I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

Richard Miller presented on “Using WordPress as a CMS” at Wordcamp Utah today.

Richard works for the More Good Foundation, whose mission is to help LDS church members share their beliefs online. The More Good Foundation has migrated 40+ websites from Dreamweaver to WordPress, and now manages 150 WordPress sites. In addition to his work with the More Good Foundation, Richard is also the author of the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin.

Richard says a CMS (content management system) provides separation of code and content, and allows non-technical users to publish and update the content. The More Good Foundation chose WordPress rather than Drupal or Joomla because WordPress is easy to use, extensible, and has an excellent community.

When using WordPress as a CMS, one of the biggest questions you face is whether to use pages or posts for your content. Pages provide parent/child hierarchies, but don’t provide RSS or offline publishing. Posts appear in chronological order (which you can tweak), but don’t provide hierarchical arrangement. You can, however, organize the post categories into hierarchies.

Richard showed some examples of WordPress CMS sites:

• bookofmormonresearch.org
• blacklds.org
• mountainmeadowsmassacre.org
• Mormonsbelieve.org
• Mormonbloggers.com
• Askgramps.org
• andyroddick.com
• autoshows.ford.com
• particletree.com
• allthingsD.com
• ethosmarketing.co.uk
• mouseonhome.com

There’s no set way to use WordPress as a CMS. You can use all posts, all pages, or a mix of the two. Here’s another list of sites using WordPress as a CMS.

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Tags: content management systems, More Good Foundation, richard miller, WordPress as CMS

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