Author: Neil Matthews

Did you know that WordPress can be used as the content management system (CMS) for “real websites”? I want to take a look at how post and blogging functions of WP can be repackaged to work as a back end content creation management and placement system for a traditional non-blogging web sites.

I have worked with professional CMS tools from companies such as IBM which cost tens of thousands of dollars per processor not per license, and in my opinion, a certain level of this can be done with humble, free WordPress.

What Is The Difference Between A Blog and A CMS

A blog publishes posts in reverse chronological order usually with a list of previous posts available to read from the front page, whilst a CMS is a system to create content easily and then publish it in a predefined section of a web site.

For example all news articles will appear in a news section of a site, all special sales offers may appear on the front page. It’s all about easily creating content and pushing it to it’s predefined location on the site.

Static Home Pages

If you are building a CMS the likelihood is that you will not need a series of blog posts on your front page, rather you will have a static front page and have content or posts pushed into their own container.

WordPress allows you to change the front page of your site to do exactly this. From your dashboard goto settings -> reading, and you will see the following options:

Change the setting from your latest posts to a static page, create a page with your home page content and you are good to go, it’s as easy as that.

CMS Theme

The selection of your theme will probably make or break your CMS installation. You are looking for something with lots of sidebars into which you can push content. The task will be made easier if the theme is widget ready.

Check out the WordPress theme directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/, you can search for themes by the number of sidebars and widgetization (is that a real word?). Your other options are to buy a premium theme or have one tailored made for you by a theme designer. A search on google for CMS wordpress theme will return a large number of pre-made themes ready to act as a CMS.

The use of the term sidebar is a bit of a misnomer, think of a sidebar as a slot into which you can place widgets. An example of this misnoner can be seen on my site, I have four sidebars in my configuration, and only one runs down the side of my site, the other three are in the footer.

Organise By Categories

Once you have a static front page and a theme of your choosing you need to start pushing content into its correct container. I think the best way is to orgnanise your content is by category.

For example you may have a section on your site for your sales team, put all of their content into a wordpress sales category, this can then be extracted and published to the correct location using the techniques outlined below.

Widgets to Push the Content

Once your data is categorised, you can then use widgets to position your content. Using the “list category post” widget you can push a list of posts from a particular category in your sidebars.

This is done from your wordpress dashboard -> appearance -> widgets, then drag and drop your widgets onto the appropriate sidebar.

Plugins to Organise Content

You may want to position content in locations where widgets don’t easily work, for example you may want a static page called news into which news items about your organisation are displayed. To do this there are a number of plugins out there, the one I use is Sobek’s post In Category plugin. Using this I can pull all of the posts in a particular category and display them as a linked list for people to click through to the acutal post. These can be shown on pages or posts.

Using plugins in this fashion allows you to extend the WordPress page function to act as a new container for content.

User Management

You may want your CMS to be updated by many people, WordPress has the functionality to allow multiple authors and editors of your content. Using the roles built into WP you can allow people to write content but not publish it, create editor level users who have the permission to edit and then publish the posts.

Full details of the roles available can be seen at http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities the roles are fairly granular so control over what your contributors can or can not do is available to you.

Controlling Who Sees Content

Another function of a CMS is controlling how can see which content, with the addition of a plugin or two, WordPress can do this .

For example you may have a customer only area on your site where they can read order information. Using the user management functionality areas of your CMS could be password protected.

Check out my post How To Integrate Paypal with Your WordPress Blog whilst this is about monetising your site with paypal, it also discusses the various membership site plugins available. Using these type of plugins you can create login IDs to protect certain pages or posts making them available to a subset of your site users.

Time Delayed Posts

Using the scheduled posting function of WordPress the site can be updated at set times. An example of this may be a sale. Write up details and set the post to appear in the appropriate container when the sale begins.

Check out my post Write Now Post Later for the mechanics of this process.

Removing Old Content

You may find that you want to add content to the site then remove it when it is not valid, not like us lazy bloggers who just want to pump out more and more content and leave it online for posterity. Using the post editor, content can be marked as draft or deleted very easily to make visible or remove content on the site.

