Using WordPress As A Full Fledged CMS

[Jeffro]

Inspired by Brad's recent post regarding WordPress as a CMS, I thought I'd start a thread for everyone to post not only their ideas, but actual websites in use where WordPress is being used as a full blown content management site. I'm looking for a list of plugins and techniques in order to make this happen.

I'll start things off by mentioning the Pods plugin http://pods.uproot.us/ which enables you to create new content types, configure exactly which and how content types are displayed, and more.

[williamsba]

Kel from BadCat.com wrote a nice article on using WordPress as a CMS:
WordPress as a CMS : Journal : BadCat Design

He has links to the better plugins at the bottom that help achieve this. Custom Fields Template is my favorite of the group.

[flick]

Thanks for the link, williamsba :) It's a very nice writeup!

I just wanted to throw in a historical link for "Custom Fields Template"; the author has already credited this but I thought it important to highlight that the original plugin was developed by Joshua of Rhymed Code and was initially called "Custom Field GUI", although he was working on an updated version with an even more powerful interface called "Custom Write Panel".

It worked well up to around WP 2.1 or 2.2, but sadly development stopped, although one or two people did provide workarounds in the forum.

Back to the original topic. One of my most favourite plugins is Page Links To by Mark Jaquith

It is a very 'simple' plugin that allows the admin to create a page for the navigation that links to another site or even categories. There are probably a number of other plugins that offer the same functionality, but this has been around for a while and does exactly what it says on the tin without all the extra frills and bloat. Exceptionally useful in an understated way imho.

[Kim]

+10 for the Page Links To plugin - I also use that one for a few sites.

A few plugins I use when developing a site are:

Page Link Manager by Garrett Murphy
- Easily pick which pages are included in the site navigation

Page Menu Editor by Sarah
- Customize the title attribute and menu label of each page link in wp_list_pages. WordPress doesn't allow for specifying a title attribute to the page links. Meaningful title attributes can give an expanded description of what the visitor will see when going to that page.

Simply Exclude by Paul Menard
- Allows you to selectively exclude/include categories, tags and page from the 4 actions used by WordPress: is_front, is_archive, is_search, is_feed.

[itsananderson]

I use My Page Order for the CMS site I help manage. I think every CMS site based on WordPress should have it installed.

Thanks for the plugins you posted Kim. I'm not currently using them, but probably will in the future.

Jeff, I've seen a similar plugin, but it didn't work! I'll be checking out pods to see if it's any better.

[conorp]

Here is a few links to articles I found helpful- Some are a bit dated:
From Weblog to CMS with WordPress | O'Reilly Media
Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins | Chicago Web Design
Five Wordpress “CMS Enabling” Plugins Andy Peatling on WordPress
Wordpress CMS Blog - Use Wordpress to Build CMS Sites
10 Great Website Designs Using Wordpress As CMS | Custom Wordpress Theme Design
10 plugins that will make WordPress into a CMS | Wordpress Garage

[patrickd88]

I wrestled with the whole WordPress as CMS problem on this blog post: I'm The Mike Brady Of Web Design.

In the end, I feel it's fine if it fits the bill. I don't use any specific plugins (although the above may come in handy). I've just changed the landing page to a specific 'home page'. If this will cause weird problems, I'd love to hear them. Given the site I set this up on had a very basic design and didn't need a huge amount of special anything, so really pages were all that was needed. For a more complex site, I'm sure the elements get trickier.

[Laurens]

It has taken me over a year to more or less get to a WordPress set-up that handles the 400 static pages of my site the way I wanted. Some of the plug-ins that I use were already listed by others. A full overview is available in this summary.

What is still missing is an easy way to navigate those pages in the administrator panel. I would also love to be able to sort pages on their modification date, to update older stuff.

What surprised me the most is that the WordPress core seems to lack a function to search for bad links. Am I really the only one that struggles with pages that get moved or disappear?

[Jeffro]

As I've seen described in a wp-hackers mailing list one time, WordPress Pages have developed at sort of an afterthought as they don't provide the same flexibility as posts do. What has it been like for you to use pages instead of posts? Is it any different?

[andrea_r]

Am I really the only one that struggles with pages that get moved or disappear?

If you're hardcoding links to them in your template or posts (or other pages, then yes - moving them around in the backend will break the links.

There's a broken link checker in the plugin repository.