A Crisp New Web

As a visitor to the Crisp Blog, you may have noticed that we’ve launched a new web site on www.crisp.se?

Apart from a new design, we’ve also changed CMS from imCMS by imCode to open source WordPress.

Old site, based on imCMS
New site, based on WordPress

WordPress is not a real CMS!

You might say: “WordPress is not a real CMS!” You may be right. But who needs a real CMS anyway? We wanted a open source, web content management systems we could easily work with, without too much effort. This Joomla, Drupal and WordPress comparison by Marco Barbosa inspired us, but I think the decision was made primarily based on personal experience and gut feeling of the ease of use, community size and availability of plugins. Also, we recently migrated this blog from Pebble to WordPress. Our needs are fairly simple, and we ended up choosing the simplest platform of the three, or as Marco Barbosa put it: the Lady Gaga CMS.

The work on the design, wireframes, personas, effect map and information structure has been lead by Mia Kolmodin.

The foundation of the Crisp WordPress Theme was done by David Wallin from Academic Work. I have continued that work, refactored the PHP quite a bit, made it more DRY, reduced database hits and added some features that were missing at launch. There are more changes coming.

Localization is one of the major features on the horizon. (Yes, english would be nice, wouldn’t it?) A lot of work has gone into making customizations translatable. We’re planning to use WordPress plugin WPML for general localization. With a bit of research, it turns out it can be used together with Advanced Custom Fields.

We manage change by using a Trello board, shared with the Crisp group.

Source code for the Crisp Theme is stored in a private repository in the Crisp GitHub organization.

We hope that you like the new site!

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