WordPress CMS modifications

I made a presentation at WordCamp UK 2008 entitled ‘WordPress is not a blog‘ - slightly controversial, which was the idea! It ended up with the alternative title of ‘WordPress is a blog… and a whole lot more!‘. It centered around using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS).

New developments since presentation

Nothing stands still in the world of web development! Since making this presentation the following developments have occurred:

Cloak plugin - This hides areas of the write page and write post panels, and I think is very useful for de-cluttering the interface. The developer has moved on to bigger and brighter things now, so he has kindly passed over to me for development and maintenance - and I will be making an announcement about this shortly! The old plugin still works fine, and is tested upto WordPress v2.6

Fresh Post plugin - The ‘fresh post’ plugin has evolved a little into ‘Flutter’ - which now allows (if you wish!) more CMS type control over the layout of your site. It still creates custom write panels, which most people would be interested in (thanks to Chris Garrett for pointing this one out… Twitter is good!)

Relevant links and further reading from presentation

PLUGINS

• Cloak - Hide unwanted write post/page items.
• Fresh Post/Flutter - Create custom write panels and hide default ones.
• Audit trail - Some functions now obsolete due to 2.6 roll-back functionality.
• Role Manager - Complete control overs user privileges.
• wp-dbmanager - Database backup tool.
• CForms - Great form building tool.
• Simple Tags - Very powerful tag management tool.

DISPLAYING CONTENT

• query_posts - (for use with loop) WordPress codex article
• get_posts - (outside of loop) WordPress codex article
• get_post - (outside of loop) WordPress codex article

Presentation slides