WordPress is a great blogging platform with a potential of being an easy to use content management system. This is the third article of our three-part series, “The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress”. We are taking a look at 40+ quality and useful WordPress Plug-ins that will turn a simple WordPress site into a blazing fast dynamic one, with easily managed content, that you and your clients will love to use.

The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – Part 1
The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – Part 2

Making Your Content Unbreakable

There is one big drawback to using WordPress as a CMS: the lack of custom content types/groups, an area where developers put restrictions on how clients insert content. This is fairly easy to do with some knowledge of custom fields, but can be a little complicated if your client is new to WordPress. Developers must create workarounds to keep the content clean, portable and relatively unbreakable.

1. More Fields Plugin

More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write/Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post. For example, if you write about books, you can add a box where you can enter title and author, etc. The boxes can be placed either to the right or to the left on the Write/Edit page.

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2. Creating Custom Content Type with Flutter Plugin

Flutter is made precisely for CMS-making, allows you to create custom Write Panel (Posts, Pages, and Theme Options). This, basically, is a custom content type in which you can add your own fields. So, if a WordPress installation gives you two different content types (Post and Page), Flutter enables you to add more Write Panels to your likings. You can create any type of field (File Uploads, Audio, Video, Checkboxes, Dropdowns) to make as simple as possible for your client or yourself to enter content.

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3. Post Templates Plugin

If you find yourself writing posts and pages on a regular basis which have the same structure, then this plugin would be a great addition to your WordPress plugin arsenal. This could be very useful for clients who have no idea how to get started to write a new page or post. Written by Vincent Prat, Post Templates plugin helps you save time blogging by letting you save and recall templates for writing posts and pages.

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4. WP-CMS Post Control Plugin

This plugin gives you complete control over your write options. It not only allows you to hides unwanted items like custom fields, trackbacks, revisions etc… but also gives you a whole lot more control over how WordPress deals with creating content! This helps you use WordPress more like a CMS, alowing you to totally customise what your authors see and use.

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Managing Users and their Roles

1. User Access Manager Plugin

This plugin is useful if you need a member area or a private section at your blog or you want that other people can write at your blog but not everywhere. Features include:

• User groups
• Set seperate access for readers and editors
• Set access by user groups
• Set access by post categories
• User-defined post/page title (if no access)
• User-defined post/page text (if no access)
• Optional login form (if no access)
• User-defined comment text (if no access)

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2. Role Scoper Plugin

Role Scoper is a comprehensive enrichment for access control in WordPress, giving you CMS-like control of permissions. Assign reading, editing or administration roles to users or groups on a page-specific, category-specific or other content-specific basis.

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3. Role Manager Plugin

This Plugin allows you to define and manage multiple subscriber profiles – called Roles and their Capabilities. Also you can create new Roles and Capabilities.

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4. Member Access Plugin

Member Access allows a WordPress administrator to make individual posts and pages accessible only to logged-in members. Member Access allows global configuration so that all posts or pages can be viewable by everyone (the default) or only by members, and it also allows each post and page to override the global setting.

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Better & Smart Navigation

1. WP-PageNavi Plugin

Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog. Example: Pages (17): [1] 2 3 4 » … Last »

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2. WordPress Navigation List Plugin

The plugin gives you the ability to create unique site navigation from your pages, categories and users using a Drag ‘n Drop Interface; arrange the items within a group in any arbitrary order. Navigation groups may be composed of any combination of pages, categories, Authors, (Editors, Contributors, Subscribers), internal/external links and list dividers. This plugin has a lot of other great features, you have to check it out.

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3. Multi-level Navigation Plugin

Adds an SEO friendly, accessible dropdown/flyout/slider menu to your WordPress blog. The plugin generates the code necessary to create a Son of Suckerfish horizontal dropdown, vertical flyout or horizontal slider menu. The plugin produces W3C valid HTML and CSS and only requires Javascript to function for very old browsers such as IE 6. Check out the demo here. The options page allows you to choose from a range of options including:

• What content will be displayed in the menu
• Animation speed (how fast the dropdowns appear)
• Mouseover delay
• Hide delay
• Add a second menu

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4. Yoast Breadcrumbs Plugin

Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO”. They are good for two things: a) They allow your users to easily navigate your site. b) They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme.

5. Simple Sidebar Navigation Plugin

This plugin adds a widget into the Widgets dashboard that allows in a simple way, without writing any PHP code on your part, to create custom navigation in any sidebar pre-defined by your WP theme. Features include:

• Flat and multi-level navigation hierarchy for existing pages and custom links.
• Very flexible conditional appearance options.
• Out-of-the-box Suckerfish support.
• Option to add navigation links with custom title, url and target attribute.
• Unlimited number of navigation widgets.
• Optional setting includes blog posts into the navigation selection list (only pages are available by default).
• Support for custom drop-down menus CSS.

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Having a Multilingual Site

Writing multilingual content is already hard enough, so why go extra mile without making sure you already have a good plan to manage translation on your blog. Check out the plugins below that will help you have a fully featured multilingual CMS.

