WordPress as CMS?

Yes, you can do it, and there are so many plug-ins, I have no idea where to start with recommendations. My advice on that subject is to make yourself a cuppa whatever, and spend some time browsing the plug-ins pages.

I’m no techie, but you can take a look at https://pacificmartialartsconference.com and https://lifelovefood.com to see how I’ve used it as a CMS. I love wordpress ??

One thing that will help is to think about what things will count as pages and what will count as posts. That is, what information will be best organized according to categories and tags, and what will be static, and will be navigated in a more straight-forward manner.

Best of luck to you.

Angela

Yes, to a large degree, but you’ll probably have to devote time to finding the right plug-ins (and this can be exhausting if you’re looking for a specific function — not all of the most useful plugins are in the WordPress extend repository, and some of the plugins in the repository are no longer supported by their creators), and you’ll have to learn how to customize WordPress to suit your needs.

The great power of WordPress is also its weakness — because it is open-source, free and popular, there are many, many developers introducing new useful functions. But very few actually make any money doing this — they do it out of passion for the application, or to create a function that they themselves wanted. As a result, plugins may become outdated from lack of support, may be buggy, may conflict with other plugins.

On the other hand, you’d pay a lot of money for someone to custom-design new functions for a commercial CMS.

Anyway, yes, you can do it, and it’s a very flexible and powerful program, but be prepared to spend time on it, depending on how much your needs differ from the “out-of-the-box” application.

My advice is to set up a test blog with WP, and see if you can get it to do what you need. Then you’ll have a better idea of how much time you may have to invest in tweaking it.

The other thing you should be aware of is that WP puts out new versions frequently, and these new versions can break your old plugins and customizations. So always backup your old database and installation files before installing a new version.

Good luck — I love WordPress, and personally think that WP has the potential to become the best open-source CMS available.

Yes, you can do this (and seeing how my own business is flourishing by using WP specifically for this purpose, I think I know what I’m saying). In fact I did a site for my local Newcomer’s Club that’s a lot like this.

Definitely want Spam Karma and/or Bad Behavior for the site (If you so choose, Bad Behavior should replace Akismet, all three shouldn’t be loaded up together.) There’s tons of gallery plugins for you to pick and choose from. Widgetize Anything is always an excellent choice to use. With the tagging system, I’ve found that creating a Newletter is very easy – just use the tags to separate things into month/year items, and use the Event Calendar. GamerZ has an awesome plugin – wp_print- that makes printing a piece of cake. I did my own custom “scraping” thing because a lot of the local news sites don’t have a feed(?!?), but if yours does, you can skim content form your local area and have the feed plugin in “Recent news” content into the index page.

Those are some ideas for starters!

Thanks for your excellent replies. I have used wordpress for a few things on my sites in the past but Ive never used it for a full site before. Just knowing that others have done it and suceeded gives me the motivation to go for it.

Ill keep you posted on how it goes

Glennk

Even I cant tell you to do that Im sure you can use wordpress as CMS.

Take a look into https://milenio.com one of the most important newspaper in Mexico and you can see it is made on wordpress. Its amazing what does this guys do in the online version of the newspaper.

So, yes, If you have time and hability, you can use as CMS

Right now I’m making website for my client and using the WordPress as CMS. I know it’s possible to use WordPress as CMS and I’ve used it many times. But it can be also very frustrating as in my case right now. I have designed full website by using html and css. I didn’t want make WordPress template right away because it takes lot’s more time to fix things if there is something my client wants to change. Changes are easier to make to HTML-/CSS-version. My client has now approved it and now I making it run on WordPress. The one simple thing that makes the whole thing REALLY REALLY (!) frustrating is the WYSIWYG editor’s habit to erase codes and change the coding. I have to struggle for hours to have even one page to look like it is in my approved html-/css-version.

I’ve read many topics about this problem and there is always someone saying “if you want to code, don’t use WYSIWYG-editor”. I should turn off visual editor so to speak.

Ok. Let’s assume I turn it off. Then it works perfectly, I can’t deny it. I just copy/paste the code and that’s it. But then, after I have installed the whole site and its running I have to give the controls to my client who doesn’t know HTML and CSS and needs to use the WYSIWYG editor. And there is The Problem. When I first time teach my client how to update his website and I open the WYSIWYG-editor, the whole site is ruined. All the coding changes and website doesn’t look like it’s suppose to look. And my client doesn’t understand it. He just thinks I can’t do my stuff and I’m pretty sure he isn’t happy with the results.

This is mainly why I’m trying to find some other CMS.

In nutshell – if you’re planning to make the website just by using some already-made templates and you don’t need to be very specific on how the website looks eventually, then the WordPress will propably suit you just fine.

But if you have to do it in my way (making it first html/css and then implementing it to WordPress), don’t bother. Try to find some other CMS which actually respects your coding.

I just found this cool theme which seems to be designed to make wordpress into a cms. I’m excited about playing with it.
https://themes.wordpress.net/columns/2-columns/3540/drikatruu-jelly-11w/

I see your problem maisteriharju. However I am familiar with html and css and will write posts via the code part of the text editor. Simple H1, h2 and P will do the trick. The template itself will make the site look how it should. I do understand your frustration with handing the site over to someone who dont understand html.

I think you’ll love this article:
https://pressingpixels.com/completing-the-cms-with-wordpress/

Re: handing the site over to the client with a visual editor, but worried about editor messing up your html — have you tried installing a different editor? There’s a few of them — I’ve been pretty satisfied with Tiny MCE Advanced, which lets you customize the editor. It has nearly every editor function you might want for a client, and you can arrange the buttons and choose which functions to include — so I deliberately do not include buttons I don’t want the client to use, such as tables or fonts.

You can also use Role-Manager to suppress the ability of the client to mess around with certain WP functions — I usually assign them a level below Administrator to suppress most of the things I don’t want them messing with (theme, for example), but I also give them the privilege of being able to self-upgrade to administrator if they so choose.

Many clients like this because they prefer to have their functions limited to what they will actually use, and not worry about screwing up the website.

DeMurph: That’s a great link — very cool plugins there for CMS purposes. I myself use Dagon Design form mailer all the time.

(I personally think Dagon Design makes very useful, flexible, and well-thought out plugins. One of the plugin authors that I’ve actually donated some money to.)

Yeah, that’s odd that allowing the client to use the WYSIWYG editor messes up your entire site. I’ve never seen that happen before. I always do my sites in XHTML/CSS (like you have) and then cut it over into a WP theme. I’ve never had the client using a WYSIWYG editor mess up the site’s layout – not unless the client does something really weird (thus, it’s their fault). But then again, most times I try to avoid the usage of the WYSIWYG editor – I just create my own quicktags. but if they choose to use it, that’s their perogative – the site shouldn’t break because of it (I’ve never had that happen before.)

Do any of you guys know of a good review site plugin ? I have been using the dan Grossman one but of late its malfunctioning.

You could try this one https://www.sourcebench.com/toolbox/sb_review-wordpress-review-plugin/
although i haven’t been able to get it to work.

I have been using WordPress as a CMS for some time now to build small-scale customer websites. It works great and has the added benefit of WordPress’ great SEO. With some serious tweaking, a few plugins and a completely customized theme, you can make a WordPress blog look like whatever you want. I’ll post some links once I launch the latest sites but for now you can read about it on my blog:

https://blog.pinkandyellow.com/category/wordpress-as-cms/