After a big search I still hadn’t found one and had little response from the Wordpress forum so I tried the forum over at blogging tips where help was much more forthcoming. Sarah from Stuff by Sarah kindly created a plugin called Page Menu Editor which did exactly what I needed and I am sure will be useful to many people. Sarah’s website also has a lot of other plugins and advice which are well worth a look.

Related posts:

1. Tumbleweed Plugin Revives your old Blog Posts
2. Wordpress as a CMS – Content Management System
3. Create Your Wordpress Design Locally on Your Mac

1. Website examples of word of Wordpress being used as a CMS

As many of you probably know as well as being used as a blog Wordpress can also be used as a CMS or if you didn’t know here are a few examples of sites that use it. (Found via http://www.codex.wordpress.org). Click on any example to go to the sites.

2. My endeavours as a beginner to use Wordpress as a CMS

I have been experimenting with Wordpress as a content management system myself, all be it by adapting an existing template as my coding skills are still not very strong (so please be gentle with me).

My experiments have been on a site I wanted to create for my characters designs The Weather Pops. I was looking to create a simple website fairly quickly as I am attending the brand licensing show in October.

After searching for a suitable theme to start with I settled on the Blixed Wordpress Theme for its simplicity and the fact that the pages did not have a side bar, as I only wanted header navigation on my main pages. I tweaked the CSS on the pages so that the width of the content was the same width as the header.

The newer versions of Wordpress give you the ability to create a Static home page, ideal if you want to use Wordpress as a CMS. You can set this in your admin panel under OPTIONS – READING

What I was really looking for though was something that would allow me to specify both a static front page and a blog page as I wanted my website to function as a website first, with a secondary blog. I found a plugin which allowed me to do this called Filosofo Home-Page Control which allowed me to set both a home page and a “virtual” location for my blog. If you look at http://www.theweatherpops.com/blog it appears that the blog aspect of the site is in a blog folder, when in fact it isn’t, it is just part of the rest of the site.

The website is very basic but it gave me a taste of what could be done with Wordpress.

3. Using Wordpress as a CMS by Jennifer Farley from Laughing Lion Design

http://www.laughingliondesign.net
Jennifer is an experienced web and graphic designer and also a design instructor. Make sure you take a look at her blog for loads of photoshop tutorials. Jennifer’s Laughing Lion Design website also uses Wordpress as a CMS

I took my first tentative steps from using Blogger to Wordpress (WP) as my blogging platform about 8 or 9 months ago. Initially my plans were to use WP solely for blogging. I had read quite a bit about it and lots of the blogs I was visiting seemed to be using it so I decided to give it a go. Within a very short period of using WP I realised that it offered so much more than just making it easy to publish a blog.

So what else can you do with this baby?

It is possible to use WP as a complete Content Management System (CMS). Not only can you write and edit posts easily, you can also write, edit and add PAGES easily and for me that’s what makes it so great. This means that you can set up the design or look and feel of your site and continue to add as many web pages to your site as you need, when you need them. No more pleading with clients to REALLY think about each section they need before you start designing, if they forget something you can add it in later with little or no problems. Many people believe that they must have the blog posts on the front of their website if using WP but the fact is you can set any static page as your home page and have your blog “inside” the main site.

Another factor which makes WP a joy to work with is the number of superb plugins that are available. WP is an Open Source application which means it has been developed by a community of people who are genuinely interested in creating good quality, FREE applications. Plugins could be considered smaller, “helper” applications that plug in to WP and give extra functionality to your site. To find out more about the type of plugins available check out – http://www.codex.wordpress.org/plugins
So let’s take a look at a couple of examples of where you could use WP to manage different types of website.

a. News or Magazine Site

WP lends itself very well to this type of site. Feature articles can be kept on the front page with latest news listed chronologically on another part of the page. You could also set up different category pages such as Fashion or Sport. To see a WP theme using this style, check out Gridlock at http://www.hyalineskies.com

b. Gallery Site
As well as displaying images, gallery sites sometimes allow commenting (no problem for WP) and rating of individual items or lists of top rated items. This sort of application can be put together using WP with the WPG2 plugin – http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpg2/ which allows random, recent, daily, weekly, popular images, and albums to be displayed as image blocks in the Wordpress Sidebar.

