Vertigo Project» WordPress

Entropy Revamped

January 7th, 2009 by dave. No Comments »

We have just recently revamped Entropy, our tech/gaming blog with a brand new theme and a lot of content/plugins etc. Please have a look and let us know what you think!

WordPress as a CMS

October 26th, 2008 by dave. 4 Comments »

Image representing WordPress as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

Inspired by our use of WordPress as a CMS, I’ve written up a guide to quickly and most importantly easily setting WordPress up as a CMS, without any code modifications.

Step 1: Installing WordPress

First off, you need a WordPress installation. Get the latest WordPress from WordPress.org or clicking here, or optionally choose a host that supports WordPress and can automatically install it for you (such as HostCentric).

Once you have it installed and setup proceed on to step 2.

Step 2: Installing the Plugin Manager

We use various plugins to get the site to work how we want, and to add additional features – most of these are optional if you are just looking to run a CMS, and so I will describe each in the list.

First off though, install (manually) Plugin Central as this will speed things along. Its an automated plugin installer/manager, for which we will give you a copy/paste below. This will be the only plugin you have to manually install – so put it in wp-content/plugins/ in your blog directory, and enable it under the Plugins menu.

Plugin Central will allow you to paste a list of URLs or names into it, and automatically install all of the plugins by that name, or on that URL that can be found.

This makes setting up your CMS, and of course maintaining it slightly easier.

Step 3: Selecting the Plugins You Need

Now that you have Plugin Central, you can use it to quickly install all of the plugins you require. Below is a list of the plugins we use, and why –

Akismet — prevent comment spam
All in One SEO Pack — optimize the site for search engines
cforms — provide easy to use contact forms
Enforce www. Preference — redirect “vertigo-project.com” to www.
Lighter Menus — pretty up the admin control panel
LightBox 2 — makes image viewing much more appealing
Live Comment Preview — for user experience improvement
OpenID — for Open ID support
Permalink Redirect — more SEO optimizations
Plugin Central — easy to use plugin manager
SEO Friendly Images, SEO Post Link, SEO Slugs and SEO Title Tag — all SEO and accessibility related
Subscribe to Comments — improvement of the user experience
WassUp — a powerful, simple stats package
WordPress Automatic Upgrade — the self-explanatory upgrade script
Zemanta — for related content and images

The most important of the above plugins are the cforms, akismet, wassup and automatic upgrade plugins. The reasons for this are simple

Your CMS needs users to be able to contact you, and you need to ensure its not spam.
You’ll be using it as a blog as well no doubt, and its both annoying and deterring to guests if you have spam comments.
You can’t build a site without statistics.
WordPress must be kept up to date – always!

The rest cover various SEO (non black-hat) techniques to make your CMS friendlier to users and search engines, and some usability features.

If you would like to quickly install all of the plugins we’ve listed above, paste the following into your Plugin Central installer:

Akismet
All in One SEO Pack
cforms
Enforce www. Preference
Lighter Menus
LightBox 2
Live Comment Preview
OpenID
Permalink Redirect
Plugin Central
SEO Friendly Images
SEO Post Link
SEO Slugs
SEO Title Tag
Subscribe to Comments
WassUp
WordPress Automatic Upgrade
Zemanta

Step 4: A CMS Theme

Truely, any theme can be used for a CMS, but what you are specifically looking for is something that focussed on pages more than posts. We’ve set our CMS up to show Page links at the top right, and posts in a sidebar.

There are several interesting CMS-style themes available –

But really all you need to focus on is “wp_list_pages()”, the WordPress function for listing pages. Any theme can easily have this added in, and widget based themes can have a pages list added in.

Step 5: Configuring Plugins/WordPress Settings

Aside from the standard setup you would do with a WordPress blog, there are some CMS specific tasks you need.

Front page and blog display

Firstly, create a Page called Blog. Also create a front page Page if you don’t want to use the default About page. Now go to Settings->Reading and change your Front page displays setting to show a static page, and choose “About” for your front page and “Blog” as your posts page.

With this setup, going straight to your blog will show the about page, and only when a user visits the Blog page will they see blog posts – a typical CMS setup.

Permalinks

You may want a different setup, but we setup our permalinks to function like so

“About” Page — /about
“Website” Page, under “About” — /about/website
“Blog” Page — /blog
“Blog Post” called “Test” in category “News” — /news/test

What you need to assure is that the pages are easy to follow for users and for search engines. If you want to copy our setup, use the Custom Structure option and enter: “/%category%/%postname%” as seen below

Step 6: Maintaining

This is more advice than a requirement – don’t forget that WordPress needs maintaining to be secure and spam free. You have installed automatic plugins to keep you up to date so it should be easy.

The second step is that search engines and users like changing content – don’t think that a blog has no place on your CMS – constant updates will keep engines sending you traffic and giving users something to read.