When Is A Blog Not A Blog

.. when its a CMS, WordPress is not just a blogging tool it can be used to update and present content on a traditional more static site. Your usage of WordPress as a CMS is limited only to your imagination for organising content into containers.

I hope this posts has prompted you to think of WordPress as more than just a blogging tool.

Examples Of WordPress as A CMS

I put a call out on twitter to find out who was using WordPress as a CMS, here is a list of sites configured in this way, have a look and get inspiration.

• http://www.morethanadmin.ca/
• http://www.maestroquality.com/
• http://www.ogagym.org/
• http://simmsfurniturewarehouse.com/

Special thanks to Charlene Polanosky, she not only sent me links to sites but detailed desciptions from her own site on building sites using WordPress as your CMS

• http://essentialkeystrokes.com/project-files-wordpress-as-a-cms-comes-through-again/
• http://essentialkeystrokes.com/project-files-using-wordpress-as-a-cms/
• http://essentialkeystrokes.com/project-files-using-wordpress-to-build-a-traditional-web-site/
• http://essentialkeystrokes.com/project-files-is-that-really-wordpress/

Planning To Use WordPress as Your CMS?

If you need some assistance making WordPress work as your CMS, please visit my WordPress coaching page.

When you logged into your blog today, you probably saw a new banner running across the top like this:

This is an announcement that the latest version of WordPress is available for you to download and install.

This release is a bug fix to the version 2.8 release which was sent out about a month ago.  Here is a link to the fixes and changes available in this new version just in case you are into that kind of thing http://wordpress.org/development/2009/07/wordpress-2-8-1/

With this in mind I thought I would link up all of my posts on updating to the latest version of wordpress.

Please remember to backup thoroughly before you upgrade.

• https://dev.neilmatthews.com/shoud-update-version-wordpress
• https://dev.neilmatthews.com/wordpress-271-upgrade
• https://dev.neilmatthews.com/plugin-review-backup-plugins

A few days ago I wrote about the trial I was interested in conducting on RSS advertising.  Adding Google adsense to your RSS feed has been around for some time now, but no-one is saying how well it performs as they do with on-site Adsense.

This post is the result of my great RSS experiment.

My One Word Conclusion

Indifference.

My Thought On RSS Advertising

People taking RSS subscriptions are pretty tech savvy and they want to read content not respond to advertising messages.  I think people are ad blind and not interested in clicking on the offers put before them.

I think you need a large number of subscribers and some compelling ads (perhaps graphical ads) to get the clicks required to make this worthwhile.

There are bloggers in my RSS reader who use RSS advertising, but I have never clicked on an ad what about you?

Income

I have a modest RSS following, and the ads have had a relatively large number of impressions, I was expecting some action, let me give you the numbers …

It is against the rules of the adsense program to discuss your earnings but since I earned nothing I am happy to report my income was zero.  No clicks no cents nada zip.

Drop Of Subscribers

As I said I think people are indifferent to the ads, my subscription rate has continued to gently climb, there has been no drop off of subscribers that I have noticed.

People just don’t care about the ads.

Moving Forward

<shrugs shoulders> I don-know I’m indifferent about it all.  I don’t think there will be an impact if I remove the ads or leave them there.  My spidey senses are saying get rid of the ads in case   I alienate anyone into unsubscription.

Please leave me some comments before apathy on the subject overtakes me completely 🙂

Advertising in your RSS feed has been around for a while, but I have not seen anyone crying from  the rooftops on how effective it is.  There are not images of people holding up their cheques for $$$$ sayng RSS advertising is the best (as they do for traditional AdSense).  Since no one is saying how effective it is, I thought I would run an experiment on my own feed to see how effective it is.

I’m not a fan of traditional AdSense, the idea that someones comes to your site to read your quality content and then clicks away for a couple of cents does not sit very well with me.  I have yet to make my mind up about RSS feeds, and I will probably only leave it up for a couple of weeks.

So I’ve laid my cards in the table and full disclosure has been made, now lets move forward this post is all about adding AdSense to your blog’s RSS feed.

If you want a quick lesson on RSS, you can check my post on the subject Beginers Guide to WordPRess RSS.