1. WPML Multilingual CMS Plugin

Turns WordPress sites into a fully featured multilingual content management system (CMS). WPML helps it go the extra mile. Features include: 1) Multilingual content support based on Drupal i18n architecture. 2) CMS navigation allows adding drop down menus, breadcrumbs trail and sidebar navigation (all wigetized). 3) Creates internal Sticky Links so that they never break. You can read more about the capabilities of this powerful plugin here.

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2. xLanguage Plugin

xLanguage is a full featured plugin allows you to blog in different language, and allows user to select which version to read. It works for blog post, page, tags, categories. The user language preferences will also select the right theme and plugins MO files.

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3. qTranslate Plugin

qTranslate makes creation of multilingual content as easy as working with a single language. Here are some features:

• qTranslate Services – Professional human and automated machine translation with two clicks
• One-Click-Switching between the languages – Change the language as easy as switching between Visual and HTML
• Language customizations without changing the .mo files – Use Quick-Tags instead for easy localization
• Multilingual dates out of the box – Translates dates and time for you
• Comes with a lot of languages already builtin! – English, German, Simplified Chinese and a lot of others

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Easily Manage Categories, Pages and Posts

1. Idealien Category Enhancements Plugin

Manage category templates as easily as you manage page templates. Select which apply through the post > categories menu using file names that make sense, not category ID numbers. Now any views of the category (or sub-categories) will render the according to the category template selected. Posts in a given category can also use a category-based template.

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2. pageMash > Page Management Plugin

Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.

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3. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog.

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4. Exclude Pages Plugin

This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you un-check it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).

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5. WP No Category Base Plugin

As the name suggests this plugin will completely remove the mandatory ‘Category Base’ from your category permalinks ( e.g. myblog.com/category/my-category/ to myblog.com/my-category/ ).

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SEO

WordPress by default is pretty decent at letting search engines see what’s going on. But there are a whole bunch of plugins that can be used to make your blog rank better.

1. Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

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2. All in One SEO Pack Plugin

Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines: page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.

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3. Redirection Plugin

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

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4. Permalinks Moved Permanently Plugin

If you just migrated your WordPress blog from one permalink structure to another, and you don’t want to lose Pagerank or traffic that accesses your blog through the old permalinks, this is for you.

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5. SEO Smart Links Plugin

SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

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6. Platinum SEO Pack Plugin

This is an improvised version of the AllinOne SEO plugin. It does everything that AllinOne was doing and also some extra cool features. It takes care of pretty much everything, a bit more advanced than a basic SEO plugin but easy to use as well.

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Highly customizable Widgets

1. Widgets Reloaded Plugin

Widgets Reloaded replaces many of the default widgets with versions that allow much more control. Widgets come with highly customizable control panels. Each widget can also be used any number of times.

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2. Flexi Pages Widget Plugin

Flexi Pages Widget is a highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. Can be used as an alternative to the default ‘Pages’ widget. Features include:

• Option to display sub-pages only in parent page and related pages.
• Option to select and exclude certain pages from getting displayed in the list. Alternatively, only certain pages can be displayed by using the ‘include’ option.
• Option to include a link to the home page.
• Other options include title, sort column/order, hierarchical/flat format, show date.
• Multiple instances of the widget. Unlimited number of instances of the widget can be added to the sidebar.

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3. SidePosts Widget Plugin

With this widget you select the category you want, and all entries with this category, will be shown on the sidebar instead the main blog. You will have then a small blog on the sidebar for those special entries. For each entry, you have the link to the post page. You can select the number to post to show and if must show only the post excerpt or the full post content (Also excerpt with thumbnails can be shown).

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4. Query Posts Widget Plugin

This widget has everything you’ll ever need to show posts on your site without touching code. It’s like having a WordPress developer ready to do your bidding all wrapped up in a widget. All you need is a theme that’s widgetized.

It lets you displays posts by nearly any criteria you can imagine using the query_posts() function, except you don’t need to know anything about PHP to use it. You can do all kinds of neat things: Posts by tag, Posts by category, Posts by author, Posts by time/date, Posts by custom field key and/or value, Choose any number, Show pages, Show the full post, excerpt, or even order them in a list, and much more…

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Must Check Plugins

1. Search Everything Plugin

Search Everything increases the ability of the default WordPress Search, options included: Search Every Page, Search Every Tag, Search Every Category, Search non-password protected pages only, Search Every Comment, Search Every Custom Field, Exclude Posts from search, Exclude Categories from search and more.

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2. Subscribe2 Plugin

Subscribe2 provides a comprehensive subscription management and email notification system for WordPress blogs that sends email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog. Email Notifications can be sent on a per-post basis or periodically in a Digest email.

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3. Exec-PHP Plugin

The Exec-PHP plugin executes PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets. Features include

• Executes PHP code in the excerpt and the content portion of your posts and pages
• Configurable execution of PHP code in text widgets (for WordPress 2.2 or higher)
• Write PHP code in familiar syntax, eg.

