First and foremost, as discussed before, WordPress may be “blogging software” on the surface, but by using it as a Content Management System, you can run an entire website using WordPress, allowing for easy updates anywhere that you have an Internet connection.

It’s important to note that while WordPress is fairly autonomous once it has been setup, it’s just as important to keep up to date should you use WordPress, so that you have the latest features and security measures. Luckily, WordPress has made this even easier

Automatic Upgrades

One added feature in WordPress 2.7.0 (the current version is 2.7.1) is automatic upgrading. As this suggests, you can now upgrade with a few clicks through your administration panel. This makes upgrading a snap and allows the process to happen in about 30 seconds.

Automatic upgrading should eliminate any concerns you may have about using an application such as WordPress to run an entire website. You have complete control right down to the templates. You can easily design your own theme using CSS, and of course you can include your own graphics. You can make changes through the administration panel, or manually upload files.

Conclusion

With all these features in place, why not use WordPress? Here at Adakist we’re always glad to integrate our designs into WordPress so that you can more easily manage your website.

For example, you can set it up so that your website looks like this:
www.domain.com/blog
www.domain.com/news

It’s really quite easy to use WordPress to build a website, and the best part is that if done correctly,  it won’t be obvious that you’re using blogging software.

Plugins

But that’s only half the beauty of WordPress.  With the recent release of version 2.7, you can automatically add “plugins”, which offer additional functionality.  In previous versions, you’d have to download the plugin, and then upload the files to your server.  All that is a thing of the past.  Now, what can plugins do for you?  Pretty much anything.

You can browse through the available plugins in the “Plugins” section of the administration panel.  You’ll find plugins that provide mail forms (cforms is perhaps one of the most versatile and popular plugins for that), a way to display the number of views an article has had, you can show recent comments, and you can even integrate your blog/website with your Twitter page.

Do you want statistics?  No problem!  There are numerous plugins available for that as well.  With plugins such as StatPress, combined with WP-UserOnline, you can know exactly who is on your website and what they are doing minute by minute.  This can provide valuable feedback as to what’s working and what is not working on your website.

Numerous Advantages

There are hundreds of plugins just waiting to be tried out.  That, combined with the ability to design your own theme, or use one of the numerous themes that are available on the WordPress website, makes WordPress a versatile, popular, and easy to work with choice.

One of the obvious beauties of using this method to run a website is the fact that you can update pages and post blog entries from anywhere with an Internet connection.  You can also start a blog entry from work, for example, and then save it as being under “review”, only to finish it at home.

Using WordPress offers numerous advantages over the “old school” methods of designing and maintaining a website, and considering that the software is strongly supported and very much under development, one needn’t worry about the company, Automattic, disappearing, which is a nightmare for any web designer.

The latest major version of WordPress, v2.5, has really made it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system with new features like setting a “page” to be the home page of a site, rather than a list of blog entries. I’ve been amazed at how easy it has been to convert my entire website to run on WordPress.

How to Set it Up

It’s really quite simple to start using WordPress as a CMS. First, you will probably want to create your own design/theme for WordPress. With its simple theming system, it’s very easy to integrate an existing, static design or template into the WordPress theming engine.

Next, you’re going to have to create your content pages. This is easily done in WordPress by writing “Pages” (rather than “Posts”).

The last major step in using WordPress as a CMS is to tweak the settings a bit. In the settings, you’re going to need to have the front page display a “static” page. You can then choose which page (of the ones you created in the previous step) you want displayed as the home page, then you can choose another page which you want to be replaced with the “Loop” (list of recent WordPress posts), which is typically displayed on the homepage of a blog.

Shortcomings

Of course, using WordPress as a CMS is not without a few, minor downfalls. There’s no built in support for using PHP, which would put off some people from using a CMS right away. In fact, I almost didn’t use it because of this reason… but fear not! You can easily add PHP to your pages a few ways… the first method is to create a new template page with the PHP in it, then create a content page and have it use the new template file rather than the default page template. This method is kind of hack-ish because you’re using templates in a way they weren’t really intended (or were they?). The second method to add PHP to your pages is to install this little, handy WordPress plugin (plugins make nearly everything possible with WordPress!) called Exec-PHP. With this plugin installed and enabled, you can add PHP code using the standard PHP tags (<?php…) to add PHP to your content pages. Easy!

Conclusion

WordPress offers a comparatively light-weight solution to replace existing, bulky CMSs and upgrade currently static websites to easily-managed dynamic websites. With it’s powerful plugin and templating engines, its really easy to customize WordPress to make it work for your website. I’m beginning to use WordPress when developing new sites because it makes it so much more easier to update pages in the future and make small changes without having to search for the page’s file, edit it, and re-FTP it to the website. And with WordPress, you don’t have to worry about templating and making header and footer files as the templating is built in, and it works very well!