an exhaustive enquiry on this matter.

The reasons why I’ve chosen Arras :

  • Can be set on one column. Good to show larger images and in my point of view, Google is the main navigation tool to navigate in my website.
  • Nice slideshow on the home page.
  • Nice display of post excerpt on the home page and on the archive pages (for example when you browse  in the categories structure).
  • Nice use of the images thumbs on all the archive and home pages.
  • Up to 3 usable zone in the footer of the site.
  • Size of the thumbnail can be chosen.

The Taxonomy in WordPress

With WordPress you get 2 main way to arrange your production : the categories and the tags.

The categories.

My choices are reflected in the menu bar at the top of Hydracharina.org.

At the moment I write this article, here are the chosen use of the categories

  • Water mite with the use of subcategories to match the superfamily / family / genus accepted by the science.
  • Size : with a subcategorie using size range because this is an interesting way to narrow a research when you are trying to identify a specific water mite.
  • Locality : I’ve read that it’s a shame that some former scientist haven’t precisely indicated the place where they have found their specimen. I’ve organized this category with country and county sub hierarchy. For this place, I place the latitude and longitude in the field « description » of the category.
  • References : the books and internet sites I own or I think interesting to site.

The tags

Usually a very useful feature in the WordPress sites. In WordPress there is no hierarchy possible with the tags. For the moment here are my idea :

  • Degree of identification : Identification certain – Identification almost certain – Identification with help asked – Identification unknown.

 

 

The permalink structure.

In WordPress, it can be interesting tu use the name of the animal identified as the identifier of the article on the animal. The problem is that, when you describe a water mite is is very difficult to name without doubt. So, using an URL like http://hydracarina.org/limnesia-fulgida is not an option. I prefer using « post number » like http://hydracarina.org/8. Like this, it is possible to change the identification without changing the URL.

 

Things todo

  • How to produce a XML file with all my discovery.
  • How to deal with multiple picture of different individual of the same specie.

 

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