c. Portfolio Site
Very similar to a gallery site, the portfolio site usually consists of one or more pages of thumbnails which when clicked allow the visitor to see a larger version of the work. You could of course include the WPG2 plugin to allow rating, but if you’d rather just show your work without them, a wonderful plugin that you can use is NextGen. This is a plugin I have used for many of my clients and I cannot tell you what a time saver it is compared to the old method of individually resizing thumbs and then linking them up. Great stuff.

d. E-Commerce Site
These days, it’s very important to be able to add some sort of E-commerce functionality to a site. Everyone has something to sell, don’t they? This type of site is generally made up of product page with descriptions and thumbnails. Also required is integration with some type of payment service. I use Paypal as the payment service for my clients because it really is simple to setup. But what about the E-commerce functionality? How does that tie in with WP? Well needless to say there is a plugin available …

The imaginatively titled “WP E-commerce” plugin is available for download from http://www.instinct.co.nz It’s one I’ve used on two client sites without too many hassles. The main problem I came across with this was the particular themes I had designed didn’t quite sit right with some of the product pages, but that was my fault rather than the plugin.

So that’s a short round up of just some of the ways you can take your WP blog and turn it into a fully fledged CMS with tons of functionality. You’ll find there are plugins for all kinds of things, the ones I listed above are some that I like and use for my own and my client sites, there are many more out there to play with.

4. A series of links about using Wordpress as a content management system and useful Wordpress Plugins

Semiologic
Semiologic is a Wordpress theme that has been designed so it can be used to build a website rather than just a blog – ie. act as a content management system. I downloaded it put it on a test site to experiment. It basically contains a series of wizards and set up features that you can activate without any coding knowledge. There are a lot of layout variations you can choose from – 1 column, 2 column, 3 column and you can choose the width of your website as well, there are a few skins build in too. What I though looked pretty good was how easily you could duplicate the skin and create/amend it to adapt to your own liking if you had a bit of CSS knowledge. Using widgets you can drag and drop what you have in the sidebar too. (if you choose to have a sidebar)

Related posts:

1. Wordpress Plugin to Change Website Link Names
2. Wordpress Design Showcase
3. Create Your Wordpress Design Locally on Your Mac

A small selection of prizes up for grabs include:

• Logo design from David Airey.
• Blog review from Aaron Russell of miLienzo
• Custom WordPress theme design from Nate Whitehill of Nate Whitehill dot Com. .
• Website critique from Randa Clay of Randa Clay Design.
• Revolution Premium WordPress theme package (personal package) from Brian Gardner.
• One year’s hosting and blog setup from John Boardley of I Love Typography
• Logo Design designed by myself at Graphic Design Blog

To see the full list of prizes and how to enter see David Airey’s Blog

Related posts:

1. 5 Things About Design and Me
2. Poster Design Competition with Big Prizes
3. Is it Wrong for a Graphic Designer’s Website to use a Template?

What is something that would surprise people about you and design?
I never really intended becoming a designer, to be honest when I went and did a 2 year General Art and Design course when I was 18 I thought I would be a fine artist. At the end of the 2 years I was quite enjoying illustration but still was not sure whether to go in this direction or fine art. One of my tutors said why not consider graphic design, so after taking a look at the graphic design course that’s what I decided to do. What I found really difficult at first was working with type, I was used to working with images, but typography was something new.

If you could design one blogger’s site for free, who would it be?
To be honest at the moment I don’t think I would dare offer to design another blogger’s site (even for free) because I am still learning CSS and wouldn’t want to make something that didn’t work in all browsers . However I have been incredibly inspired by Brian Gardner who revealed that in only a year he learned how to code and design beautiful Wordpress templates and am determined that I soon will be more confident.

