See http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy

Once you have the home.php in place, you may do pretty much whatever you please and fully customize your WordPress to act as CMS.

Thanks,
Emil

Just started building a WP based site (in the sandbox atm) & wanted CMS structure on the front end with blogging capabilities, you showed me how.

Heart-felt thanks.

Its a Killer CMS actually , better than the available ones !

This was a good day for me !

Thank you again
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The article on creating multiple dynamic sidebars has now moved to:

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2007/11/how-to-create-multiple-dynamic-sidebars-for-wordpress-widgets/

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That only happens on headers that are note the header default.

Any help will be really appreciated

@henri – I’m using the “Tabbed Widgets” plugin (yes, it’s compatible with 2.7).

As for the “About Me / Skills / Contact” info below, that is all hard-coded into the footer.php file. Although I saw a post somewhere showing how to set that up as if it were a sidebar so that you could edit the content as a widget. (Sorry I don’t remember where the article was, though…)

Thanks!

I look forward to seeing more from you.

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Great information you have provided. I have just finished a project consulting with this information. Thank you.

I have a problem, I could not be able to find how to highlight parent page link inside navigation while viewing the sub page of the parent.
Please help how can i do this.

Your help will be much appreciated.

Once again, thank you very much
iShafaat
http://tinyurl.com/8xrdwo

anapat

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So not only the best blogging platform but quite possibly one of the top CMS’.

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Great post about using Wordpress as CMS…

Regards,

Wordpress is, indeed, flexible enough to be adapted to almost anything with enough mods and tweaking. But the problem with any CMS is that when someone becomes enamored with one, they start to believe that it’s omniscient and always better than anything else. And that’s very much not the case.

A very quick example would be that setting up multiple templates in MODx is much easier and more flexible than WP, and customized menu generation is more flexible and easier. Yet WP crushes MODx on plugin updating, form creation, etc. The right tool for the job, as it were.

It’s easy to see why this happens. Apart from emotional attachment to something one likes, after spending a lot of time with a system, the thought of learning still more can be annoying. And if you’re part of some large IT department, they will resist change, even for the better, because it’s just too big a deal to do so.

(There’s also a link to an article I wrote in an earlier comment on this post).

Hope that helps!
-Josh

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Thanks

@Josh – thanks for providing your links! Your articles both seem to be good resources with additional detailed information – thanks for sharing!

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@Dragon – I don’t know of a specific tutorial offhand, but I’m sure a google search will give you some great ones (it’s a matter of weeding out the good vs not so good ones, lol).

To start with, though – I’d suggest going straight to the source with the WordPress codex site. A few helpful links on their site…

- WordPress Template Tags
- WordPress Lessons
- Designing WordPress Headers
- Stepping Into WordPress Templates

Just a few, but those might help get you started…

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Nice work on the category page templates that was new to me.

It’s a killer compilation

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Where would you suggest I go for a quick tutorial on editing static content in WP like the header or footer PHP includes? Or even changing the layout of the page to accommodate my existing design (which is not in WP)?

I myself got stuck several times trying to figure out how to accomplish a few of the things I wanted to do, so hopefully this post helps save some frustrations when you are developing your own sites, too!

Anyway, thank you all for the love on this post – I got a lot of social votes and bookmarks from this one (even more than my previous “popular” post “6 Phases of the Web Design / Development Process”

@Kevin – Sorry you feel that way about the light / dark. I am aware of the issues of reverse text. But with this being my own personal site, I decided to take a calculated risk – something I can’t usually do with client web sites (unless it’s something they want to do, as well).

The number of people who take issue with the lighter text is very low in comparison to the number of people who don’t mind it, so so far, so good… Most of my previous personal site designs were dark text on a lighter background. This time around I wanted something much more edgy. Black is great for portfolio sites, too…

Also I went with light grey text as opposed to white text because it was much less jarring on the eye. I started with white text, but felt the contrast was too much on the eyes for this amount of text, so light grey won out… I don’t think the green links are hard to read, but it’s all personal opinion.

@Jonny K – I literally LOL’d at your comment. Thank you (for not loving me in a weird stalker-guy way!) ha ha

@JamieO – Thank you for posting your plugin link! If only I had known, it would have saved me quite a bit of time, lol.

