Professional WordPress: Design and Development, 3rd Edition

15 WordPress in the Real World

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 shopping carts
• Considering real-world challenges and how to address them with WordPress

In the real world, WordPress is generally used as the base for websites because of its extensive CMS capabilities. However, as you saw in the last chapter, WordPress can be so much more. 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 focuses on traditional 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.

IS WORDPRESS THE RIGHT TOOL?

When is WordPress the right tool for the job? Making ...