I recently talked about a tutorial on creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress and thanks to WPCandy, have now found a pretty slick plugin that mimics that feature and adds a lot more. Flutter lets your modify your write page and post screens to your liking and adds the ability to add custom content types and write panels to these screens. From WP Candy’s review and from the Flutter documentation, it appears that the plugin is not only under active development and quite complex and mature, it also has a lot of potential for the future. For those that are planning to use Flutter, please remember that it is still in beta and there are lots of broken features and options. Upgrades and uninstallations seem to be the most fraught with issues.

1. Is the functionality needed covered by the WordPress core functions, and/or with the addition of (not too many) plugins? This is usually managing information pages (using Pages), and publishing news/press releases (using Posts). If I need to add a lot of custom stuff, including the custom fields, then perhaps it gets too complicated for the client.

2. Is there a good translation of WordPress available, so that your client can get the backend in their own language? Why should my Swedish customers not have their CMS in Swedish? There is no reason, of course, and it is easy enough to install a language pack.

3. Will my client be able to upgrade WordPress themselves, or do I need to make plans for this as well? This is true for most platforms out there, but nevertheless you’ll need to have an upgrade strategy.

I’ve never dived into the realm of setting up WordPress for a client so this is all new to me. However, I know a lot of you install and configure WordPress for your own clients. With that in mind, I’d be interested in knowing your own checklist of things to consider before committing them to WordPress.

This release candidate, accoring to Dean, is mostly a fix for the backend of things with a few interface tweaks. Look through the complete list of changes in that forum topic above.

Changes worthy of note include:

• Security and authentication fixes
• New (different) method of installing plugins
• Less tables, more “webstandardsy”
• Default pinger now Ping-O-Matic

Changes not done yet, but in another RC or two:

• Theme installation engine
• Metaweblog xml support
• Batch image uploads to directly create galleries

For Upgraders, dean suggests

To upgrade from previous versions, BACK UP YOUR CURRENT INSTALL and simply copy everything in the distroâ€s /textpattern/ directory into your existing /textpattern/ directory. You will need to re-enter anything youâ€ve set in /lib/admin_config.php – this nasty step should be eliminated next release.

Do not run _update.php! It gets run automatically when needed. Forget about it entirely!

Thanks Michael!

Part 2 covers some tips and tricks to extend the framework we created in part 1 using some apache tricks and a plugin or two.  Hope you find it helpful.

Part 1 is up at my site, you can find it here.  Part two should be up soon, and will cover getting the most out of your new WPCMS by combining some plugins with a little apache magic.

Hope to see you there.

* Sub-categories: Categories can be arranged hierarchically and infinitely deep. Multiple categories combined with sub-categories gives WordPress the most comprehensive taxonomy system of any blogging software available.
* OPML Export and Import: You can import and export OPML to systems like Bloglines or desktop aggregators like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.
* Automatic Thumbnail Creation System: WordPress has a refined upload feature that automatically creates thumbnails any size you want.
* Encyrpted passwords and cookies: All passwords in the database and password cookies are encrypted, ensuring maximal security.
* New plugin architecture: The new plugin architecture simplifies modifying or extending WordPress features. Plugins can now hook into nearly every action WordPress does.
* Localization of WordPress and Unicode support: The efforts put into internationalizing WordPress have borne fruit, and now you can adapt WordPRess to work in your native language. Several translations are already available.
* Advanced comment moderation: You can now fine-tune your moderation filters in a manner very similar to blacklists for other weblog tools. There is also mass-editing of comments, which makes it a snap to delete hundreds of comments with the click of a button, if necessary.
* Post preview: Near-instant previews while writing or editing articles help you proofread and make improvements before finally presenting your work of art to the world.
* RSS and LiveJournal Importers: The new RSS import script is the closest thing to an universal importer. It allows you to import entries from Radio weblogs even other blogging tools that we may not support specifically. The LiveJournal importer finally lets you have a full blooded self-hosted weblog without losing all your old LiveJournal posts.
* Unlimited update services: Now you can define multiple weblog change monitoring services to be pinged when you post.
* Directory flexbility: Now you can have all the WordPress files in one directory and the weblog in a higher level directory.

Congratulations, Matt! Great work as always and thank you!