Step One Get and AdSense Account

The first step is to sign-up for an adsense account at http://adsense.google.com

Once you are in go to adsense setup and then to adsense for feeds.

Why Google Bought Feedburner

You can only add adsense to RSS feeds which are served up by Feedburner.  Feedburner developed itself as the leading RSS hosting company before being acquired by Google a couple of years ago.  It has taken some time but finally they have fully integrated the adsense platform with Feedburner.

Google bought the top platform with a ready made user base to serve up ads.

Change the Look’n’Feel

So your have decided to add RSS, there are a number of options you can set:

Ad type – you can specify that text and image ads or text only ads are shown on your feed.  I have selected text only.  Since I have very little control of knowledge of what will be advertised, I thought text will be less disturbing to you my jolly readers if something unpleasant is pushed upon you.

Post interval – a nice touch is to control how often ads are served.  You can select every post, or set an interval of every x posts so part of your content can be ad free.

Post length – you can specify ads over a certain word count to only display ads.  I was thinking why Google would do this and my thought is that a reader needs to be completely engaged to read a long post, and perhaps they are more inclined to click on an ad at the.  I’m not sure but the massive heads at Google will have done that for a reason.

Location – you can serve your ads at the top of bottom of the page

Colours – you can let adsense detect the colours of your feed, or you can setup a custom palette.

Assign this configuration to your feed from Feedburner and click save, it really is as simple as that.

Beware Click Fraud

Click fraud is a cancer on pay per click advertising, do not click on my feed ads unless they are of real value.

In case you did not know click fraud is the process of clicking on paid ads without a desire to review or buy the products.  Click fraud is done by bloggers trying to increase their income or by advertisers competitors trying to deplete advertising budgets.

Watch This Space

I will report back in a couple of weeks on how effective RSS advertising has been (or not been).  I would love to hear your opinion on advertising in RSS, it’s something I know will polarise people.

Many people subscribe to RSS to get away from the ads, how do you feel about them coming after you.

Are you tempted to unsubscribe from my blog because of it?  Please let me know before you click unsubscribe  this is just an experiment I don’t want to fall out over this :).

Tell me your stories about adsense, show me that RSS advertising can work or not in the comments section.

I think it is a big step on your journey as a blogger when you hand over your hard earned for your first premium theme .  It says you are serious about your blog and you want it to stand out from the also ran free themes.

The problem is, premium themes look excellent and with that excellence comes a complexity of use.  I have been working with a couple of clients recently to coach them using their new themes.  From this experience I thought I would documents the common pit falls premium themes can spring upon you.

What’s A Premium Theme

A premium theme is a professionally developed template for your WordPress blog.  They tend to be of a high quality with lots of wizzy features such as video players and featured post rotators.

They are the middle ground between free themes and custom developed setups, they tend to cost around $100 and for that you will get a customisable theme, support and usually updates.  You will get a fairly unique looking blog, add to that your own logo and bingo a less than ordinary blog look and feel.

My site uses a premium theme Ice Cream Dream, it’s not as busy as many premium themes but the cleanness and efficiency is something I could never ahve done myseld, I have very little graphic design skill.  That’s why I handed over my money for a premium theme.

Here is a short list of companies creating premium themes so you can get an idea of what is available, no affiliate links here, just companies themes I have used:

• Woo Themes
• Theme Forest
• Press 75

Premium themes are for bloggers wanting a unique look without the skills or budget to develop their own custom theme.

RTFM

The first thing to do when you get hold of your premium theme is to read the f*cking manual.  This sounds obvious but the devil is in the detail, I don’t know how many times I have steamed ahead, installing themes only to have to go back to the PDF packaged in the zip file to learn how to use a complex theme.

The documentation is usually packaged with the zip as well as being available on the plugin site.  Check out the sites forum as well as the documentation so you are up to speed with any issues before you install.

