kieranbarnes

I wrote the Extra Cover Cricket site about a year ago to provide a central news hub for syndicated cricket news from around the world. Previously there has never been so much cricket news on a single web site. Seriously!

It was wrote around a single page that provided the home page, the category listing and the single article page. Really simple stuff. There was also a separate page called from cron that updated the feeds on a regular basis.
Unfortunately it was all too simple. It needed individual meta information, SEO friendly URLs not to mention some basic URL security and XSS protection. It did have sifr though - tacky now.

So what do you do with limited time available? Rewrite the application from scratch? Or use Wordpress?
Use Wordpress of course. I managed to get Wordpress installed and syndicating feeds from the news sources, all in less than an hour. Not bad. A few hours later I had the full site up and running with all the features and SEO goodness I required. It was secure too.

I used a fairly standard set of plugins;

• All in One SEO Pack
• cforms
• Crawl Rate Tracker (My 2.5 fix)
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Popularity Contest
• Simple Tags
  A good looking plugin with lots of potenial, uses the Yahoo! Term Extractor, like me to create tags automatically.
• Ultimate Google Analytics
• WordPress.com Stats
• WP-o-Matic (My 2.5 fixes)
  This plugin is annoyingly bug prone, generally needed a lot of tweaking to run correctly.
• Category Icons
  A really nice plugin to replace category names with images which really helps in this style of site. (Credits to FamFamFam for the icons)

The whole project turnedn out very successful. Ignoring the theme that needs a bit of work. Thanks to Wordpress, the whole thing took less than a day to get up and running. Try programming that yourself in 24 hours!

Extra Cover Cricket

Tags: application from scratch, central news, Cricket, Google, news from around the world, news sources, Popularity, popularity contest, SEO, Sitemaps, Wordpress

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 09:49 and is filed under PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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