[photopress:wordpress_cms.png,full,alignleft]For one of my ecommerce sites I needed a very simple CMS. I always use Wordpress for my blogs, and love it, but I wanted to have a more CMS than a blog. After spending a few minutes, I have turned the wordpress blog into a CMS. I’m pretty sure this has been done millions of time before, but I wanted to share it, because I know it will help somebody who’s looking for a similar solution.
Step by Step Guide to Turn a Wordpress Blog Into a CMS
- 1) Download and install Wordpress.
- 2) Download and install all your plugins. I specifically recommend All in One SEO Pack Plugin. You may setup the details of this plugin at Options > All in One SEO. Always remember to check Use noindex for Categories (no uncheck).
- 3) Under Options > Permalinks, choose Custom, specify below and enter /%postname%/, This way you will not have the post date in your post URL’s. You will have domain.com/post-title/ instead of domain.com/2007/08/23/post-title/ , it will look more like a CMS.
- 4) Do not use Wordpress Categories, instead we will use Pages as categories. So remove or do not add Categories to your sidebar.
- 5) This will be your only manual step. You will need to setup the Pages as categories, and enter the link to the right page after each blog post. This may sound extra work, but wordpress categories only pull the summaries of blog posts, and it is not very useful for SEO and usability purposes. You will benefit greatly from SEO perspective. You can also write descriptions, and add images to your categories (pages).
- 6) Since we will not use categories, we need to remove the category link every post. Go to Presentation > Theme Editor, and choose Single Post (single.php), and remove < ?php the_category(',') ?> , this is the link to the appropriate category for that post.
This is it. It took me around 10 minutes to install a wordpress blog onto a brand new domain, and turn it into a CMS.
Article by Ahmet Kirtok
Ahmet KIRTOK is a New York City based entrepreneur and small business consultant. He is the founder & owner of Small Business Arena
Ahmet has contributed 69 articles.
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I too have been frustrated with wordpress and its non friendly SEO set up.
I look forward to toying with this idea you have presented here.
This is a real life example of a wordpress blog turned into a CMS:
http://portal.turkishcorner.com/
This really helped me out…thanks for posting it!
Jen
oh nice, i had been thinking of doing this for one of my sites. Thanks for the quick and easy tutorial.
Word Press and CMS are a good match … for the most part.
I tried one a while back, where I had too high of expectations of Word Press. There are some shortcoming, but really, all in all it’s excellent, for the smaller site.
My main thoughts here apply to the ability to actually optimize the code inside of Word Press. I found that it was simple matter to add completely search engine friendly code into the Word Press templates and wind up with an incredibly optimized site. Most of mine are well situated in the Top-10 for important keyword searches.
As long as you have the know-how to optimize the code, can get around and provide links to your site, and actually know what you are doing, then there is no reason why Word Press can’t be the perfrect CMS for your needs.
Henry
I’ll also add that the Revision3 website is (amazingly) running on WordPress. No clue how the back-end is set up, but check out an article on the WordPress Publisher Blog for more details.
thank you for post
How can I install the Plugin under Wordpress 2.5
thanks a lot.
Yes gd post. WP can be a great cms platform thats at the same time seo friendly coupled with the rite plugins
Your post makes one think! Great article. Thanks for allowing me to comment!
Thanks for the informative post.. and thanks for adding our comment to the blog. I searched for a while to find the right answer to my questions!
Thanks for the very impressive post. I\’ve book marked your site.
Great information! Thanks for writing this. It is an honor to participate in the discussion.
Thanks, you nice post that helped me alot.
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how do you think my site is setup? http://www.choice-direct.com im still trying to seo it.
I just want to add that in case you will have issues on permalinks and SEO All In One pack plugins, there’s something wrong with the “.htaccess” that is being generated automatically.
I find this post interesting and really beneficial to everyone.
Cheers!
I’ve also tried to use Wordpress as a CMS. I love how easy it is to set up Wordpress, but I was frustrated by the lack of options out there to create listing of businesses/business directory.
I’ve had some difficulty with Wordpress in the past, I’ll try putting this to use.