A quick tip, look for documentation on the plugin developers site before you buy.  If it is incomprehensible, I recommend you take the advice of Dionne Warwick and walk on by.   If the documentation is poor, it is a sign that the support will be equally poor.  On the same note if documentation on how to install your theme is not on the site, consider if you want to buy this theme.  I learned this from hard experience I was installing a premium theme for a client and the documentation was so poor I had to pull apart the code to understand how it worked.  Techies are notoriously poor communicators, they just expect you to understand what is obvious to them.   If I am paying for a theme I want support and quality documentation.

Plugins

Often a premium theme will rely on certain plugins to work properly.  Make sure you have downloaded and activated these or your theme will not work as expected . The plugins will either be included with the theme zip file or be documented in the readme file.   Take notice of versions, sometimes updates to plugins can make themes fall over.

Custom Fields

This is one which catches out many people.  A custom field is a small piece of information which you pass into the theme for it to perform a function.  An example of custom field usage from my site is the thumbnail on the front page. For each post I create,  a custom field needs to be created too called thumb which contains the URL of the thumbnail image to be displayed on the front page.

Custom fields are added from the edit post page, scroll down and near the bottom of the page you will see a section like this:

Enter a new custom field name, then add the value as specified in your documentation, don’t forget to activate it by pressing “add custom field” . Please be aware of the case Thumbnail is not the same as thumbnail with custom fields.  As you add custom fields they are saved (see the drop down) so you can easily create new fields for your posts.

Categories

Many premium themes use categories to position items on the page.  For example many of the look and feels will have a featured post section, to get posts into the featured section, you need to add them to a category named featured.

Again watch the case, I spent hours trying to get some videos to appear by adding the to a category called video instead of Video.

I Love Premium Themes I Do..

A premium theme says you are serious about your blogging, but please remember content is still king and your true fans will probably subscribe to RSS and never see you day-glo rotating doo-dad from that point on.  Don’t get too hung up about your look’n’feel.

Just to re-iterate, read the manual and do exactly as the developer tells you and you site will look as smart as a carrot .

When you want to ask your readers a question or are stuck for a quality post nothing beats a poll. In this post I will show you how to add a poll to your WordPress blog.

What Will a Poll Bring to My Blog?

A poll is a very easy way to engage your readers, there is not the in-depth need to write a reply like a comment, a simple click on a yes or no answer is far more likely to generate feedback. It helps to engage your audience and make your blog feel more like a conversation than a lecture. Consider this; if someone asks your opinion in a conversation rather than talking at you during the intercourse, what feels better? I think polls add a pause to your conversation where your readers can give their opinion.

Polls are good for asking questions about your niche, getting feedback from your readers or even for marketing purposes e.g. a poll asking if your readers are interested in a membership side to your blog can be excellent market research.

I have used polls as way to test if my blog content is pitched at the correct level by asking the technical expertise of my readers, I have used it to test if people want particular services from me.

Add One Polling Plugin

Where there’s a poll there is plugin that’s my motto of the minute. Adding a poll to your blog is as easy as finding the right plugin. Below I list the things to consider when choosing your plugin.

Widget or Post

If you are running you poll over a number of days it maybe more appropriate to add a widget to your blog’s sidebar rather than containing your poll in a post. This is because posts may drop off the front page of your blog and potential poll results may be missed.

Check with your particular plugin to see if it is widget ready. I like a plugin which gives me the flexibilty of adding it to a post or page as well as having a ready made widget.

Posting the Results

I like a poll plugin which automatically calculates the results at the end of my polling period as well as an ongoing count displayed to my readers. Check to see if your polling plugin presents results to your users or only on the backend to your the administrator.

My Preferred Polling Preference

Alliteration always makes me happy 🙂

As always I would encourage you to check out the available poll plugins from the plugin repository and see which one matches your requirements, there are a number to test at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/polls.

The poll widget I use is called WP-Polls, it is available for download http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/#wp-polls

The plugin has an admin interface where you create your poll, then it is inserted into a post using a tag [~poll id=”n”] the tag is then replaced and the poll inserted for all to see. It comes with a widget built in to drop polls onto your sidebar(s).

WP-Polls has a template editor so you can match polls to the look and feel of your site and It has a really handy interface in the dashboard so you can analyse the results of your polls.

