WordPress as CMS

Ok, so in addition to the Moosecamp session “Wordpress Anonymous” on Friday (depending on interest) and the “Don’t Call it a Blog, call it an Educational Publishing Platform” on Saturday, Lloyd Budd recently facebooked me asking if I would “lead” a small group for issues and questions about using WordPress as a CMS (I’m trying to rope D’Arcy in as well). I’m pretty excited about the opportunity —mainly because it’s what I do anyway. And even though metamedia makes a strong case that WordPress is not yet a CMS, the fact that the WordPress community members keep on pushing the boundaries with various plugins and themes keeps the dream alive and well.

I think the relationship between the core WP application and the user community is often a symbiotic one: the folks at WordPress make a product that is simple, powerful, and eminently hackable, on the other hand the community hacks it, creates plugins, designs themes, and documents their work to death. It becomes quickly apparent that one cannot thrive without the other, and the fact that I’m even thinking about making WordPress do something it “shouldn’t” speaks volumes about the community that pushes the boundaries and the core application developers who keep it relatively spartan to allow for such communal imaginings.

All this to say that I have been on a scavenger hunt to collect all the best plugins and themes for creating a WordPress powered CMS for a while now, and I have the perfect opportunity to start documenting and demonstrating these tools on a blog within my WPMuEd domain shortly.

But until then, below is a list of some of my del.icio.us bookmarks that link to numerous posts and tutorials for using WordPress as a CMS. The del.icio.us tags I am pulling in to compile the list below are the following, in case you are interested: wpcms (general), wpcms_plugins, wpcms_themes.

Also, I would appreciate any and all resources you may collected during your own search as I try and make a somewhat useful resource for folks at NV and beyond.

Delicious/jgroom/wpcms

  1. How To: Using WordPress as a Static Site
    Nice hot-to for getting the most out of this
  2. Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins | Blueprint Design Studio
    For moderately sized sites (including simple e-Commerce sites), WordPress does a pretty good job as a CMS, making it easy to maintain your site, and update your content. The strength of WordPress is the community of developers who have already done almost
  3. WordPressing Dissected: NMC Pachyderm Services ” CogDogBlog
    CogDog gives a play-by=play for how he converted a regular old WP Blog into a dynamic website. Some great stuff here, I particularly like the FAQ-tastic hack
  4. Blogs, Wikis, and New Media
    Blogs, Wikis, and New Media An Experiment in Republishing OpenCourseWare by David Wiley
  5. Revive | Extending Wordpress Beyond the Blog
    The name says it all, how do we think beyond the blog?
  6. Why I Choose WordPress as My CMS ” Lorelle on WordPress
    Lorelle Von Hossen on why she uses WordPress as a CMS
  7. Bos89.nl ” Wordpress as CMS in five steps
    A WordPress CMS theme. Five easy steps to get up and running with WordPress as a CMS
  8. Creating a student journalism website on a tight budget ” Reportr.net
    UBC's journalism school uses WordPress as the core of their multiplatform journalism course. Some good recommendations for approaching this system, with some nice recommendations for plugins.
  9. Graphic Design Blog ” Wordpress as a CMS - Content Management System
    Great post on WordPress as a CMS featuring some excellent example of Gallery sites, e-commerce sites, portfolios, etc. An excellent overview of the possibilities with some excellent recommendations.
  10. ONLamp.com — From Weblog to CMS with WordPress
    An overview of why and how to use WordPress as a CMS by John McCreesh.
  11. Turn Wordpress Into a CMS - OpenSourceCMS
    Tutorial for turning WordPress into a CMS.
  12. Completing the CMS With Wordpress : Pressing Pixels | A Wordpress Magazine
    A magazine powered by WordPress
  13. WP Not a CMS
    While metamedia concludes WP is not a fullblown CMS, there are some excellent suggestions for plugins to help it through these dark times.
  14. WordPress Candy - The Best of WordPress ” The WordPress Help Sheet
    Great helpsheet for Wordpress (and a great site more generally).
  15. WordPress ” Support ” College newspaper site powered by WP
    Awesome example of a college newspaper site using WP -thanks dsforeman

