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.

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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

This entry was posted in plugins, themes, widgets, WordPress, wordpress multi-user, wpmu and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

6 Responses to WordPress as CMS

  1. You knew this was inevitable…How about use Drupal? 🙂

  2. jimgroom says:

    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. 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. Jim says:

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

  5. 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. Mike Caulfield says:

    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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