I can set a time limit for my poll, and at the end it marks it as closed and only the results are shown. It allows you to set who can vote i.e. guest or registered users, I would not recommend using the registered users option, any barrier to entry will stop people voting in your poll.

The only thing missing for me is free form fields which would allow me to get more than a yes or no answer to my poll.

Offsite Polling Solutions

There are various solutions out there which allow you to host a poll off-site and then display it on your site. Solutions such as Poll Daddy will host your poll. This is of benefit if you poll is a huge multi page thing and you expect housands of results. Of course these tend to work under the freemium model with more advanced options available at a fee.

Have you used any offsite polling solutions let me know in the comments.

Other Ideas

If you want a very quick poll with immediate results, I can wholeheartedly recommend the combination of twitter and polldaddy, in a couple of seconds you can create a poll and put it in front of your twitter followers. This is excellent for asking a quick question and having the results correlated for you. This can be done from http://twitter.polldaddy.com/

The lazy writers guide to Polls

I’ll let you into the secret, polls help to fill gaps in your posting schedule if you are stuck for something to write about, first of all you set the poll with a couple of paragraphs of why you are running the poll, post one – check.

Next you get the result post where you analyse the post bingo two posts, not a great deal of effort. Post two -check, see how it fills the gaps.

Are You Going to Add a Poll?

Here’s a sample poll for you, I would appreciate your feedback:

[poll id=”7″]

Mad WPDude here, and have I got a sale for you …. no cannot do it, just cannot be a US car salesman.

WordPress 2.8 Released

WordPress 2.8 has eventually been released after much too-ing and fro-ing with bug fixing and slippage in the project.  It was originally due for release last month but that date passed.  The slippage is a good thing it means bugs were spotted (and fixed) before the code was sent into the Blogosphere.

You will probably see update notifications on your dashboard right now.

What’s New in 2.8

Full details of what is new in 2.8 can be seen at http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8, but my particular highlights of this update are:

• Install theme from dashboard instead of using FTP
• Hot key to save posts ctrl+s

What’s the sale about

I am offerning to update your site including installation of backup plugins,  taking a complete and tested backup, update, post update testing and rollback if required for one hour instead of my usual two that I would quote for this job.

If you want me to upgrade your site to WordPress 2.8, drop me a line from wpdude.com/hire-wpdude quoting Crazy WPDudes Sale, or just say please update my site, whatever you are more comfortable with.

Connecting to your blog and writing posts through your dashboard is not the only way to craft your content.  I am going to tell you of a few other methods to write posts and publish them on your blog.

Why Do I need to Publish Posts Remotely?

You may not be at your computer or only have a mobile device with you, you may be researching a topic away from your Blog dashboard or you may just hate writing from the WordPress editor.  The ability to publish from sources other than your blog has many uses.

Email Your Posts

WordPress has the ability to receive emails as posts to your blog for publication.  In essence you setup a secret email account know only to you and your blog, then any email received by the blog to that account will be accepted as a post.  I am a very lazy man so rather than reinventing the wheel, here is a link to the resource written by the good people at WordPress http://codex.wordpress.org/Blog_by_Email

Remote Clients

There are a number of clients out there which allow you to write your posts offline and push them up to your blog at the click of a button.  These tend to be more like client based word processors, and as a result they are more feature rich than the default wordpress editor.

The remote clients all0w you to draft and prepare posts offline.  Perhaps you like to switch off your net connection when you write to minimise distraction, then this is a method for you.

The tool I have tried is Windows Live Writer, it is an excellent gui writing tool which allows you to download your theme to give you an idea of what your posts will look like.  Write your posts, save them offline as drafts, then click on publish when you are ready.

I am a windows boy, are there are mac remote posting clients? Please let me know in comments section.

Browser Plugins

There are quite a few browser plugins available for free download which allow you to post directly from your browser.  I guess the idea is that when you are doing your browsing, the idea for a posts comes to you and the plugin allows you to write the posts during your peak of creative musing.  The two plugins I have used are:

ScribeFire – a firefox plugin which at the press of the f8 button becomes a blog client.  You create an account to your blog and you can write a post directly from firefox.

