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!