Using Wordpress as a content management system (CMS)

Wordpress has developed into a superb blogging platform. You may not realise how powerful it is as a content management system (CMS). It can be used to power a complex web site, as I will show you now.

We run and own a personal finance news website, which we had developed around a MySql database and PHP front end. It pulls in news feeds from an external service and publishes feature and SEO based articles using various database tables and scripts.

As the site grew, it was become a nightmare to support and publish content into, particularly using a number of authors. After some research I decided on using Wordpress as the core CMS - mostly because of its excellent architecture, theme and plugin availability and it was free!

MoneyHighStreet.com is indexed daily by Google news and with some excellent SERPS results, I had to be really careful to maintain all the same URLs, so the ability to tailor categories and mod the htaccess file in and around Wordpress, was of real importance. Maintaining our good standing with Google, particularly Google news was absolutely critical.

There are some great news themes around, however one stood out above the rest - Revolution News by Brian Gardner. Its a premium theme and therefore isn’t free, but it provided all the functionality that we needed, although it required a lot of PHP programming behind the scenes to get the theme to work as we wanted.

Wordpress and this theme work together brilliantly and after about a months development work, both are integrated into the MoneyhighStreet web site. The great news is that traffic to the site has gone up, as we can now ping sites like Technorati and we have maintained the excellent performance in Google news and natural SERPS.

We’ve learnt a huge amount about how to use Wordpress as a CMS, how to integrate it into a complex web site, and most importantly how to use power techniques to boost traffic.

I’ll explain some of the power techniques and problems that we solved in the next few blogs. See you very soon!