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4. WP e-Commerce Plugin

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

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5. NextGEN Gallery Plugin

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. It can turn a regular blog into a powerful photo-blog while giving you all the tools to manage it efficiently and easily.

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6. Contact Form 7 Plugin

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

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7. Viper’s Video Quicktags Plugin

Tired of copying and pasting the embed HTML from sites like YouTube? Then this plugin is for you. Simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box — easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more.

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WordPress is often thought of as little more than a blogging platform. But it’s capable of so much more. Through a little customization and the use of plugins, WordPress can easily be transformed into a full-featured content management system. Here are more than 25 sites who have done just that (and done it well).

This is the second article in the three-part series, “The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress”.

The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – Part 1
The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – Part 3

UGSMAG

UGSMAG is a Canadian hip hop magazine. The home page is laid out in a grid, with featured articles along the left two columns and news on the right. The color scheme and design choices reflect the young, independent audience they attract. The lack of a category list (other than the top nav, which simply lists “News,” “Features,” and “Interviews”) and archives lend the page to looking more like a traditional news or magazine website than a blog.

Subtle changes to individual article pages, such as removing the category labels, the use of a drop cap initial character, and moving the date from it’s usual blog-centric location under the title to the upper-right hand corner of the page all also contribute to the site looking more like a magazine and less like your standard blog.

The Weather Pops

The Weather Pops are a group of weather-related characters available for licensing. The site is simple and straightforward, and an excellent example of how WordPress can be used to build a simple yet powerful website. The pages included on the site offer great examples of how you can incorporate a gallery, contact form, and standard pages into a WP site.

The integration of plugins, such as the NextGEN Gallery plugin used on the gallery page, further improves the functionality of the site. Unless you looked at the code of the site, it’s unlikely anyone would have any idea this site was built using WP.

Temple Bar TradFest

The Temple Bar TradFest is an Irish music and culture festival held each year. The home page of this site bears absolutely no resemblance to a blog. The same can be said for internal pages, too. Individual pages within the site have no date or timestamp, no category or other tags, and otherwise look nothing like a traditional blog post.

Good use of plugins for the gallery and other pages further improves the functionality of this WP installation. This is another site where your average visitor would have no clue it was built on WP unless they checked the source code.

Table Talk

Table Talk is an online store selling dining furniture, tableware, and similar products. The home page features a product gallery with rotating images and the product pages show products laid out in a grid format. The site was built using the WP e-Commerce plugin for the online store functionality. E-commerce plugins greatly increase WP’s ability to be used as a CMS for virtually any kind of site.

Pages within the Table Talk site are set up without comments, date and time stamps, and categories. Categories are used for products, instead.

TP Hire

TPs is a teepee rental company serving Sussex and South East England. This site is actually a great example of using WordPress as a CMS. In addition to the standard pages found on most business sites (news, information, about us, etc.), there’s also a really great gallery page that uses the Lightbox formatting for viewing larger images and the option to view images in a slideshow. The layout of the events page is also an excellent example of how pages can be thoroughly customized within WP to suit the needs of the individual site.

The Art of Catalin Bridinel

The Art of Catalin Bridinel is your basic portfolio site. This site is a bit more blog-ish than most of the others here, but still offers up a good example of how to use WordPress for something other than your traditional blog. Paintings are listed in blog posts, with a large image appearing immediately under the title and a brief description under that. Comments are enabled here, unlike on many other CMS sites. The overall design, lack of sidebars, and other stylistic elements make this look more like a traditional portfolio site than a blog.

Search Inside Video

Search Inside Video is a service that provides searchable transcripts for online video content. Their site is one of the more innovative uses of WordPress as a CMS that I’ve seen. The overall site design is very simple, basically consisting of one long page with anchor tags for different content. Not exactly a revolutionary idea. But the implementation of it is very slick. It’s a great example of thinking outside the box in using WP as a CMS.

P2P Rescue

P2P Rescue is a non-profit organization working to help Sri Lanka and other Southeast Asian countries. The home page offers up basic information and articles about the organization and their cause. The overall site architecture is very simple, but again, bears little resemblance to a regular WP blog. Use of plugins for allowing donations to be made through PayPal further increases WP’s base functionality. The site also includes an online store powered by WP e-Commerce. Other pages include basic information about the organization and a blog (under the “Voices” section).

Myshli

Myshli is the portfolio of Danil Kryvoruchko. The home page of the site offers a gallery of designs, including a JavaScript slideshow of selected works. Individual pages on the site include galleries for each different type of work they do (web, print, etc.) along with an about page. Pages for individual projects show a variety of screenshots and images. The site also includes a blog with a different theme from the rest of the site (the main site has a black background whereas the blog has a white background).

Little White Lies

Little White lies is a website that revolves around movies. The home page is not unlike many other news and magazine websites, offering up links to current content, including interviews and reviews of upcoming and recently released films. Category pages (such as for interviews or reviews) use a different layout than the home page, though it does make them feel a bit more blog-like.