What blog platform do you prefer, and why?
Definitely Wordpress, which I only discovered about 6 months ago. I am amazed at its general ease of use and how search engine friendly it is. I did once try blogger.com which I found quite inflexible. I have also dabbled with Drupal and Joomla, both of which I found incredibly complicated to use.

Aside from your own, what is your favorite blog theme/template?
I really like Grid Focus which I think Johno at Redsil has used to great effect. I also like the incredibly popular Vertigo theme by Brian Gardner and Copyblogger theme, which is nice and simple and I think could be easily adapted to great effect.

Do you have a blog-reading guilty pleasure?
I don’t really have a blog reading guilty pleasure, but every now and again I like to read invention websites and blogs (is that bad?).

I am tagging James Dempsey – Creative Guy, Lauren – Creative Curio, Joe Drinker – Four Bux, Kat – Katize and Nate at Nate Creates

Related posts:

1. $4000 Worth of Prizes to be Won in a Blog Giveaway
2. Is it Wrong for a Graphic Designer’s Website to use a Template?
3. Wordpress Design Showcase

• Would I really want other people knowing what I am going to blog about?
• Would I want other people to use my research to potentially write a blog post before I do?

Maybe I am being a little paranoid, but take the following scenario:

You are researching the area of direct mail design and your del.icio.us tags feature 5 or 6 websites you intend to feature, a blogger who also blogs in the design niche sees your tags and writes an article about direct mail design using many of the sites you have referenced before you have had chance to write a post yourself.

So while I will occasionally use del.icio.us to tag a reference design site I like, I think I will stick with Google Note Book for my blogging reference and research.

What are your thoughts? Do you use del.icio.us to tag websites in your blog research?

Related posts:

1. Google Notebook for Bloggers and Designers
2. A Quick Update
3. Freelancer Focus 21st December 2007

Elgg is an Open Source (free) program to do just that, I have been reading a little about it in .Net Magazine and hope to have a dabble with it when I can. Elgg can be downloaded and run from your own server and then looks like it has a lot of the features of community sites such as MySpace, Facebook etc. I was looking into scripts like this a few months ago but then they were costing a few hundred dollars (and I didn’t know if they worked), but Elgg is free.

Features of Elgg

• Blogging
• Social networking
• File repositories for individuals and communities
• Podcast support
• Full access controls
• Supports tagging
• User profiles
• Full RSS support
• RSS aggregator
• Create communities
• Collaborative community blogs
• Create ‘friends’ networks
• Import content
• Publish to blog
• Multilingual
• Branding/customisation
• OpenID support – coming soon

Elgg requires requires an Apache web server with mod_rewrite installed and the ability to send emails, plus PHP 4.3+ and MySQL 4.1+ (Postgres can also be used).

There are a limited number of themes currently available but these are editable with CSS and I am sure as Elgg grows in popularity the number of themes will increase.

If any one tries it let us know how you get on.

Related posts:

1. Open University Web Design Course
2. Themedreamer a Dreamweaver Wordpress Extension
3. A Useful HTML and CSS Source

Related posts:

1. 21st May is the Final Day for Entries to the Design Bloopers Competition
2. What Do You Want on Graphic Design Blog?
3. Face Behind my Blog

There are are lots of different sources of free royalty free photos – from image libraries, Flickr and public domain images, it would be nice if you could search for them in one place wouldn’t it. That’s where http://www.yotophoto.com comes in handy. Yotophoto has indexed over a quarter of a million Creative Commons, Public Domain, GNU FDL, and various other ‘copyleft’ images. So you do one quick search and see what images are available from several different sources, ideal for finding images for your blogs or designs.

Each of the images comes with a different usage license so you need to check the restrictions before use.

Related posts:

1. Royalty Free Images – Subscription or Pay as you Go?
2. Your Input on Subscription Royalty Free Images Please
3. Free Fonts for Personal Use – What About Commercial Use?

1. When I was 6 I lived in Houston Texas For 2 Years
Before my Dad retired he used to work for Texas Instruments and was asked to go and work in Houston for 2 years, so I have experienced both the US and UK schooling systems.

