Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, 3rd Edition

Chapter 9: Using WordPress As a CMS

CMS is short for content management system — simply put, a way to manage content. You use a CMS to write, edit, and manage your work online, usually by storing content in a database or in files. This is a lot more convenient than editing files or updating the database directly, which was the way the web used to be managed.

Although WordPress started life as a blogging platform, it has over time become a powerful and versatile CMS in its own right. This chapter tackles the challenges you face and the decisions you need to make when you want to use WordPress as a more traditional CMS, powering nonblog sites with the system. It is not only possible to use WordPress in this way, but it is also a great solution that saves time and money.

Is WordPress the Right Choice for Your CMS?

By now you’ve gathered that WordPress is useful for much more than just blogging (if not, just wait until Chapter 14, “Uncommon WordPress Usage”). Basically, you can do just about anything that involves managing written content, along with other media such as images, sound, and video. I often tell newspaper and magazine publishers that there is no newspaper or magazine site that I couldn’t rebuild in WordPress. Those sites are usually powered by expensive licensed systems, and whereas it was unlikely that anyone would make that claim a couple of years ago, today it is taken seriously. Larger publishing companies are already putting WordPress to good use for their editorial ...