How to use WordPress as a CMS

I have been using WordPress for quite a while for blogging. But more recently at another site I wanted a simple Content Management System this site. There are lots of options out there such as Joomla, Drupal and so on. But WordPress was more than enough to meet my needs to provide a simple publishing platform. Here is the simplest way that I have found and the procedure that I used:

Step One: Download the static front page plugin from here (http://www.semiologic.com/software/publishing/static-front/). And then upload it into your plugins directory.

Step Two: Create two pages. (Not posts). Called Home and Blog.

Step Three: Activate your plugin in your wordpress dashboard.

And its all done.

What happens now is that the “Home” page is the permanent front page and you will have another link to your blog that will display you blog posts as normal in reverse chronological order.

A couple of things that I went on to do:

Create a new home template. I did this because the one used from my blog posts still contained a date marker. I didn’t want this on my front page. I deleted the scripts that fetched the features that I didn’t want and then uploaded that into the theme directory.

I copied the blog template and then pasted it into notebook, (any text editor will do) and once I had changed it i saved it as home.php.

This is also a place that you can add the features that you want to your front page as well.