Improved ‘page’ support?

  • Hey, I’m doing my site in WordPress and I’m noticing a few drawbacks with Pages, compared to Posts.

    A page cannot have an “excerpt”, which I would ordinarily use as a description of the page, linked from its Page Parent. Pages cannot be set to Draft or Private, and so are always effectively Public. Also, a page’s parent cannot be set to give a list of pages in that category; I would like any parent page to work somewhat like a category does for posts, instead of being an open page.

    Has anyone tried to use WordPress to build a website with various pages of content in addition to the blog ( https://www.solidsharkey.com would be a good example of this type of website)? Perhaps you could give some advice? Should I try to work around the limitations of the current WordPress ‘pages’ system, or use WordPress only for a blog and handle all articles via a home-coded system? Or am I using the wrong tool for the job altogether, and should use some other system, such as Drupal?

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  • WordPress can be used as a CMS (Content Management System) and there is a WordPress Theme that is specifically for WordPress CMS. I use it as one, but it takes some work to get around the chronological order, but that really only impacts what is seen on the front page and the order the articles appear on category pages.

    The Pages in WordPress can be used as articles, but they are new to WordPress and only meant to be used for information that does not move within the chronological function of a blog, like “About”, “Contact”, “Sign up” and so on. They do what they do. They are not meant for anything else.

    Part of this is semantics, getting your head around the idea that “articles=posts” and not web “pages”.

    With the help of some great plugins, like ColdForged’s Enhanced Post View, Skippy’s In-series (connected articles in a series) and Coffee2Code’s Customized Post Listings, you can make WordPress into a CMS.

    If you need more than that, use the right tool for the job, and WordPress might not be it. It’s a lot of work to change your way of thinking to make WordPress into a CMS, but it can and has been done. Still, it is blogging software whose popularity is growing and people want to make it fit their mold, which luckily, they can. But it takes work.

    Thread Starter jonathandrain

    (@jonathandrain)

    So is it more effort to code one’s own CMS system from scratch, or to modify WordPress?

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Applying the Semiologic theme and its companion plugins will effectively turn WordPress into a CMS. So, if it’s between turning WordPress into a CMS or making your own, I’d say that it’s easier to turn WordPress into a CMS.

    https://www.semiologic.com/projects/sem-theme/

    It will ALWAYS be more effort to write your own code unless you find great pleasure in the process.

    Here are some other resources:

    https://www.semiologic.com/projects/sem-theme/
    https://www.chrisjdavis.org/university/wp-cms/

    And you can check my site for tips on how I did it. I’m still writing them and posting, but there is a good start of information there to pour over.

    It all depends upon what you want to do and how much effort you want to put into getting it to work “your way”. With WordPress, you may have to make some compromises, and you certainly have to start thinking differently.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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