The article pages have stripped out the majority of blog-centric features, but have left in the comments section (many newspapers and magazines have added comment functionality to their articles both in and outside of blogs). The shop section on the blog appears to be the only section not powered by WordPress. Why this is is unclear, as there are some great plugins for e-commerce on WP.

KMX Karts

KMX Karts are manufacturers of recumbent trikes. The home page bears no resemblance to a blog, with the exception of the presence of a somewhat blog-like footer. The site includes a number of different kinds of page templates. There are pages for the different Kart models, pages for accessories, and pages for general company information. Each type of page, because they have their own unique functions, is slightly different from the other pages. The theme, though, is consistent throughout the site. The e-commerce aspects of the site are powered by the Shopp plugin.

IconDock

IconDock sells stock icons to designers. This is one of the prettiest sites I’ve seen using WP as a CMS. The home page is simple while still offering up plenty of content and some icons for sale right on the home page. Navigation is easy, with top nav and links placed within the content (such as the “Browse Icon Library” in the main image on the home page). The e-commerce portion of the site is powered by the WP e-Commerce plugin. The product pages offer up plenty of information about individual icon sets as well as different pricing options.

One of the coolest features on this site, though, is the drag-and-drop shopping cart (just drag an icon or set to the box on the left-hand side of the screen to add it to your cart). The box on the side shows your cart’s contents and removing an item is as simple as clicking the “x” in the corner. It’s definitely one of the slicker shopping cart UIs I’ve seen.

Ginger Restaurant

Ginger is a restaurant in South Africa. The overall site design and architecture are very simple while also being very attractive. The home page offers up basic information, including their hours and phone number. Other pages include more information about the restaurant, an online menu, and a gallery of the restaurant and their food. The gallery uses the JavaScript Thickbox functionality for displaying photos. There’s also a slideshow in the header of their offerings.

A couple of features that really set this site apart from similar sites, though, are their addition of links to their Facebook page and a page that lets you tell friends about Ginger. This kind of functionality is rarely seen on local business sites but should be utilized more often.

Fraai Magazine

Fraai Magazine is a free online magazine offering up creative inspiration. The site uses a the FLV Embed plugin to embed the Flash magazine into the site. (FYI: There is also a plugin available for WordPress, Page Flip Image Gallery, that allows you to create a flip-book style magazine right within WP.)

Other pages on the site include a visual index of articles and a page listing the issues available. The overall site is very simple but it’s an effective implementation of WP and appears to work well for what they’re doing.

Ford Motor Company—Global Auto Shows

This is the site of Ford Motor Company’s global auto show coverage. This is another site where you’d never guess it was powered by WordPress if you didn’t look at the source code. The home page offers up a gallery of featured vehicles, links to the different Ford brands, and a list of recent articles. Other pages on the site include a show schedule, information on concept cars (including a gallery) and information on vehicle types. From the looks of it, there’s a lot of custom programming going on on the site, including some custom Flash modules.

Executive Warfare

This is the site for Executive Warfare, a book by David F. D’Alessandro with Michele Owens. The basic layout of the site is very simple, as is the site architecture. The home page features some basic information about the book as well as a couple of sample articles. Pages contained on the site include a sample chapter, “10 Rules”, Reviews, an “About the Authors” page, and a video page.

The site also has a blog. The page templates are all the same, though the use of images and block quotes gives them each a unique look. Overall, it’s a great site that offers up its content in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and practical.

Cubicle Ninjas

Cubicle Ninjas is a design firm offering up web design and development, graphic design and illustration services. The overall design is bold while still being simple. Their portfolio pages are some of the best I’ve seen, offering up embedded video on some pages in addition to images of individual projects. The Cforms2 plugin (which offers great customization options) is used for their “Request a Quote” page.

Camacho Cigars

This is the site of the Camacho Cigars company. The site architecture is completely un-blog-like. For example, the “Our Story” page contains subpages (“History of Camacho,” “Tobacco in Honduras,” and “Production Tour” linked with icons from the page itself. Other pages on the site include a page detailing their cigars, a “Where to Buy” page, a “Press Room” and a contact page. This is another site that does well by linking their social network profiles right from their home page.

Alpha Multimedia Solutions, Inc.

This is the online portfolio of Alpha Multimedia Solutions. The site’s design is simple and elegant, as is the architecture and navigation. The offer up case studies for their different clients and the pages for these use a slightly different template than their other pages. The use of slideshows for each project in the header also add to the overall look of the site very nicely.

Gaijin Film & Sound

Gaijin Film & Sound is a film, sound and new media production and consultancy company. Their home page offers up basic information about the company, including contact information in the sidebar, a list of services, and an abbreviated list of clients.

The top nav on the site is very effective and includes links to “About,” “Portfolio,” “Production,” and other pages. Their portfolio page is one of the nicest on the site, offering up links to videos within a very aesthetically pleasing layout.

Frisk Design

Frisk Design is a web design company. Their site makes great use of pages within WP for offering up information about the company, their services, portfolio, and contact. A blog is also included, though it’s not the focus of the site. The portfolio has a very elegant layout that offers up information about each site without having to click through to individual project pages.

