You all may get a kick out of the Western Springs Newspaper Obituary Index. An industrious Magazines Desk employee was interested in indexing obits from our local papers, and naturally we wanted this index to be online. The obvoius solution was to use WordPress:

Quick and easy database creation. In fact, I didn’t have to do anything, WordPress did it all. Yay. Fully searchable.

Easy data entry This is Beth’s project, and she’s very dedicated to it. I wasn’t going to have the time to enter code myself, and there wasn’t time to show her how to write code. It took literally 4 minutes to show her how to log in, make an entry, select a category, and post.

So each ‘record’ in this database is a blog post. Categories were put in alpha order by

< ?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name'); ?>.

I had to get the posts within a category display to be in alpha order too, not the usual bloggish reverse chronological. Luckily I found this code on the WordPress forums:

< ?php if (is_category()) { $posts = query_posts($query_string . '&orderby=title&order=asc'); } ?>.

The static front page is produced by semilogic’s static front page plugin.

It isn’t the prettiest website I’ve ever seen, but it’s functional. And it’s sure a great example of how weblogs can be so darn handy.

n.b. People can’t make comments on the obit index. I wasn’t quite comfortable with giving people the opportunity to talk about the deceased. “Online Grieving @ Your Library” has an odd ring to it.