Professional WordPress: Design and Development, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14

WordPress as a Content Management System

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Examining content management system tasks that are easily performed with WordPress
• Configuring WordPress to handle more complex content organization and display
• Integrating interaction vehicles such as forms, e-mail, and carts

Using WordPress as a content management system (CMS) seems to come up every month on the web. Run that phrase through a search engine and you will see countless results on the whys, why nots, and hows. It seems that WordPress is trapped with the stigma of being “only” a blogging engine when, as you have discovered by now, it is so much more. Since the first edition of this book, this topic and discussion around it have grown. WordPress is no longer pigeonholed in the “blog engine” space as it once was.

This chapter defines content management from the perspective of a WordPress system, looks at the major functional areas associated with a CMS, shows you how to implement them via WordPress, and finally points out some areas where WordPress, despite its flexibility and simplicity, is potentially not the best tool for the task.

DEFINING CONTENT MANAGEMENT

“Content management” has become hard to precisely define because it has been applied to a wide array of software tools and systems. On one end of the spectrum you have wikis, with explicit, multi-author editing and version control, but almost no page organization, navigation, or display mechanics. At the other extreme are commercial ...