How to use as CMS like this…

Unless you are an experienced developer/programmer, this may be a bit much to tackle. Maybe you should just buy the theme?

Actually I am a developer, more for Java and ActionScript, though.

Buying the theme could be an option, bu I need to change a few things. I just would like to understand how the concept works as I need to tweak it a little bit to fit my needs.

Can you give me some guidance., please?

There is a lot involved in making the site work – too much to detail here, even if I could view the code to provide specifics. I think that the design uses multiple loops: 1 for the ‘Featured’ post at the top, another for the 3 boxes, and a third for the content below.

My best advice is to find free themes having one or more of the features you like and study their code. You might find these useful:

• Arras
• Ikarus
• PixDesign

Thanks.

What I discovered in the code is that it seems like some content, especially content displayed in columns above actual page content, seems to by post. The HTML code gives some hints on that.

So I wonder how they do it? Do they use “normal posts”, maybe a custom post type “Page Element”, and then assign it to the page? How, by using custom fields maybe? And then on the page in the template there is a query getting all posts assigned to the current page.

This could work, but it is not very nice. The content is detached from the page and maintained at another place. Not very user friendly.

And how would you “assign” a post/”page content element” to the page? Only by knowing the page ID or slug? Or is there another way?

Probably done with categories in regular posts. Many of the ‘Featured Article’ type displays use this. For example, in the Ikarus theme magazine style, the query is this:

$the_query = new WP_Query('category_name='. $tn_mz_featured_articles_cat . '&' . 'showposts='. $tn_mz_featured_articles_sum);

where $tn_mz_featured_articles_cat is the name of the featured category set by the user in the theme options.

But what if each page can have different “featured” content? E.g. on each product page it is different?

You could set up a template that gets the featured category from a custom field. Then, create pages that use the template, each having a different category name in the custom field.

Although the design is very different, you can see an example of that in my site for the Bluegrass Miata Club. Look under Events->Event Talk, and sub-topics under Good Stuff. All of those pages use the same template, but show a different category based on a custom field.

Ok, any my assigning a specific category too each post, e.g. “Product 1 – Features” or “Product 1 – Videos” I can later get the posts in that category and display them in my template?

Is that right?

That is correct. The template will read the custom field value and then show all posts in the category named in the custom field. Basically, you are using data stored in the custom field to tell the template which posts to show.

Thanks.

I am starting to think though if this is relly the best approach. Might it not be better to use e.g. the plugin “Custom Field Types” and add a few more “content area boxes” with TinyMCE to the page? Like that I can have the main content and also boxes for other content boxes on a pag which can not be represented by widget areas.

How many featured content areas does a site normally have, anyways?

I have not used that approach, so I can’t comment on it.

I don’t think there is a ‘normal’ for the number of featured areas – use as many or as few as you like.