templates for simple non-blog site

  • Hi,

    in order to make it easier for different people (a few select members of our association) to modify contents on our website, I am thinking of migrating it to some CMS system, or possibly use WordPress for that purpose.

    The site is https://www.capoeirart.free.fr, and is quite simple in structure. There is a home page, including a row with links to 1st-level categories, and a few announcement (not really blog entries). Each category has sub-categories, it does not currently go beyond level 2 (we might need to seriously redesign the navigation if it did).

    The content is almost entirely static, apart from announcements that might change about once a week. There is no need for advanced access control, one shared user/password would be sufficient.

    We will soon want to add a photo gallery, and possibly a forum later on.

    Is WordPress suitable for this, and how do I best go about it? Are there templates I could use as a basis for this site?

    The documentation of WordPress is a bit confusing to me, as a large part of it is about using it for blogs, not for simple, almost static sites.

    Thanks in advance for any help and pointers,

    Jens

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • wordpress will work for this, a better option depending on the complexity of features needed might be xoops (www.xoops.org). with WP, you’d just need to choose or develop a ‘theme’ and remove the blog-like things you don’t need from the sidebar navigation (pretty simple to do).

    there are many plugins available to handle more CMS like functionality, and additional features such as photo galleries, forms, etc. check out https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/

    Thread Starter grivolla

    (@grivolla)

    Thanks. I really don’t need a whole lot of functions: the simpler, the better.

    I am sure that WordPress is largely sufficient featurewise, but does its blog-oriented nature make editing pages and setting up a template for a simple site more complicated?

    Let’s clarify first the theme issue: we have themes in WP; and themes are built up of several template files. (That’s why talking about templates is confusing many times…)

    The theme defines ONLY the front-end of your site, i.e. what is displayed and how is it displayed. After a site is set up (WP or not) you don’t edit the template files all year around ??

    How you organize your content (all of it is stored in the database, btw) – it’s a matter of using posts in categories, Pages for more static stuff… and so on.

    If it is “complicated” – that’s not from WP being blog-oriented (though it’s true!), but because it is a complex tool. Whether you have a simple display (frontend = theme) or a very sophisticated one – the backend (admin interface) will be always the same.

    Thread Starter grivolla

    (@grivolla)

    Thanks, I am essentially aware of that.

    So, I need to create or modify a theme that would include a template for the front page showing a row of links to 1st-level pages and the announcements, as well as a (very similar) template for those 1st-level pages with an additional column of links to the 2nd level pages.

    Unfortunately, I cannot currently play around with it and test it, because the automatic installation of WP provided by my hoster doesn’t seem to be working.

    What would be a good theme to start with? I saw that PhotoMatt’s page has a partly similar structure…

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • The topic ‘templates for simple non-blog site’ is closed to new replies.