Issue and Volume Management
While Wordpress has quickly become my favorite platform for building almost any webpage (so simple even my stupid brother could use it), it isn’t perfect by any means. When it comes to magazines, one of the biggest problems with Wordpress is that there is no Issue and Volume management. iJoomla has constructed a phenomenal plugin for Joomla. It allows you to organize your issues and volumes, change the layout, and much much more. The problem with iJoomla is that you have to use Joomla. Now, I love Joomla(it was my first CMS), but to be honest, it’s a terrible CMS when it comes to handing it off to an end-use who isn’t you. The backend navigation is a bit complex for most users.
If Wordpress had some sort of mechanism like iJoomla that would allow you to manage the content on the frontpage by volume and issue, that would be amazing. As it is now, a Wordpress magazine user has to be content with just allowing the content within their issue to be treated like all Wordpress; the old stuff sinks to the bottom, and the new stuff sits at the top. That means that an old issue’s material will likely exist on the frontpage right under new content. Eww! Wordpress needs a plugin that allows magazine developers to manage volumes, issues, and frontpage content.
Batch editing of Articles
One of my greatest frustrations with Wordpress has to do with its inability to allow an user to batch edit posts. One of the magazines I worked on required me to archive years worth of material. What that meant was I had to upload about 300 articles, upload a picture for each article, assign its “date of publication”, insert pullout quotes for each article, and assign a category and tags to every article. It took nearly 3 hours per issue. I would love to see a plugin for Wordpress that allows a person to edit the categories, tags, and dates of multiple articles simultaneously.