Feedback Audio

Feedback Audio provides music production, film audio production, and live sound production services. The home page of the site offers up a great overview of the company, their services, and ongoing projects. It’s an elegant design that offers some great visual pop. The individual page templates are simple and the lack of a sidebar keeps this from looking anything like a blog.

Eye-Fi

Eye-Fi is a company that provides SD cards for digital cameras with built-in wifi for transferring photos to your computer. The site has an excellent layout that is at once visually interesting and easy to navigate. There’s no blog on the site, only pages that offer up information about the products, including where to buy and how they work. Overall, it’s an excellent example of a WP-powered site.

Earth911.com

Earth911.com is an environmental information site. The top navigation is one of the best I’ve seen, offering intelligent drop down menus that are only there when you want them to be. The overall site design is exceptional, simple while still be visually pleasing. Individual category pages are also beautifully designed, offering up basic information at the top along with articles related to the topic below. Overall, the site is one of the better designed portals I’ve seen powered by WP.

OriginOne

OriginOne is a clothing company that celebrates human oneness and connectedness. The site design is edgy and complex while still being very user-friendly and easy to navigate. The online store is powered by the Shopp plugin for WP. There’s no blog present on the site. Individual pages are kept simple, with the content as king. The shop itself is beautifully laid out and works well for a shop without a ton of products.

  

This is the first article in the three-part series, “The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress”. Throughout this article, we’ll be focus on many WordPress Theme hacks, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready in hand when developing WordPress websites.

The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – Part 2
The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – Part 3

There are some technical stuff we have to get out of the way first. Let’s take a look at useful, yet rather unknown techniques for a powerful CMS using WordPress. Each section of the article presents a suggestion and provides you with an explanation of the solution for each suggestion.

WordPress CMS Hacks and Tricks

1. Create a static home page

By default, a WordPress home page shows chronological blog post entries — with the most recent post at the top. If your goal is to have a WP-created Page with static information, WordPress will allow you to select a different page as your home page so that you can display more traditional content like information about yourself or your business.

How To »

In your admin area, just go to Setting » Reading. Here you can decide if your home page will display your blog posts or a static page, if you choose a static page you can also choose which page to be your home page from the select box.

Points to take care »

• First problem you may run into when you make a static page your home page is that the link to that page now appears in the main site navigation. Usually the page called “Home” in the main site navigation. This tutorial shows how to remove one of those links from your site navigation so that visitors to your site are not confused by the duplicate link.
• The second problem is you will see that link again in the sidebar widget, the fix is pretty simple. The WordPress Pages navigation widget now allows you to exclude any page from its links by inserting the Page IDs of pages you want to exclude into the “Exclude” box in the Pages widget.

2. Customized Navigation bar

Adding too many pages to a WordPress blog that has a navigation bar in the header can really make your WordPress blog a mess. There are options to control what pages are shown in the navigation bar and even a way to add external links.

How To »

The Template Tag, wp_list_pages(), displays a list of WordPress Pages as links. It is often used to customize the Sidebar or Header. You can simply edit the header.php file and exclude any page id you want, you can also include the pages you want. So now the code of the top nav bar will look like this:

<ul id="pagenav">
       <li class="<?php if ( is_home() ) { echo 'current_page_item'; } ?>">
             <a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>">Home</a>
       </li>
       <?php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=&exclude=17,38' ); ?>
</ul>

Creating Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation in WordPress »

A common navigational scheme, parent pages on top and child pages (if they exist) on bottom:

How To »

Darren Hoyt goes through a nice solution to help us: 1) query the page, 2) determine if there are child pages, and 3) properly highlight both the .current_page_parent and .current_page_item links.

<ul id="nav">
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=1'); ?>
</ul>

<?php if($post->post_parent)
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->post_parent."&echo=0"); else
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ID."&echo=0");
if ($children) { ?>
<ul id="subnav">
<?php echo $children; ?>
</ul>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php } ?>

And then he show us how to use CSS to make sure the :active and :hover states display correctly whether or not subpages exist — if they do, the primary nav uses current_page_parent, if they don’t, it resorts to simply current_page_item.

Use breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are great for so many reasons: usability, SEO, etc. In terms of plugins, there are many options, my favorite is Yoast’s Breadcrumbs, because it’s easy to implement. Another breadcrumbs plugin, gives you a new template tag called breadcrumb_trail() that you can place anywhere in your theme. Once that’s done, it’ll display a hierarchical menu of where the current visitor is on your site. It’s quite useful if you have more than a few pages or posts.

3. Making Your Content Unbreakable

There is one big drawback to using WordPress as a CMS: the lack of custom content types/groups, an area where developers put restrictions on how clients insert content. This is fairly easy to do with some knowledge of custom fields, but can be a little complicated if your client is new to WordPress. Developers must create workarounds to keep the content clean, portable and relatively unbreakable. Darren Hoyt discussed some solutions for this issue, probably not the best solution out there but could get the job done.