@franky j – I haven’t used cushycms (though have heard of it). WordPress is used so widely that I wanted to continue to utilize it. I already use it for this blog, but decided that as I’m now focusing more on offering WordPress custom theme design and development to clients, that I would convert my static html web site to utilize the same platform, as well. Since this was for my own site, I was able to spend as much time as I wanted to learn some new techniques (putting it on my own dime, so to speak…) – you don’t always have that luxury with client projects. I’d call it a self-learning educational project so to speak…

@wasser – You mention that cushycms is a hosted solution – then yes, I wouldn’t have wanted to switch my web hosting to another company either. Too much hassle when I have several databases setup here, etc. (I’m happy with my web host, lol).

@ornob – There are several plugins that do a great job of integrating photos for a portfolio (or other) type of image gallery. On my own Portfolio I use the Slimbox Plugin. Another great (and even better) gallery plugin is NexGEN Gallery which I use on another personal blog. That one is the most comprehensive that I’ve used and will likely integrate it into my portfolio at some point, as well. If you have a Flickr account, Flickr Photo Gallery plugin is a good one too (you can see that one in action on my recent vacation post displaying photos of the US Virgin Islands

@Bill – thanks for the plugin recommendations! I use Feedburner Feedsmith (very helpful to track all of your subscriptions!). The Simply Exclude sounds great, too – I use a variation of that (which is probably more complex?) as I have the Google XML Sitemap plugin, however you have to manually enter in post/page ID numbers in order to exclude it from the sitemap. I’ve also installed All In One SEO Pack which handles all of your meta tags (I admit it’s a recent installation for me, though, so I still have to actually start using it to it’s full potential!

A note on the plugins… I’ve got a massive list of plugins and other tweaks, etc. that I will be writing about soon (I’ve been promising this one to people for months – lets see if I can’t finally get it published within the next couple of weeks, LOL)

@Manuel Viloria – The redirecting of the categories just came from me being anal retentive and overly controling, I guess, LOL. Even if I don’t list a link to the categories, I’m sure those versed in WP can easily type in the url and get a dis-organized list of posts, etc. I went with the redirection to help control it a bit, and send them to the page I want them to see (where posts are in the order I setup). The SEO “duplicate content” issue is an added bonus!

@Gesnok – Apologies for the grey on black text – that’s one of the “controversial” issues about my site. Most don’t seem to mind, but every once in a while… Anyway, I don’t currently have another version (though would like to work on a theme selection option, where users can select the default light on dark, or a modified dark on light theme…). What I can suggest is that you subscribe to the feed, because through your feed reader you’ll be able to read the post with your feed reader’s default design (which is likely black text on a white background). And just pointing out that I’m not saying that to get more subscribers, LOL – you can unsubscribe if you want, it’s just a way to be able to view the text differently. Also, until publish another post, you should just be able to read this post on the feedburner page without actually subscribing. Just a thought…

@Dragon – I don’t see why you can’t use your existing WP theme with some of the techniques above. There will be a little bit more work, just that you’ll have to create some new php files. But they can certainly be based on your existing files, with whatever changes you wish to implement for each of the individual page/category templates. Good luck if you decide to give it a try! I hope you’re able to get it out by your launch date!

Anyway I am almost done building a site in which users (who are for the most part web illiterate) can register, author and post online articles (usability is a huge consideration). It also has an e-commerce section.

Do you think I could retrofit what I have done (simple 2 column CSS layout with header and footer) with your CMS idea for WP? The online WYSIWYG editor and CMS functionality are obvious pluses. This would be SO much better. Any issues that may prevent something like that from being done with WP? Don’t want to postpone the launch date and start down a road that I find out later I can not use due to some unforeseen limitation.

Thanks again for a great article. You are sparking many ideas.

nice blog cheers!

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I’d left WP a years back (when it got spammed constantly) in favour of Textpattern but TP just isn’t any good for clients to use if I’m honest.

With the 2.5+ versions out I’ve come back to the fold and was literally talking about the feasibility of WP as a CMS yesterday with peeps.

Your article has addressed my main concerns and though I don’t speak PHP (didnt know html when I started using that though either) I know I can offer this as a good and not just workable solution.

I’m intrigued by your approach of redirecting Category pages to written Pages. I don’t see too many WP bloggers doing that. I like it because it’s also a good way to address the “duplicate content” issue.

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