Crosswayorphans.org Launch – Using WordPress To Manage Data

Check out the new site from Crossway International, a mission agency serving among other places, orphans in Sudan. Crossway wanted a system to promote and process sponsorships for their 499 children. At first a daunting task, we found multiple methods of automation and batch processing to pull the data into WordPress and make management a breeze.

Challenge #1 - Are you gonna type all that into WordPress? Nope. This article demonstrated a method for a batch import of data from a spreadsheet to create all of the posts. Beware however that you need a different timestamp for each post or paging and post ordering break down.

Challenge #2 – So many pictures! Photoshop provides great functionality for batch processing of images for the web. Then, WordPress’s flash uploader does us the favor of creating thumbnails. I thought I might be pushing the limits of the flash uploader, but it passed with flying colors.

Challenge #3 - How do we keep track of these kids once they’re in WordPress? Luckily, each child is assigned an ID# which became our key variable in the custom template creation. A single post template called up the post, the image and dynamically populated a response form field for easy organization and identification when a visitor to the site wanted to support an orphan.

Redirect to a PayPal payment option list and voilà! Check out the site to see the acrobatics in action and consider making a donation to the orphans.

Tags: crossway, custom template, data, manage, orphans, wordpress

Posted on Wednesday, July 8th in Uncategorized, news.