Delicious/jgroom/wpcms_plugins

  1. Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins | Blueprint Design Studio
    For moderately sized sites (including simple e-Commerce sites), WordPress does a pretty good job as a CMS, making it easy to maintain your site, and update your content. The strength of WordPress is the community of developers who have already done almost
  2. Blaze New Media » » Five Wordpress “CMS Enabling” Plugins
    A few key plugins for making your WordPress blog more CMSy. Like Filosofo's Homepage control, the search everything plugin, and more.
  3. Completing the CMS with Wordpress : Josh Byers | My Digital Playground of Fun and Frivolity
    This is a list and descriptions of the plugins and techniques I have used to make Wordpress a very effective and useful content management system for clients.
  4. In Series WordPress Plugin @ REM State
    In Series is a plugin that lets you write series of posts in WordPress, without having to deal with the hassle of manually writing up tables of contents or “next” and “previous” links in each post. It adds a new set of controls to the post editing
  5. Building alexking.org 2.0, part 7: Plugins | alexking.org
    AlexKing takes you through the Plugins he is using in his latest iteration of alexking.org

Delicious/jgroom/wpcms_themes

  1. CMS WordPress theme
    Here is an example of Wordpress theme that has a much more flashy site look, than a blog design.
  2. K2 Theme for WordPress
    Despite my many flirtations, still my favorite theme to work with as a CMS. It has limitations, but it also has an unbelievable amount of options.
  3. Using WordPress as a CMS | Adsense Ready To Go Sites
    A step-by-step approach for creating a simple site using WordPress. Focusing on the theme you use, this article Includes some good hacks for making pages and categories more compliant with CMS standards.
  4. Bos89.nl » Wordpress as CMS in five steps
    A WordPress CMS theme. Five easy steps to get up and running with WordPress as a CMS
  5. Squible » Squible
    This is the home for the Squible Wordpress theme. The purpose of theme (besides putting out something that’s different from the herd) is to promote the use of social networking within Wordpress. How? By including the tag system I built that sits on top
  6. WordPress Theme Hacks
    "In this article, I’m going to share some of my WordPress tricks with you on how to make a better WordPress theme. I’m not a programmer nor developer, so I will focus more on the frontend development."
  7. Theme Playground | The Best WordPress Magazine Themes Available
    Now that blogs are being used by groups of people (be it businesses, organizations, even schools) just as much as they are individuals, WordPress theme designers have felt that need and have created a number of quality magazine–style themes in response.
  8. Kubrick and K2 WordPress Themes: Collection of Theme Tips « Lorelle on WordPress
    A wonderul lists of links to guide one through hacking K2.
  9. Semiologic theme for WordPres
    Semiologic is a pretty comprehensive CMS theme with many, many options built-in.

Update: Looks like the delicious feeds are breaking for some reason, so until I can figure it out here are the three links to the respective delicious tags:

Wordpress as CMS (General)

WordPress CMS-inspired Plugins

WordPress CMS Themes and Theme Hacks

Related posts

6 Responses to “WordPress as CMS”


  1. 1 Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn Feb 12th, 2008 at 1:23 pm

    You knew this was inevitable…How about use Drupal? :)

  2. 2 jimgroom Feb 12th, 2008 at 1:38 pm

    That’s fine if you want to pull your hair out, and given you have more than me, I’ll leave that to you :) Nice to have the Drupal argument still, even if only by way of comments, makes me feel at home.

  3. 3 Bill Fitzgerald Feb 12th, 2008 at 2:40 pm

    Oh, Mr. Groom.

    /me shakes head, then shakes head again.

    This is all I have to say: http://drupal.org/project/wordpress_import

    Help is available.

    Cheers,

    Bill

  4. 4 Jim Feb 12th, 2008 at 2:55 pm

    We’ll have to duke it out in Vancouver. All you Drupal zealots take posts like this so seriously. Touchy, touchy, touchy!

  5. 5 Bill Fitzgerald Feb 13th, 2008 at 5:23 pm

    Hello, Mr. Groom,

    It’s not that we take it seriously. It’s just that we hate to see you working so hard, when the One True Answer lies so tantalizingly close.

    And, btw, that’s cold to call Patrick a Drupal Zealot. Because I know you’re not talking about me :)

    Looking forward to Vancouver as well —

    Cheers,

    Bill

  6. 6 Mike Caulfield Feb 15th, 2008 at 6:58 am

    I’ll add more to your list soon… but i wanted to let you know we have a class here that is using wordpress with Ning on the side for some social media stuff, and it seems to be a nice combo - public blog, private chat and socializing.

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