Wordpress as a CMS
- WordPress as a CMS Introduction
- CMS vs. Blog…no you don’t need Pepto Bismol
- Choosing WordPress: “ooo doesn’t she LOOK fine?”
- Choosing WordPress: “She’s got guts”
Here’s the promised first post in a series of articles I am going to write over the next month about the challenges and benefits of using WordPress as a content-management system (CMS).
Now I know that this topic has been covered fairly well already on the blogosphere – I’m not so naive as to think that I’m somehow setting a trend by writing this series! I am writing this series primarily as an excercise of recording for my own benefit some of the problems I ran into and the solutions I came up with in the process of designing a wordpress cms website.
In the course of these articles I’ll be referencing three websites that I’ve designed in the past 6 months as a CMS: vigliottiwoodworking.com, gohpc.net, and unashamedsermons.com. Here are some of the topics I’ll cover:
- CMS vs. a blog – what’s the difference and how to you determine what is used? (among other questions I found myself asking when designing a site around WordPress)
- Challenges that face a developer when using WordPress as a CMS.
- Benefits for using WordPress as a CMS
- Recommended WordPress plugins for WordPress as a CMS. (I’ll also talk about some custom coding (and plugins) I did along the way to aid in the transition.
- Theming a CMS site – designing from scratch vs. modifying an out-of-the-box (and open-source) theme.
- Helpful tools to aid in developing and publishing a WordPress CMS site.
That’s just a few of the topics I’m planning on covering at this point. Of course as I start writing other “branches” may occur to me and I’ll travel down the more interesting ones. If there’s any topics/questions you think of as you read any of these articles – make sure you leave it in the comments and I’ll try to incorporate what you ask in future posts.
Now for the important disclaimer: Although I’ve had the pleasure of dissecting and learning the way WordPress works as I’ve experimented with it over the past half a year I definitely don’t consider myself a WordPress expert! Although these articles may read as “how-to” instructions at times, the reality is that this series is more about chronicling the things I’ve learned than professing any expert understanding of WordPress workings. There’s a good chance that some of the things I write about are actually a hard way of going about doing things and if so, I can only hope that a WordPress “expert” comes along and comments about it so I can learn something more (and make my work a bit more efficient in the process hehe).
By the way…something I’ve found to be true…coding is poetry!
Nice text, and wordpress really is damn fine piece of software.
Great series. I’ve enjoyed reading it and learned several new things from your writings. Thanks for sharing!