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Create and Manage Adaptive Content with WordPress

Beverly Lerch1576 18-Jul-2018

Technology has continued to evolve and new trends are coming up in the dawn of each and every day especially in the world of website development. Creating and managing content online is an art that has grown immensely with various content management systems. WordPress is among such and arguably one of the best and rapidly growing platforms. Such platforms have found a major application because of the way they are flexible in the creation and management of content.

Conventionally, we have had a continued use of inflexible images and data on web pages but that is now changing. The need for adaptive content as well as high-quality content is in high demand in the efforts of improving ways in which content is being managed online.  

The process of implementing this new concept is underway though there is not yet a generally accepted way of doing it. However, WordPress can get website owners started in coming up with adaptive content that can easily be managed online.

And to ensure high-quality content there are a lot of writing services such as EwritingService that are ready to help.

The Need for Adaptive Content Design Tools  

Adaptive content is a technique of content strategy designed to present meaningful and focused interactions on all platforms. The content gets perceived, arranged and developed based on customer’s goals, context and their mood regardless of the technology or device being used. Adaptive content should be able to cover every piece of information and data on different channels. Such personalization of content that takes into account different channels is growing by the day.

Web-focused technology has been the center of attraction for several decades now but the mobile world is now taking over. There has been an increased use of mobile devices in recent times hence the need to develop content that can easily adapt to such platforms. Wedging website tools into mobile applications has proved to be challenging and time-consuming at the same time. There has been a problem with the architecture of websites offering the ability to access information from online databases. The need prompted the use of responsive web design (RWD) framework that responds to different platforms.  

Although a relief was realized with the application of RWD, there has been an increase in the number of browsers, devices, and platforms that should work with websites. Therefore, the way websites are built is slowly changing and such platforms as WordPress are providing answers on how to address these dynamics. Through Adaptive Web Design (AWD), websites are now becoming more and more compatible with different platforms offering ease of content creation and management. AWD is a type of progressive development that considers different markup levels alongside assistive technology support.  

With the use of RWD and AWD, websites can now be viewed easily in different screen sizes and on various mobile devices. Content Management System (CMS) tools have greatly been developed on a page model and not on the different types of data being posted online. Ideally, a shift should be made to develop such tools based on the content that needs to be uploaded. The design properties of the different content types are much more needed than how the design is being made.  

It is not just enough to have a responsive design model in place. It will only address front-end challenges such as images and fluid grids. Adaptive design as realized with WordPress engages back-end approaches that consider both the function and type of user. The initial attempts made focused on making websites look better on mobile devices but were limited on how they could help companies to make use of the existing content and ensure it gets seen properly on different platforms and devices.  

Traditional website development still has been experiencing challenges despite making use of responsive design and some content management systems. It has not been possible to create content and publish the same on different platforms. A lot of duplication has had to be made for content to be available for reuse on different platforms. WordPress offers a chance to content producers to do so once and publish it wherever they want. For that reason, adaptive content is becoming more and more important hence the need for developing other standards is growing by the day.  

WordPress Capabilities for Adaptive Content  

Migrating from one content management system has always been a challenge for many people who own websites. The problem has been in the ability to create adaptive content that is easy to manage across various platforms. This issue is now getting a green light with the emergence of such content management systems as WordPress. There are tools and features in WordPress that can help in the creation of content and be published in ways that are reusable, and easily manageable across different platforms.

With WordPress, content creators can now develop their content and present it in a flexible manner on various platforms and different viewing settings. The most useful bit especially with WordPress is the ability to plugin tools and implement them on this platform to make it as adaptive as possible. Developers can apply customized themes in line with WordPress standards. For instance, D5 creation themes are coded with strict adherence to WordPress settings. Therefore, all standard plugins can run with these Premium WordPress Themes without presenting any challenges to users. It is a WordPress compatible theme that will helps in comfortably creating content and easily managing it on different platforms and devices.  

Create and Manage Adaptive Content with WordPress

WordPress was initially a blogging platform and opened its doors to a fully-fledged CMS through the introduction of custom taxonomies and custom post types. There still is another great feature known as custom fields that can be combined with these other features. The custom fields in here are a representative of a metadata sets that can be connected with any object found in WordPress CMS. With WordPress, users have the ability to make a User Interface (UI) that is highly customizable for metadata and a flexible Application Programming Interface (API) to keep and access it.  

