Wordpress as a CMS

Over the last decade or so that I’ve worked in New Media I’ve either used, developed, customised or researched dozens of content management systems for a wide range of end users. Wordpress is by far the easiest to use.

Many people think of Wordpress as little more than a blogging platform, myself included when I first started using it about three years ago - but it is capable of SO MUCH MORE.

You might have noticed that I’ve recently moved to a magazine style theme - I’m currently using it in its most basic form but it has the potential to be and do a lot more than it does and most of that is driven by Wordpress.

It’s all about HOW you use the back end system. If you want it to be a blogging platform - just load the editor, write a post, add a few tags, assign a category and publish.

The simple blog post will then appear at the top of your blog. Simple and wonderful.

However, as every aspect of the editing window can be called on from the template.

If you write your post as with a blog but then use custom fields to add a lead and teaser image, add a custom field for related links, use the more tag to set the cut off for the summary and manage categories - you have the makings of a full on CMS.

Currently in this basic form - when I write a post I use Custom Fields to add a 70×70 teaser image and use an Amazon:Asin machine tag to show a book on the side.

Every post also has a linked (to the post) 290 wide image at the top, a summary paragraph underneath and the more tag underneath that.

The homepage template is then set to pull in different categories at different points on the page.

So the top left item shows the most recent post complete with 290 image and summary. Then on the right you have the three posts after that with a thumbnail image - these are pulled in by assigning every post to the General category and then setting offset as 1 (this tells the template to pull in the second post and on through the loop).

Under the thumbnails you get to see the next five posts but without the thumbnail.

Then I have other items - the second item on the left hand menu pulls a post from the Homepage category, under that I have a poll and under that I pull a post from the Photos category.

Back to the middle column - you’ve got posts assigned to the Tech category (without thumbnails) posts assigned to Media (with thumbnails) and the most recent three ‘photo’ posts.

More it could do

But this is all just scratching the service stuff - it’s turning my ordinary blog into a slightly more in depth blog - it’s also encouraged me to post a LOT more than I would before.

However there is a LOT more you could do and the main reason is the wonderful Custom Fields in Wordpress - they mean you can set and define ANYTHING.

You could use the Custom Fields to define audio/video links that could then be displayed on the right hand menu of the post page itself - it could geo IP info and a Google map for the location of the post - or all sorts of other things from the parts of a car used (say writing a website about cars) to the ingredients used in a recipe.

I occasionally get asked to create websites for friends, organisations and charities - I don’t do it very often as I don’t have time but when I do it tends to either be a static site that they need to use Dreamweaver to update or a very simple dynamic site with a CMS I’ve built myself with minimal options.

In future I’m going to use Wordpress as the backend and just write a quick user guide for the people using it.

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