Chimp-Simple Design » Blog Archive » 5 Steps to Making WordPress a Content Management System (CMS)

5 Steps to Making WordPress a Content Management System (CMS)

Posted on June 20th, 2007 admin 9 comments
1. Login to WordPress as Admin
2. Make a new Page called Home and assign it Page Order 0.
3. Make another new Page called Blog and assign it Page Order 60. This will be the last Page item in your menu.
4. Select the Admin section and then the Options, Reading. Select the Home page as Front page and Blog page as posts page.
5. View the site.
Optional – Menu Themes

If you theme has a menu at the top make sure both of the pages show up. If not check the Header.php file and add wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&title_li=’) to add a menu.

Also, some themes have the “home” page listing hard coded in the Header.php. If you view your site and have two Home listings in the menu, then edit Header.php and delete the default home item.

Optional – Searching Pages and Posts

If you want to be able to search your pages and posts then
you should install the Search Pages 2.0 Plugin.
With this plugin installed you will be able to search for information stored in the pages as well as the posts.

Trade Secret: I number the pages (Page Order) in increments of 10. That way I can “insert” a new page if I need to between two other pages.

Key: The Page Order is key in this setup. This will determine what order the pages are displayed in the menu. You can go into Manage, Pages and change the Page Order at anytime.

Here is an example of the basic pages I setup for each site:

Page Name

Page Order

Menu Order

Home

0

1

Blog

10

2

Products

20

3

Free

30

4

Press Info

40

5

Contact Us

50

6

About

60

7

In this example, Home will be the 1^st page because
it has the lowest Page Order value of 0 and About will be the last with a Page
Order value of 60.

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9 Responses to “5 Steps to Making WordPress a Content Management System (CMS)”
1. Milo's SEO Blog June 29th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
  
  Thanks! This is very helpful.
  
  I often rely to Wordpress Themes that would help me create a CMS website. I have found one such theme, but there are too many restrictions. You can’t just edit the sidebars and it doesn’t work well with most plugins.
  
  Thanks again!
2. steve June 29th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
  
  Thanks Milo, I appreciate it. Did you get a chance to setup a CMS system yet?
3. Setting Up a WordPress E-commerce Site in 30 Minutes » Chimp-Simple Publishing July 15th, 2007 at 8:53 am
  
  [...] Try using these plug-ins with our steps for setting up WordPress as a CMS. [...]
4. My First Encounter with Wordpress… « Weird Knowledge Weblog January 13th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
  
  [...] the likes of community type). chimp-simple have a nice site that uses Wordpress and he also have a step-by-step guide on how he did it. One comment said that yahoo will always treat wordpress posts as blogs unlike [...]
5. Wordpress Shopping Cart « Beauty of Wrapping August 27th, 2008 at 11:58 am
  
  [...] How to configure WP as a CMS [...]
6. web hosting October 21st, 2008 at 6:33 pm
  
  I saw some one use wordpress as an online shopping cart,It’s quite cool, hope you can also instruction how to make wp to a shopping cart
7. reviewazon June 11th, 2009 at 1:24 am
  
  Thank you so much for this post. I use the reviewazon plugin. Reviewazon is the easy and simple way to add amazon affiliate product to your website.
8. Betty August 26th, 2009 at 2:09 am
  
  Beauty has been a gift for women since ancient times. Though it sounds partial, beautiful women have always been given preference over an average looking woman. Every woman is born beautiful in some way or another. What we need to do is focus on our strong triats and enhance them and they will take care of our traits that do not resemble us in a very beautiful manner.
9. Betty August 26th, 2009 at 2:09 am
  
  Beauty has been a gift for women since ancient times. Though it sounds partial, beautiful women have always been given preference over an average looking woman. Every woman is born beautiful in some way or another. What we need to do is focus on our strong triats and enhance them and they will take care of our traits that do not resemble us in a very beautiful manner.
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