2. I used all the 7 letters in Scrabble at once when I was 7
My biggest claim to fame . My Mum is a big fan of word games so when I was a kid we used to play scrabble a lot (hate it now). When I was 7 or 8 I managed to use all 7 Scrabble letters at once.

3. I have a flying phobia
I haven’t flown for many years as I have a major flying phobia, the last time I flew I had to get drugs from the doctor to try and calm my nerves – they didn’t work too well but instead made me laugh uncontrollably for no reason. My phobia stemmed from a bad flight when I was a child, and since then I have hated it. My grandparents used to have to stay and look after me when my Mum and Dad went on holiday because I wouldn’t go on a plane. The terrible thing is I have made my partner Kevin nervous too and he used to be fine.

4. I painted on my first car
I bought my first car for the grand total of £260 back in about 1988 when I was at college. It was a rush bucket and a sickly orange colour. To try and cover up some of the rust I decided to paint Garfield on it (how embarrassing, what was I thinking. I used to get some funny looks when I drove it.

5. My boyfriend went to the same college at the same time but never met.
My boyfriend and I both went to the same college at the same time (he studied quantity surveying), and it was not a very big college. In the canteen there were massive long tables that everyone used to sit on, at some point in the 2 years we probably sat next to each other, but we didn’t meet until about a year after we left.

6. I used to design plastic watches
Not long after college my second job was for a firm that made plastic watches called Tikkers which were popular in Europe (similar but not as good as swatch). I had to create the graphics for the watches as well the literature. They used to use Jeff Banks as a consultant, who was big on “The Clothes Show” at the time, so we had a couple of meetings with him regarding colours and trends. They paid us inhouse designers peanuts but I bet his firm did very well out of it.

7. I tried and failed to learn to play the keyboard
For about 3 years I had keyboard lessons, but I was terrible, I sounded like one of those bad keyboard players you hear when you are on holiday. I just couldn’t learn how to read music and try and find the right keys at the right time. I know play guitar, not very well but better than the keyboard .

8. I once tried to make some skis out of wood (as a kid)
I think I must have been a bit of a weird kid (heck I am probably a weird adult) because I always used to be in my Dad’s garage cutting up wood and trying to make things. When I was about ten I decided I would try and make some skis with two planks, I sawed points at the end and my neighbour helped me bend them with heat. I then attached the tops of some old roller skates without the wheels and made some ski poles out of two old broom sticks. If I had ever used them I would have probably broken my legs. The table tennis bats I made with pieces of wood and net out of a netted onion bag were far more successful .

Take a look at some of the other bloggers who have taken part in this meme

Charity at Design Adaptations
Vivien at Inspiration Bit
Aaron at Milienzo
John at Redsil
Mark Rapp at Unique Epitome
Paul at Reflections

Related posts:

1. Do you Take Design Challenges, or Play it Safe?

Whenever I used to find a new site I thought was interesting I used to bookmark it in Firefox, but my bookmark list became huge and I could never quite remember what some of them were. Google Notebook makes things a lot easier. Google Notebook has a Firefox extension which allows you to open your notebook from the bottom of your browser (while still viewing a web page). So when you find a web page you like, simply open your notebook from the bottom of your browser and press “clip” – which creates a link to the article, then below it add your notes about the article.

Whenever I see a site I am interested in I “clip it” and write a short note, so when I am stuck for inspiration for what to write (or nice designs) I have a look through my Google Notebook. The good thing too is that it is easy to delete an entry, so when I have written about a subject I can delete it and hopefully my Google Notebook won’t end up as cluttered as my bookmarks .

Another advantage of Google Notebook over Bookmarking is that your notebook is available in any machine wherever you are work or home as long as you can login to your google account.

Google Notebook is not just for bookmarking links you can also use it for (surprisingly ) writing notes or reminders for yourself. Take a look at the Google Notebook tour to find out more.

Related posts:

1. Del.icio.us Tags, Should Bloggers Beware?
2. Google Has Gone All Arty
3. Image Manipulation in Firefox