OK so I've used wordpress for about 5 blogs now and have got quite into using the Starkers theme and starting from scratch and building my designs up to match the styling of the website the blog is associated with, or just creating a normal blog.

 

I've heard a lot here and there and read a bit about using wordpress as a cms but wondered how it's possible.

 

Ok so you can create custom pages, but how do you control the content that appears on these pages in the wysiwyg editor? say you've got a custom page that required a left hand column and a right hand column - how do you so this?

 

I'm goign to be creating a site for a client soon which requires a blog that users have to register with in order to access the content. So I was thinking of creating a normal HTML site and using cushyCMS for the client to be able to edit the text on the main site pages and then doing the blog in wordpress. But now I'm thinking, maybe I do the entire site in wordpress. I just don't know how you would go about that as I've only used wordpress for blogging.

 

I can't find any decent articles online that go into this in any great depth, everything I find is just a mish mash of what I've just read on another site etc...

 

Does anyone know of any good hardcore tutorials / articles that go into this topic in greater detail.

 

Thanks

 

E

Hey, I am looking for exactly the same thing as you.

 

I found this, some pretty good video tutorials here, but I wanted to learn more about Wordpress as a CMS.

 

Help would be appreciated.

Ah I should've checked Chris Coyier's site - it was his video tutorials that introduced me to the starkers theme and starting a theme design from scratch - got a feeling that'll be good, so loading that at the moment.

 

Apparenty moo.com is a wordpress cms site - HOW?

Just watched the Chris Coyier video and didn't learn anything from it to be honest apart from that he's using WP as a CMS but I guess he's the one editing and adding the content as he's dealing with the code all the time...not so good for handing over to a client to do themselves.

this is a good read, but doesn't really answer my questions...

just found this which looks useful, but not got time to read it tonight.

http://www.idesignstudios.com/blog/web-des...rdpress-as-cms/

If you find a solution I'd love to hear it as I've been wondering this myself... feel a bit limited with just a sidebar and main content div... hmm.

I've come across the same problems, and I don't believe wordpress is made for the individual pages, that template is kind of stuck?

Ok so you can create custom pages, but how do you control the content that appears on these pages in the wysiwyg editor? say you've got a custom page that required a left hand column and a right hand column - how do you so this?

 

http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages - scroll down to the "Page Templates" heading.

 

You can create custom page templates which override the default page.php content.

You don't have to limit yourself to wordpress' sidebar, you can include whatever components you want, where WP falls down is in the creation of custom fields. I'd highly recommend checking out Expression Engine if you want more freedom of layout and functionality.

@eskymo - do you get the feeling that you're banging your head against a brick wall on this one? What you're trying to do is mold a blogging system into a CMS - WP is probably able to do what you want with some hacking but you should have more success with a known CMS like ExpressionEngine as sunwukung said as it will do most stuff out of the box.

Sam G - I've read that a million times - doesn't help me one bit and the part underneath about using Wp as a CMS is even less helpful as all it goes on about is how to make a page the front page - which isn't rocket science as it's very easy to achieve with the latest version of WP. I want to know how the moo.com site, for example, is a WP CMS site - how do they create all those pasge layouts and have the client easily manage the site without the knowledge of HTML. That's what a CMS is for - I can't understand how you would do this in WP. All searches all on the internet link to the smae kind of content - namely how to make a page the front page. So it's turning into a fruitless search for information on this topic.

 

sunwuking - I don't want to use expression engine - I want to use wordpress otherwise I would have asked a general question about CMS not one specific to WP.

I want to know how the moo.com site, for example, is a WP CMS site - how do they create all those pasge layouts and have the client easily manage the site without the knowledge of HTML.

It looks like only the blog is powered by WP - the rest of it looks custom written.

 

sunwuking - I don't want to use expression engine - I want to use wordpress otherwise I would have asked a general question about CMS not one specific to WP.

Fair enough

Sam G - I've read that a million times - doesn't help me one bit and the part underneath about using Wp as a CMS is even less helpful

 

Basically, if you have some pages that need to look a different way to the default look in the page.php template file for your theme, all you need to do create copies of the page.php file and give them different filenames. So for example you may have the following files:

 

page.php = default page layout

page_2_col.php = page layout with two columns in the main section

page_3_col.php = page layout with three columns in the main section

 

You then customise the copies so that the page looks basically like however you want it to look, just make sure that you have the get_header() function at the top of the PHP file and get_footer() at the bottom:

 

 

Once you have done your template changes:

 

Toward the bottom of the Write > Page administration panel (or on the sidebar, depending on which version of WordPress you are using) is a drop-down labeled "Page Template." From there you can select which Template will be used when displaying this particular Page.

 

Here's a screenshot to show you where to select the page template:

 

 

So as you see, all you need to do is create the template files and then your client can apply whatever page templates they want to each page without having to do any PHP coding.

Oh awesome! Thanks for that solution, will definitely try that out.

So say I want to have a custom page with a three column layout and I want a client to be able to edit the content using wordpress - they don't do HTML and I don't want them to be able to mess with the code either - what do they see if the WYSIWYG editor? How do they edit the content in the thre columns?

Well the content of any page/post gets captured for use in a template tag called the_content().

 

If you want the client to be able to edit only say one of the three columns, write the HTML yourself in the template page and place the_content() inside whichever column they are allowed to edit.

 

If you want the client to be able to edit any column, then the only solution I can think of is to perhaps install the TinyMCE Advanced plugin and then they will be able to create a table which they can then populate themselves.

 

If you are feeling adventurous, you could write a plugin so that for example you have the layout already set out in the custom template file, and all they would need to do is enclose the content of the three columns in shortcodes.

 

For example:

 

[column-one]
my content for column one goes here
[/column-one]

[column-two]
my content for column one goes here
[/column-two]

[column-three]
my content for column three goes here
[/column-three]

 

Then when they save the page, your plugin will capture the content wrapped in each shortcode and display it in the appropriate columns at run time.