How To »

Luckily, WordPress has a solution for us. Liam is using a little something called add_meta_box. This is a detailed and quite useful tutorial on creating custom write panels for the WordPress Write Post page. Custom write panels are most useful for customized installations of WordPress and could be used to add many different types of information into a post both easily and quickly.

This is is a great example of how useful and flexible Custom Fields can be in developing a full CMS with WordPress.

How to preset text in the WordPress post editor »

There are built-in actions and filter hooks that allow us to change things. Justin Tadlock is showing us how to use a simple filter to preset text in the WordPress post/page editor. This technique will work with both the visual and HTML editor. This technique might be very useful for clients who want to create a new page and not sure how to start, you can just create a demo text for them and they will just modify using your template post.

All you have to do is open functions.php in your favorite text editor and input this PHP code:

<?php
add_filter( 'default_content', 'my_editor_content' );
function my_editor_content( $content ) {
$content = "<h3>Title of the first paragraph</h3>
<p>description</p><p class='img'><img src="" alt=""/></p>";
	return $content;
}
?>

It’s as simple as that. Just a few lines of code. I added here some XHTML code so the client won’t need to do this himself.

4. How to widgetize your theme

WordPress Widgets are also known as “sidebar accessories” which are WordPress Plugins or add-ons to your WordPress blog sidebar. This could come in handy for your client, WordPress Widgets allow the easy addition of design elements, gadgets, content, images, and more to your WordPress sidebar to personalize the blog without knowing HTML, PHP, or any code.

How to Widgetize Your WordPress Footer »

Many themes have a widgetized sidebar or even two. But what about widgetizing your WordPress footer. Sometimes it’s a good to have widgets at the bottom of the blog for links to other posts and maybe some details about yourself. In this simple tutorial you will learn how to create 3 footer widget areas which can be edited from the admin area of your WordPress installation.

Simply open your functions.php file in your current theme folder, and replace the current sidebar widget code with the one below:

<?php
 if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
 register_sidebar(array(
 'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
 'after_widget' => '</li>',
 'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
 'after_title' => '</h2>',
  ));
  register_sidebar(array('name'=>'subfooterleft'));
  register_sidebar(array('name'=>'subfootercenter'));
  register_sidebar(array('name'=>'subfooterright'));

What this does is registers 3 sidebars called subfooterleft, subfootercenter and subfooterright which will correspond to the left, center and right widgets in the subfooter. A detailed tutorial would be great for you to guide you through the steps of styling the footer widgets, adding the markup and finally adding the widgets through the Admin area » Widgets

How to widgetize your page menu in WordPress »

We all feel the pain of having to customize our page menus for pretty much any WordPress theme. There are several methods that people have been trying to overcome this one frustrating thing with WordPress, but the method Justin Tadlock is describing here is easy and requires little coding. Your theme needs to use the wp_page_menu() function to add its page menu so you can completely widgetize your menu.

Open your theme’s functions.php file and add the code below:

<?php

register_sidebar( array(
	'name' => 'Page Menu',
	'id' => 'page-menu',
	'before_widget' => '<div id="page-nav">',
	'after_widget' => '</div>',
	'before_title' => false,
	'after_title' => false
) );

add_filter( 'wp_page_menu', 'my_page_menu' );

function my_page_menu( $menu ) {
	dynamic_sidebar( 'page-menu' );
}
?>

Now, head over to the Widgets page in your WordPress admin. Select the Page Menu widget area and create your menu there using the different methods described in this great tutorial.

5. Custom post and page templates

Page templates let you change the design and/or functionality of particular pages by using a certain template. This new Page Template will then override the default page.php Page Template included with your Theme. If you want to use another page template, simply open your Write Page admin panel » Attributes and select the template you want for that page. More details can be found here.

Set Up Custom WordPress post Templates »

You can use a specific post template for single posts that you want to function differently. In a recent project i worked on, i didn’t want the posts in the news category to look or behave like the rest of the posts, i thought it would be better to have another template for the posts in the “news” category. I found a smart solution, you will need to put only the code below in your single.php file in your current theme folder:

<?php
$post = $wp_query->post;
if ( in_category('13') ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/single13.php');
} else {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/single1.php');
}
?>

Here we are telling WordPress: If the post is in category ID number 13, display single13.php. If not in category ID number 13, display single1.php. Now you just create 2 new files “single13.php” & “single1.php”, and do whatever you want to do. From this, you can make as many single post page looks as you want, as long as they are styled by their category.

WordPress Single Post Templates- this post goes through a simple technique to have post templates like page templates. Austin recommends using a filter in your functions.php. Here’s the code to add to your theme’s functions.php file. (be sure you paste this code between tags):

add_filter('single_template', create_function('$t', 'foreach( (array) get_the_category() as $cat )
{ if ( file_exists(TEMPLATEPATH . "/single-{$cat->term_id}.php") )
return TEMPLATEPATH . "/single-{$cat->term_id}.php"; } return $t;' ));

This technique solve the multiple categories issue (a post is included in more than one category) since it cycles through all the categories in the array and checks to see which one of them has an associated post template. When it finds one, it uses the post template file, but if it doesn’t, then it falls back on the default single.php template.