Press This – a bookmarklet produced by WordPress, from your blog goto Turbo  and drag the Press This link onto your toolbar, when you have the urge click on it and blog from your browser.

As always I am always open to new experiences, let me know if there is a blogging browser extension which rocks your world in the comment section.

Mobile Devices

All the kids with their new fangled what-ji-mi-call-its are blogging from their handsets.  There are a couple of ways this works:

For the uber-trendy there are iPhone applications which act as clients on your Appley doodad.  This was developed by the good people at WordPress, just go to the app store and search for WordPress, it is a free app.  It gives you the ability to write posts, and pages as well as moderate your comments.

The second alternative for smart phones with slower browsers (I am thinking Blackberrys or Windows CE devices) is to adapt your blog to create a reduced interface.  Using the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin you can do this along with creating a mobile device compatible front end.

A Word About XMLRPC & Security

If you allow remote updating, you are opening holes in your blog for potential security attacks.  Think about this before you allow remote publishing.  You may wake up one morning and find your site full of posts linking to viagra companies.

Most of the methods above use something called xmlrpc, which is a standard for remote procedure calls (RPC , did you see what I did there) using XML (stunning RPC + XML = xmlrpc).  In English this means a remote call can be sent to your blog with the data wrapped up as a formatted text file and an update, delete or amend of a blog post can be done.

By default xmlrpc is disabled on a WordPress installation, to enable it goto settings->writing and click on XML-RPC to enable it.

I once used hosting company which disabled XMLRPC at a low level by blocking the WordPress php file xmlrpc.php from running. To get around this I renamed the file xmlrpc-remote.php and it worked fine, something to consider if your hosting company is being overzealous with your security.  Most of the remote tools allow you to setup where the xmlrpc file is located.

Where Am I Writing This Post from ….

.. you guessed it from the dashboard, I have used many of the methods above, but more as a blog post development tools, I throw my ideas together remotely and sit down in front of the dashboard to write up my post.  You may be different and like to write from your iPhone during your commute, give them a go.

I am often asked is there a plugin for task X in WordPress, nine times out of ten there is, here is how I go about finding plugins.

What Are Plugins

Plugins are extensions of WordPress which allow blog owners to perform a multitude of functions, there are thousands of developers out there beavering away developing code for nearly every eventuallity, they extend WordPress, usually for free, but how do you find the one for your job?

The WordPress Plugin Directory

Here is a link to the offical WordPress repository of all things plugable http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

This is a huge database of plugins here are the stats when this post was written:

5,365plugins, 32,374,772 downloads, and counting

The directory has a searchable database and a tagging system, so if you know what yiou want you can search for it, or if you have a rough idea use the tags, for example if you want a video player, check out the video tag and review the various offerings.

Plugins come with recommendations or star ratings from other users , this is very helpful finding really good plugins.

The same directory can be accessed straight from your WordPress dashboard, if you click on plugins-> add new , there is a search box which feeds into the directory.

Google It

I have found that the WordPress plugin directory search function is a little cumbersome so I prefer to use Google for my searches, try a search in the following format, it will usually bring back some hits that will help:

wordpress plugin {your needs go here}

There is usually a developers site as well as a entry in the directory for the plugin which is indexed more readily in Google than the WordPress directory.

Ask Your Network

I am always asking my social network for hints and tips on WordPress plugins, and I frequently answer others queries on what is the best .  Throw out a tweet on twitter, send out an email, do whatever it is you kids do on Facebook.  There are loads of sociable people wanting to build connections by being helpful to others.

If you need help finding the right fit plugin, tweet me  @wpdude I will do my best to help you.

When All Else Fails

Get one written to your exact specification.  If there is not a cat herding plugin for WordPress write up a specification and post it on one of the freelance sites such as  Elance or Rent-A-Coder.  The pizza munching code monkeys will happily slap togeter some code for you for a reasonable fee.

Professional Finder

I’ve just thought I should charge a fee as a plugin finder, I will find install and test plugins to your specification, this time next year I’ll be a millionaire :). 

Have fun searching for those plugins, but be careful you can get adicted and install too many plugins – what do you mean, of course I need a plugin to capitalise the third e in every sentence.