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WordPress Tip: Using WordPress as a CMS -- Wordcamp Utah

by Tom Johnson on Sep 27, 2008
categories: technical-writing wordpress

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:

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.

About Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson

I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.

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