Winnipeg Web Design

WordPress: More than just a blogging platform?

 

Today, I am going to hopefully clear up a topic that I think many people struggle with. All of you have most likely heard the buzz of WordPress, but have only thought of its use for blogging. I have reason to believe it can be used as a content management system for your website.

This idea was brought up Chris Coyier, in his screencast called WordPress as a CMS. A lot of people when they think of CMS systems talk about Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine, etc… but rarely bring up WordPress.

If you have had a chance to use WordPress recently, you know that you can create posts, pages, and even links. You can further divide up posts, and links into categories and pages into subpages. This in itself creates an environment with which to use WordPress to administer your site.

For example:

• Home page – WordPress page
• Events – WordPress posts in the category of “Events”
• Staff – WordPress posts in the category of “Staff”
• Photo Gallery – WordPress “NextGEN” gallery plugin

You can now start to visualize how you can build your site on top of WordPress in order to manage your content.

Another cool feature is that your menu can be dynamic.  When you add a page it is automatically added to the website, and if it is a subpage it gets added as a dropdown menu.  This is done by using the wp_list_pages() function.

The idea of using WordPress as a CMS is a bit strange at first, but really is not much different than thinking of Joomla’s articles, sections, and categories when creating content.  I hope this has opened your eyes to the possibilities of WordPress and if you have any comments, please let me know.