As of today, WordPress offers more than just a blogging platform. It has transformed greatly into a development platform. With it, a developer can provide content creators with a platform allowing the development of content that is adaptive to various platforms. These can provide the much-desired experience presently and still pave way for the future use and applicability. Adaptive content needs to be structured, independent in terms of presentation, allow for metadata and be reusable on different devices and platforms. These are features that WordPress is gradually shifting to in order to provide a modern-day experience giving way into the future of adaptive content development. So, what does this mean? Here is a detailed explanation of the same: 

  • Conventionally, content consisted of pages. However, it is now getting structured with the use of objects that represent a package of elements that are already defined. Each chunk of information factors in the way it will be shown in different settings. These chunks get to be presented in different formats and media for varying uses. For example, a video can be transcribed and be presented as text in a different setting where it would not support video viewing. Still, an object’s annotation may differ based on each setting. Information shared on social media platforms could be different from search results or when introduced on a website.  
  • There is a shift towards separating content from how it is being presented making it presentation independent. This is very useful in the redesigning of websites. A content object can now be referenced and permit the design system to decide on how the object will be presented.
  • As program tools take most of the work, a lot of information will be provided to such systems concerning the content being created. The objective here is to present content on different platforms automatically as defined through already predetermined settings through the use of metadata. For example, the author’s name can through a set of rules be presented differently on different platforms and devices.  
  • Duplication of the content source is now becoming a thing of the past with a single content source becoming more desirable. Content needs to be reusable with an option of publishing content based on the setting to determine the way it is presented to different users in different settings such as on a mobile device, varying connection speed and screen resolution among several others.

Why WordPress for Adaptive Content? 

Through the use of custom post types, the concept of working with pages is no longer considered a noble idea. Content creators can now use different WordPress themes and/or add plugins that would help in creating a post type of an object of their own choice. It could be anything to do with events and news or any other thing of interest as they would choose. The structure of the object can then be defined through a metadata set to make it appear differently as different platforms would warrant.

A separate User Interface can also be created to effectively managed metadata. This is helpful in presenting content in a structured way. With WordPress, different types of metadata can be created hence providing an opportunity to develop options for built-in content blocks like meta titles and meta title descriptions. Ideally, there could be SEO plugins that give room for special titles and descriptions that are SEO-targeted for each of the content objects.  

There are a number of great features provided by WordPress that give content creators a number of instances of the rich-text editor on a single page. This can be applied using the wp editor function that creates the matching text region markup as well as assigning rich-editing functionality to it and to the selection buttons for media too. Through the use of this function, content fields can be split into various types based on the structure of the object. This adds a structural component to each of these objects. Again, each of the editable areas gets a unified and similar GUI that become very useful when inserting the required markup into the desired fields and that includes the short-codes too.  

You can upload your choice theme to match your needs as follows. First, you must be logged in as the Admin and then click on Appearances from the WordPress dashboard. Choose Themes and then “Add New”. Upload by clicking the “Browse” button and choosing a Zip file of extension downloaded to your computer.   

Create and Manage Adaptive Content with WordPress

  Ideally, WordPress has made a tremendous step towards the creation and management of adaptive content. Each of the media items in the media library comes with its dedicated entry in the database that keeps all pertinent information. This includes source file data as well. However, WordPress does not store a direct link to a given file. Instead, it keeps the name of the file and the path to the designated uploads folder disjointedly to build the entire path dynamically. Still, the WordPress’ shortcode functionality allows the referencing of any markup within the content fields and the development of the actual markup animatedly should the content be printed on the front end.  

Conclusion  

The templating system of WordPress supports great themes and allows users to switch in between them and assign a template to a choice content object on a hierarchical basis. This is a very good concept for making content reusable. Through the use of a central content point, different design settings can be created and then switch in between them based on the needs of the user. As at the moment, there are various WordPress themes that are highly responsive and others fully dedicated to mobile platforms. There is room to have a WordPress theme for different settings as would be required by the user.

 A shift from responsive designs to adaptive ones has been realized in recent times and WordPress is taking a center stage in making these new developments. Planning, creating and managing content is now required to not only be responsive but also adaptive to different devices and platforms based the needs of the user. This is a different strategy towards content management where it can be published everywhere once it has been created. WordPress has a great potential for making sure that this happens now and in the future with the right themes and plugins in it.



Updated 04-Mar-2020

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