The Design Principles of the DLLP

Introduction

I began this website in late 2009 using Dreamweaver to build a static website to house my papers on French classical liberal thought and the history of economic thought, and copies of the original texts in which I was interested.

The site has grown over the years to the point where it needs a more sophisticated and easier to organise content management system (CMS). To create this I have adapted WordPress to be that CMS while at the same time largely keeping in place my essays in HTML and copies of the texts in facsimile PDF, HTML, and eBook formats.

The new site will have the following structure of five major components:

1. a Repository for the texts, (housed in the old site )
2. my papers, essays, and study guides, (housed mostly in the old site)
3. my blog posts (housed in the new website )
4. a CMS which consists of a database which contains information about the texts and the authors of those texts (housed in the new website )
5. a search engine (actually two!)

For the nerds, I use the following WordPress plugins as the backbone of the new site:

• CPT UI – Custom Post Type for database fields and taxonomies; in my case the post type “Authors” and “Works”, where Authors are categorised into “Groups” by “Nationality” (or language), “Schools of Thought”, and “Historical periods”; and “Works” into “Disciplines” and “Collections” of various kinds.
• ACF – Advanced Custom Fields where the main groups are “Author Metadata” and “Work Metadata”

This enables me to create dynamically generated tables which list all the Authors and all the Works in the collection (with links to pages with additionbal information) as well as various subsets of groups of authors and collections of texts.

The search engines:

1. “Relevanssi” for the WordPress part of the website (i.e. the “posts” and the “pages”)
2. Google Search for the Repository side of the website (the Essays, Papers, and HTML files)

The top men and navigation bar follows this organisational structure of the website.

Further Information