6. Permalink Structure

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. We won’t go through the usual techniques to how to beautify your links and get rid of the post id at the end of the url, display date, etc…

Advanced Customization of WordPress Permalink Structure »

Here is an advanced tutorial for customizing your permalink structure of WP’s pages system.

How to remove the “category” suffix in the category permalinks

Today we want to check out “>how to make your category url don’t look like they are blog categories, so instead of:

http://yoursite.com/blog/category/category-title/

We have:

http://yoursite.com/category-title/

How to remove Category Base from WordPress Permalinks

Some bloggers do not want to have any category base in their Permalinks structure. WordPress does not allows you to do it. Here is how you can get it done.

7. Create a sitemap for the whole website

Google XML Sitemaps- This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

8. Disable Comments and Trackbacks

Now you want to disable comments on your blog, go to Discussion Settings » Default article settings to disable the comments on your blog. You can also edit your single.php file and delete the code that calls the comments.php file.

9. Use PHP in your pages and posts

Conventional ways of creating advanced pages in WordPress was to create all your XHTML/PHP/CSS in a template file and then create a page and link the two, this works, but you end up with loads of template files and editing them is a pain and not very manageable.

Using one of these 2 plugins will allow you to easily add any code such as XHTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript directly inside of the post box for your posts and will be executed as it should be.

Exec-PHP or runPHP plugins to executes PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets.

10. Creating Custom Content Type with Flutter

Flutter is made precisely for CMS-making, allows you to create custom Write Panel (Posts, Pages, and Theme Options). This, basically, is a custom content type in which you can add your own fields. So, if a WordPress installation gives you two different content types (Post and Page), Flutter enables you to add more Write Panels to your likings. You can create any type of field (File Uploads, Audio, Video, Checkboxes, Dropdowns) to make as simple as possible for your client or yourself to enter content.

Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS

There are the certain points we need to think about before choosing and designing a website where WordPress will be used as the CMS. Devlounge has shared “Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS“, this is a must read post for anyone thinking about using WordPress as CMS. Below you will find just few of the points, you need to check out this article to get a better understanding.

• Is WordPress the correct CMS? Will it fit the needs? Is the translations available for the WordPress backend good enough? How will it be upgraded?
• Will I need to extend WordPress using plugins? Are any hacks to the core necessary, because if they are, how will I make sure that these won’t break when the core is upgraded?
• What types of content will there be, and what should be deemed static (i.e. use Pages), and what is flowing updates (i.e. Posts)? How will I present this, and what is the main type of content?
• How will the permalink structure be? Should it really say “category”, why not “view” or “updates” or something else?

WordPress CMS Theme Implementation Tutorials

- WordPress CMS Part 2: Theme Implementation- A very detailed tutorial taking you through the steps to create your CMS featured theme.

- WordPress CMS Part 2: Theme Implementation- A very detailed tutorial taking you through the steps to create your CMS featured theme.

- How to Use WordPress for a Portfolio Site – Part 1 & Part 2- Using WP for a portfolio site (primarily graphics and design-based).

- How to use WordPress to run a magazine, news website

Must Read Posts

Five Ways to Familiarize Clients with WordPress- What developers have tried to make their clients more comfortable with WordPress. Here’s a wrap-up of the best and most common suggestions.

Don’t mess with my Toot Toot- This is a tutorial about a plugin the author created to add a very simple new and different type of post.

Using WordPress as CMS- A series of posts on Using WordPress as a CMS – from the more theoretical to the more practical (sub)topics.

WordPress as a CMS- In this screencast, Chris Coyier shows off a number of WordPress features that make WordPress very “CMS-like”.

Please share your experience and what was the best techniques you found to be very useful when developing WordPress as a true CMS platform.

  

This is the last article in the four-part series, “Powerful guide to master Your WordPress”. We are taking a look at 60 Creatively unusual WordPress blog designs that are a little bit more distinctive from the regular WordPress Blog designs.

You can also take a look at other 3 articles in this series :

• Mastering Your WordPress Theme Hacks and Techniques
• 45+ Must See WordPress themes
• Powerfull List of WordPress Lifesavers Plugins
• WordPress Security Tips and Hacks

So let’s get started and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-Feed to keep track on our next post.

Amazing Designs full of Colors

1) Raduceuca

Grunge Style Design

4) Daninko

vector illustration

8 ) Octwelve

Dark Designs

14) Razvanstavila

Minimalist

19) RVCAclothing

Stunning 3 Column Designs

22) No Ventilador

Beyond the 2 Column Design

27) Bigsweaterdesign

Super Clean Designs

33) WordPress

Grid Designs

38) Chrizdee

Further Reading on Grid Design

65 Resources for Grid-Based Design

Artistic WordPress Designs

42) WebDesignerWall

Simply Elegant WordPress Designs

47) Papel Continuo

Further Resources for WordPress Blog Designs

WP-Premiums- Showcase attractive customizations of WordPress Premium Themes and provide screenshots of some of the best websites using them.

