Use WordPress As a CMS: Plugins, The Bare Minimum

How to use WordPress as a CMS is a popular question. Especially when you want to quickly throw up what is sometimes called “The Brochure Site”. Yep, that hoary throwback to Web 1.0, the static site. You’re going to template the site in PHP anyway, right? Why not just use WordPress and give your client the option of updating their content, while a million or so developers are working behind the scenes to make sure the code powering your site is the best it can be? Not a tough choice.

Besides, no one said it had to be completely static, did they? Here’s the rundown on a few plugins, the bare minimum you’ll need, that’ll turn a simple static site into a blazing fast dynamic one, with easily managed content, that you’ll love to use.

Random Content Excerpts

If we’re going to use WordPress as a CMS we need to use WordPress. That means not totally giving up Posts for the comfort of Pages. We want to take advantage of them. Think of Posts as shift-able content. Content that you can easily move around. Thanks to query_posts we can shift content by date or category or even well, just randomly shift it—with a plugin.

Except this plugin doesn’t really exist. That is, it doesn’t have a home. I just happened to stumble across it on the WordPress support forums and the person posting it there just happened to stumble across it on a mailing list. But it’s out there and we can use it.

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/*
Plugin Name: Random Posts Query
*/
function query_random_posts($query) {
return query_posts($query . '&random=true');
}
class RandomPosts {
function orderby($orderby) {
if ( get_query_var('random') == 'true' )
return "RAND()";
else
return $orderby;
}
function register_query_var($vars) {
$vars[] = 'random';
return $vars;
}
}
add_filter( 'posts_orderby', array('RandomPosts', 'orderby') );
add_filter( 'query_vars', array('RandomPosts', 'register_query_var') );
?>

Here’s an example of it in use with query_posts and the Sandbox theme:

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<div id="testimonial">
<?php query_posts('category_name=Testimonials&amp;showposts=1&amp;<strong>random=true</strong>'); ?>
<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post() ?>
<div id="post-<?php the_ID() ?>" class="<?php sandbox_post_class() ?>">
<h2 class="entry-title">What People are Saying About Us</h2>
<div class="entry-content">
<?php if(function_exists(the_excerpt_reloaded)) {
the_excerpt_reloaded(50, '', 'none', TRUE, 'Continue reading »', FALSE);
} else {
the_excerpt(''.__('Read More <span class="meta-nav">»</span>', 'sandbox').'');
} ?>
</div>

I’ve highlighted the important part: &random=true. What we’re doing here is querying the database with very specific criteria, our post must be in the category named Testimonials, we only want one post and we want it selected randomly. Sort of turns the Loop into a knot—but regardless, we get what we want, a randomly selected post. In this instance, from the category Testimonials. Use this plugin and code on a custom front page or about page and you’ve got some dynamic content happening.

Random Posts Query

Cleaner WordPress Excerpts

Notice another plugin in the code above? I’m also using the Excerpt Reloaded.

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<?php if(function_exists(the_excerpt_reloaded)) {
the_excerpt_reloaded(50, '', 'none', TRUE, 'Continue reading »', FALSE);
} else {
the_excerpt(''.__('Read More <span class="meta-nav">»</span>', 'sandbox').'');
} ?>

The Excerpt Reloaded cleans up the less than desirable WordPress excerpting function and turns it into something nice and 1 million times more intuitive, giving visitors something to click on (“Continue reading »” in the code above) right after they read an excerpt. No more strange bracketed ellipsis staring blankly back at us.

The Excerpt Reloaded

Category Pages as, well, Pages

Now in this case, if we’re going to go to all the trouble of highlighting content randomly, by category, do we really want to pack it down into a category and keep it there? What if I wanted to make a category page showing off all this random content? And not have it trapped in an ugly URL like this:

http://example.com/category/testimonials

But instead sit pretty near the top of the root-chain like this:

http://example.com/testimonials

Well, I’d use a plugin of course. Check out Top Level Categories by former MicroSoft developer Filipe Fortes. It pretty much does exactly what we want to do.

Top Level Categories

Professional Typography—Automatically

The benefit of using WordPress as a CMS is that it’s incredibly easy to edit content on your site. The downfall is that it’s incredibly easy to edit content on your site. Do you see what I’m getting at here? I sweat over my layouts and the presentation of content. Making a little change here, a little tweak there. Others… not so much. If it only got rid of widows (that one lonely word hanging out on the last line of a paragraph) Typogrify for WordPress would be a design godsend but it doesn’t end there. It fixes a whole bunch of web-type oddities and keeps your content looking fine. Don’t believe me? Check out what John Boardley has to say about WP-Typogrify at I Love Typography.

WP-Typogrify

Ironically, It Really is Static: WP Super Cache

Since we’re looking to use a dynamic CMS to power a static site why not finish it up by actually making it literally static? WP Super Cache makes static copies of your dynamic pages and serves those up instead while at the same time gzipping everything and speeding up you download times.

WP Super Cache

Even More Plugins

The list doesn’t end there. There are even more great WordPress plugins that will help you perfect the management of your “simple” brochure site. I’ll keep updating this list as I find more only adding the best. You can help out by leaving your suggestions/plugin-critiques in the comments.

• Google Analytics for WordPress
• All-In-One SEO
• Backup WordPress
• Google XML Sitemaps Generator
• Login Lockdown
• WP-ContactForm: Akismet Edition
• Feed Control (Suggested by Kevin)