Word­Press is well known as a blog­ging plat­form, but it can eas­ily be turned into an incred­i­bly pow­er­ful CMS if used right. Here’s a sneak peak of the tips and tricks I rou­tinely use when set­ting up a Word­Press (CMS) pow­ered website.

Choos­ing a Cus­tom Template

In my expe­ri­ence the most use­ful fea­ture is cus­tom con­tem­plat­ing. Cus­tom Tem­plates are won­der­ful because they allow us to:

• Make spe­cific areas of a site unique. Word­Press’ Cus­tom Tem­plat­ing fea­ture makes it easy to make spe­cific sec­tions of your site look com­pletely dif­fer­ent from oth­ers. I’ve seen small appli­ca­tion set up inside of Word­Press cus­tom tem­plates with­out any issues.
• Don’t feel like your con­strained by Word­Press, break free from the WYSIWYG! Let’s be hon­est, not all con­tent needs to be man­aged. If you want you can use cus­tom tem­plates to cre­ate highly cus­tomized lay­outs that are unmanagable by a WYSIWYG. You will then get the SEO ben­e­fits of Word­Press. This is very handy if your agency has an in-house mar­ket­ing team that needs access to metadata.
• Choose what aspects of a page can be edited by clients. This allows for more con­trol over cus­tom ele­ments. If parts of those cus­tom ele­ments need to be man­aged, then I’ll turn to using Cus­tom Fields.
• Cre­ate rapid, dynamic land­ing pages and cas­cade changes through­out them all. Let’s say you wanted 50 land­ing pages for a national busi­ness, one for each state. Much of the con­tent on each page would be the same, but some if it would be dif­fer­ent. You could cre­ate a cus­tom tem­plate includ­ing the con­tent that will remain sta­tic, and allow a small por­tion of the page to be man­aged by the WYSIWYG. If you want the state names scat­tered through­out the sta­tic con­tent you can use Cus­tom Fields again to inject those state names where appropriate.

Cre­at­ing Cus­tom Fields

Next in line for use­ful­ness are Cus­tom Fields, as men­tioned above. These lit­tle guys allow you to man­age smaller bits of text; oth­er­wise known as string. This can be any­thing from the name of state, the cur­rent year or your cur­rent mood. Think of it as a vari­able, ever chang­ing piece of text that can be updated eas­ily from within the Word­Press con­trol panel.

Like most things Word­Press, these fea­tures are very well doc­u­mented in the Codex. If peo­ple are inter­est­ing in this I would be happy to do a fol­low up tuto­r­ial show­ing some real world examples.