Looppress- A showcase of beautiful WordPress blog, designs and themes.

WE Love WP- WordPress Website CSS Design Gallery.

  

This is the third article in the four-part series, “Powerful guide to master Your WordPress”. We are taking a look at 77+ quality and useful WordPress Plug-ins, which have been very handy and saves us lots of time and effort to run our blog the way we wanted.

You can also take a look at other 4 articles in this series :

• Mastering Your WordPress Theme Hacks and Techniques
• 45+ Must See WordPress themes
• 60+ Unusual WP Blog Designs
• WordPress Security Tips and Hacks

So let’s get started and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-Feed to keep track on our next post in this series.

Post related Plugins

1) WP-Sticky WordPress Plug-in - Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog where you can choose to “stick” certain posts at the top of your blog.

• Live Demo View it Here | Download

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

User related Plugins

6) WP-Polls- Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog where you can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.

• Download Plugin: Download

• Download Plugin: Download

• Download Plugin: Download

Stats

9) Google Analytics for WordPress- This Plug-in easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code to all pages within your blog. That’s it’s main functionality, it also Tracks outgoing links, tracks downloads, Tracks AdSense clicks, Tracks image search keywords and tracks extra search engines.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Contact Form Plugins

12) cforms- cforms is a Plug-in for WordPress, offering deployment of multiple contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page. The form submission utilizes AJAX, falls back, however, to a standard method in case AJAX/Javascript is not supported or disabled.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Live Demo: Here
• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Photos Plug-ins

15) Photo Dropper WordPress plugin- This new Plug-in searches flickr for Creative Commons licensed photos for you to add to your WordPress blog.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Navigation

18) Creating a drop down navigation menu using jQuery- Create a navigation menu with drop down menus for you WordPress blog, with a slick jQuery animated sliding down for menus and fading out.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Further Reading on Navigation Plugins

Create drop-down menus with WordPress Plug-ins and themes

Administrative Plugins

23) Dashboard Editor- Allows you to add or remove whatever you want from the WordPress dashboard to be more useful to you.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

RSS

28) From RSS- If you want to give your RSS subscribers a little bit of extra content, or simply leave out some annoying footer about subscribing to the RSS feed.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Database and Server

34) WordPress Database Backup- This popular Plug-in allows users to schedule automatic database backups by creating backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Comments

37) Subscribe to Comments 2.1- Allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments on the subscribed post. It is one of the most popular WordPress Plug-ins out there cause it helps encouraging the commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Further Reading on Comments Plugins

30+ Plug-ins for WordPress Comments

CMS

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Further Readings on WordPress CMS Plugins

Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins

Social bookmarking Plugins

47) Sociable- Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites like Facebook, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Digg and many many others.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

SEO

51) All in One SEO Pack- Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines by automatically optimizing your titles for search engines , generating META tags automatically and avoiding duplicate content found on WordPress blogs.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Speed up Your WordPress Plugins

56) WP-Cache- WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database.

• Download Plugin: Here

Further Reading on speeding up your WordPress

Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours

Fignting Spam, Splogs

Splogs are weblog sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/ or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Splogs (spam blogs) scrape content from others and re-post the material as their own in order to earn money.

57) Digital Fingerprint — detecting content theft- To combat splogs use of your content, this Plug-in will place a digital fingerprint into blog posts. Once embedded in your post, the Plug-in allows you to quickly and easily search the blogosphere for references to the digital fingerprint.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Further Readings on Spam Fighting Plugins

30 Spam Fighting WordPress Plugins

Advertising Plug-ins

61) Got Banners- Got Banners is a simple banner rotating Plug-in for WordPress that displays all the banners provided simultaneously. But, in a different random order each time.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

WordPress Developer’s Plug-ins

64) Code Markup- Code Markup is a WordPress Plug-in that makes it easy to include program code samples in your posts. You can even include HTML markup in the code sample; Code Markup magically knows which characters should be displayed as code and which should be rendered as HTML

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Tags Plug-ins

69) Category Cloud Widget- The Category Cloud Widget is a widget that displays your categories as a tag cloud in your sidebar.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Further Readings on WordPress Tags Clouds

Best Tagging Tools and Plugins

Archive Plugins

72) Extended Live Archive- This Plug-in creates dynamic archive page that helps your readers to easily navigate your archive, has the ability to sort posts by tags, categories, date and popularity.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Live Demo: View it Here | Download Plugin: Here

Worth Checking Plugins

74) Author Exposed- Author Exposed is a simple WordPress Plug-in that allows your visitors easy and elegant way to see more details about the post author.

• Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

• Live Demo: View it Here |Download Plugin: Here

• Download Plugin: Here

Further Readings on WordPress Plug-ins

Tips to Speed Up WordPress Plug-in Development

5 Advanced Techniques for Creating Plug-ins and Widgets for WordPress.com