Found an excellent article on WordPress as a Content Management System- and much of it agrees with what we’ve been preaching and teaching for the last couple of years. It is well worth jumping over and reading the whole thing.

The key for us is how easy it is to use WordPress- as compared to other CMS systems. The author of the following article also said the same thing:

I just know WordPress, and I know it is easy to use (as opposed to, say, Joomla) for not so familiar clients. Add a solid support for “static” content, being the WordPress Pages, and more newsy update flows controlled by the Posts, and you’ve got your needs pretty much covered for most websites online today.

If you can’t use it yourself, and keep your company on the forefront of Industry news and trends, you don’t really have a website. We also see the terrific value WordPress offers as an Search Engine Optimization tool. Use WordPress right- get to the front of Google.
Here is his very helpful checklist:

Checklist for Creating Web Sites with WordPress as the CMS

These are the things I tend to think about before choosing and designing a website where WordPress will be used as the CMS. There’s probably other things as well, things I just haven’t take into account since my clients haven’t had that kind of need yet. Feel free to add yours in the comments, sharing is caring after all.

* Is there even a need for a CMS for the client?

* Is WordPress the correct CMS? Will it fit the needs? Is the translations available for the WordPress backend good enough? How will it be upgraded?

* Will I need to extend WordPress using plugins? Are any hacks to the core necessary, because if they are, how will I make sure that these won’t break when the core is upgraded?

* What types of content will there be, and what should be deemed static (i.e. use Pages), and what is flowing updates (i.e. Posts)? How will I present this, and what is the main type of content?

* How will the permalink structure be? Should it really say “category”, why not “view” or “updates” or something else?

* Will the menu be static (i.e. coded into the theme) or controlled by WordPress (i.e. listing using WordPress tags for Pages and categories)? How could this go wrong in the future?

* What hierarchy will the Pages have? This is important for the URL, since it should be coherent with the menu hierarchy after all.

* How will I present sub-pages (i.e. Pages having a mother Page)? Should there be any at all?

* Do I need Page templates for various sections? How will these work with sub-pages?

* What categories will I use? Should the client be allowed to create new categories?

* How will I present Posts content?

* Do I need category templates for the various categories?

Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS | Devlounge

Although he asks for comments on this post- they don’t seem to have them- but I would add that the issue of using Categories and Tags are still a little fuzzy for most people.

Think of Categories as the table of contents of a book and tags as the index- and you are track to better understanding how they should work. All of his points really don’t apply to people using off the shelf themes- which are the jack of all trades solutions for the most part. To really optimize WordPress as a Content Management System, you are really talking about custom theme development.

We’ve just completed an implementation of WordPress as a CMS on www.girlfriendology.com, head over and take a look.

Over at the WordPress Codex you will find an overview of WordPress 2.7’s (potentially) upcoming features.

A number of additions to this new version will be good news to the people who develop WordPress themes and WordPress plugins, but we discovered several notable entries that will be of interest to users and administrators.

1. The ability for readers to subscribe to a post’s comments is now part of the core, and does not require the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin (a plugin we install on every one of our client’s sites!).
2. Sitemaps, a file format developed by Google, is a very powerful tool for informing search engines (not just Google) about where your content is, what it is, and how frequently it’s updated. Currently, in WordPress 2.6, a plugin is needed to automate this process; WordPress 2.7 will apparently make this part of the core. We can only speculate if the same level of functionality will be present in the core implementation versus the “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin that we use.
3. In WordPress 2.6 and below, comments on posts have no heirarchy, and how one reader “responds” to another reader is not dealt with in any officially sanctioned manner – it’s basically a flat listing of comments. The Codex entry hints at “comment threading”, which potentially means comments can be nested, like a message board. This might be a dream come true for sites with large, active communities.
4. Geotagging is growing in popularity, and it gets a mention in the Codex. How this will be implemented is currently an unknown, but for some bloggers, especially those who use their WordPress site to organize events, could really benefit from a unified way to introduce geodata into their posts.
5. Lastly, we see “versioning of template edits”. We surmise that this means template editing from the Dashboard will have some form of version control, like Posts do in 2.6, and ultimately, it implies enhanced theme editing abilities in the Design section of the Dashboard. For people like us who do frequently template wrangling, this might be one of the best things to happen to WordPress since its original conception!

We will keep posting as we learn more about WordPress 2.7.

If you’re interested in how you can leverage WordPress/blogging to increase your online visibility, we humbly suggest you take our inexpensive, informative, one day seminar – Websitetology.

How many times have you wanted to show someone the whole webpage- but can’t screen grab it? Problem solved with the Abduction plug in for FireFox.

Capture an entire web page or part of a web page and save it as an image.

For the sake of making this extension findable: This extension takes screenshots of websites.

Useful for showing people bugs in a website, creating snapshots of design progress, or perhaps even creating a gallery of websites.

Right click on any web page, frame or iframe, click “Save Page As Image…” and then drag a box around the piece you want to save.

Works with:

* Firefox: 3.0a1 – 3.0.*

Homepage http://pixelcarnage.com/projects/abduction/

Abduction! :: Firefox Add-ons to add it to your Firefox install or go to Tools>add-ons and do a search for “Abduction!”

Just one more reason not to use Microsoft’s horrible browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer.