Content Management Systems have taken off massively in the last 2 – 3 years. I suppose the reason for this is that more and more stuff is being published on the web, but the number of people that have ability to do this is far smaller than the amount of information or number of people that want to publish stuff.
So why does a content management system help? Well the idea behind a content management system is that the user need know nothing about publishing on the web, in fact all they need to know is how to type in order to publish their information. Alright, I agree there are one or two things that they need to know such as creating links, adding images etc. but all this is done far easier in a CMS than when coding from scratch. The content management system allows anyone to manage content and publish it on the web.
So what software can be used in order to produce a content management system. There are several systems out their but for me I always use WordPress. Many people would ask why, since WordPress is traditionally a blogging software, and maybe they are right, but until someone can convince me otherwise I am sticking with WordPress. I use WordPress because:
Its easy to grasp: you can really learn the basics of writing pages and posts in a matter of days
- Pages: WordPress was one of the first ‘blogging’ platforms to use pages which allows you to write pages in a parent, child method
- Include a blog: even though you are using WordPress as a CMS, many sites these days will want a ‘News’ section and therefore why not take advantage of what WordPress was built for – blogging which is what a news section basically is
- Custom Fields: WordPress’ custom fields enable me to display content in a way that other systems don’t. By using custom field with both pages and posts I can display information other than what I write or display in the content of a post or page. They provide real flexibility within WordPress.
I will write more about Custom Fields in an up and coming article, so watch this space.
When using WordPress as a content management system it is best to keep your static content as pages. By this I mean pages that are written about a particular topic and do not need a data stamp and time that they were written. The page content itself may well change but the actual page itself stays in the same place all the time. Also when writing pages think about what structure/navigation you are going to want to use. You will need to take advantage of WordPress’ parent and child pages in order to get WordPress to automatically add pages that you create to your sites navigation. For example you may have a page of a site called ‘Services’ if you were a Security firm for example. Your company may well offer several services and therefore you would write pages that are child pages to the services page that outline all the services that you offer. With the correct coding in your template files you can allow WordPress to list all the child pages of the Services page when you are viewing the Services page. This makes navigation for your visitors much easier and it also makes publish pages easier as nothing needs to be added apart from the new page in order to get the page to appear on the site.
In terms of getting a News section on the site I would recommend that you create a ‘Home’ page and then set that to display as your WordPress homepage in the settings section. Then create News page and set that to display as your blog posts in the settings section of the dashboard. That way you can still use categories etc when writing news as well as tags.
I hope that has given you a little insight into using WordPress as a content management system and please check back for more posts in the coming weeks. You can view some of the site that I have created using WordPress as a CMS in the Portfolio of Equal Design.
Tags: cms, design, developer, internet, websites
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