This is what I’ll be talking about at WordCamp Toronto 2010, a bit later today along with Ryan Imel in a panel about CMS-ing with WordPress.

Back in 2004 when I took it over, Maytree’s website was a handful of static pages all made with Dreamweaver 4 and updated manually. It was not very easy to use, but back then it accomplished the task of featuring the few documents we had.

As our list of publications grew, as well as our team, programs, activities and our audience expanded, the website became an ever more important tool. We needed to be able to updated on a regular basis, even many times a day. We wanted to include photographs and video, we wanted to feature our activities, let people see what’s coming and, in general, have a much more dynamic and exciting website.

And it also had to be easy to use, because not everybody is, you know, web savvy.

If you are facing a similar situation maybe you are thinking about WordPress, or maybe you haven’t because you think it’s for blogging. Although WP is used mainly for blogging, let me tell you it can also be a terrific Content Management System; specially for small and medium organizations with a small web team and that don’t have a terribly complicated publishing process.

Here is the number 1 top thing that you must know to use WordPress as a CMS effectively. Are you ready? Here it goes:

Decide what part of the content will be pages and what will be posts

It sounds simple, but the concept of pages and posts is not clear for everybody. A page is a somewhat static part of your website, you can think of it as a section, one of the main areas of your site. For examplee “Products”, “News”, “Introduction”, “Our staff”, those will be pages because you will always have products, you will always have an introduction, you will always have staff and news.

Posts are the individual elements that make up those sections. You will always have news, but you will have different news releases. You will always have staff, but Dave won’t always be there. You will always have products, but the XS-3400 will be replaced at some point.

Pages are the ideal place to put all the content that won’t change too much: explanations about each section, information about the organization, instructions on how to order or replace a product, etc.

Posts are for those individual pieces of information that will change regulary: news items, individual products, announcements, special sales and deals, etc.

Why should we use pages for sections?

A page is not just a special kind of post. Pages can be organized in a tree structure, that is pages that are “below” another pages. This will allow you to create the structure of your site very quickly.

This brings us to the second most important thing you must know:

Create a category for each section.

Posts must belong to at least one category. The trick to use WP efficiently as a CMS is to correlate each category to a section in your site. In that way you can then use WP integrated functions to retrieve only that category when the visitors goes to a section in the site. Remember, a post may have more than one category.

Now, I know what you are thinking and this brings us to the last thing you should know:

Yes, you can simply stick with categories and not use pages.

When you send a visitor to an address like mysite/category WP will show them all posts within that category, without any need to create a page. Categories can also have sub-categories, and if you are not going to have any content related to that section, like an explanation, an introduction or something similar, then you may as well use that and do away with the need for any page. But still think of categories as sections, that you must do.

Good! Now we have our structure sorted out and what content is going to go where, what will be a post, what will be a page we can start.

Putting it all together

First create your pages in WordPress. You can choose what pages will be the main ones and which will be under those right when you are making them, or you can use the PageMash plugin to drag and drop pages. This is a much easier way to quickly capture the structure of your site. This plugin is invaluable when you have a large site.

A problem you may find is that you have some pages that you don’t want to show up in the navigation. There is a plugin for that as well: Exclude Pages from Navigation will let you tick a box to… hmmm… do exactly what it says it does. In this way your main navigation menus are very focused while you can still directly link to the other pages.

Lastly, you will need to create your categories and let WP know that when a particular page is displayed it also has to list the posts that belong to that category. Many years ago (ok, three or four) when I first looked into this the only way to do it, as far as I was aware, was to use something like:

if (is_page(3)) {
  query_posts(cat=3);
}

That’s the way I still do it because I already started doing that way and, since I know how to write php fairly well, it’s not that difficult and I have more control. However you don’t have to do it like this!

You can do the same thing much more easily thanks to List Category Posts or Post-Page-Association plugins. These plugins let you attach the posts from a category or several categories to a page without any need of programming. You may still need someone with php skillz for a complex front page or for when your site grows bigger, but if you are just starting these plugins will save you a lot of time!

And now, believe it or not, you are ready! These are all the basics you need to know to start using WordPress as a CMS.

Do you have any questions, comments, suggestions? Please let me know them!