would love to also learn from those in the house too, CMS is becoming the order of the day, but I thought wordpess was cms inbuilt?
Try going to wordpress.org...You will find everything you need there! Free themes, plugins, forums etc.
Wordpress is best for blog, although you can turn it into a CMS with some plugins and hacks. You can use BuddyPress to make a "socialable" site with Wordpress. For CMS, Joomla seems more relevant.
i think wordpress is a more than capable CMS for most people's needs...Plus it is very easy to figure out, install and modify. You actually don't really need to hack it at all to use it as a basic CMS.
If you want to blog, use Wordpress, since it is a blogging platform, not a CMS. If you want a CMS choose Joomla or Drupal. Joomla has thousands of plugins to use.
Using wordpress as a CMS is all about how you manage to display your posts or pages on template files, so it make you site look like its running on a proper CMS. There are so many CMS style theme available, my personal favorite is studiopress themes.
Incorrect. Wordpress WAS a blogging platform that has now developed into a fully functional CMS. Although maybe not as developer friendly as Joomla or Drupal, Wordpress provides ample functionality for most people.
CMS = content Managed System... originally wp was set as a blogging platform but with the abundant plugins available then it is possible to add the functionality that you need quickly and easily. unfortunately most free themes do not handle comments very well and include the text "Coments Closed" or similiar when you turn off commenting, making it harder for the non programmer to sety up a site without looking like a blog. IMO Joomla is great for large sites but for the niche / normal business site then wp is ideal
Incorrect. You can put a porsche engine into a volkswagen, but it remains a volkswagen, no matter how hard one wishes otherwise. You can add things to wordpress, the blogging platform, to make it act like Joomla or Drupal does out of the box.
But what happens when over time you replace the engine, then the indicators, then put on some 20" rims, a set of Michelins, add a Porsche body kit, a couple of xenon headlights, Porsche ceramic brakes and nice shiny Porsche badge on the hood?..... It's pretty much a Porsche! And Wordpress does function as a CMS out of the box...Maybe not with as much functionality as Joomla/Drupal out of the box, but certainly alot easier to figure out!
I have worked with all of the main cms platforms at programming level and have found wordpress to be the easiest to work with. Lots of plugins, great support, seo friendly, it really has become a great cms system. A common misconception is that its a "blogging platform", its not, its a real content management system but does blogging.
Craig, I agree wholeheartedly! Now completely off topic (sorry OP, but it seems like you haven't been involved in the thread for a while anyway ), I am creating a guide website similar to your Marbella site...My question to you is how did you go about setting up your directory? Which plugin did you use? Was is easy to add/customize etc? Cheers
I started using http://businessdirectory.squarecompass.com/ plugin but it failed badly, very memory hungry and slow and did not have many nice features for the listings. So I decided to start hacking into the plugin and starting adding my own tables etc and admin pages to more or less get it to where it is today. The "plugin" has the ability for the user to pinpoint them selves on the map, put their listing in multiple categories, create seo friendly listings, photo galleries for the listing, xml site map and lots of other small but important features....its really starting to become a real awesome plugin. It would be fair to say that we do not even use the original plugin file anymore as we have changed it so much. I have also integrated it with WHMCS (which is actually a domain and hosting billing system) and am using that to track payments for the paid listings and also free listings. I am next week building in a new function to track link exchanges as we will do guest posts on other sites and we will exchange links and of course its necessary to track the links. There is not actually many good wordpress directory plugins out there, well not if you want specific things of course. I would say that I have spent around 160 + hours in programing time on the current directory plugin so even if you put it at a basic programmers rate of $10 per hour (which of course is dirty cheap) the costs so far to develop it would be at least $1600....but the payoff in the end is worth it.....as it can make 10 times that in revenue.
Ok, thanks for the info. Seems as though I may end up going a similar route... The one I was looking at is wp-directory. They have a pro version starting at $39. Did you try that out when testing directory plugins?
Oooo. Bad news for me. I just started using the biz directory and was initially excited about the ease of use. Sad to hear how much memory it sucks. How much are we talking about. How many listings do you have. I may potentially have every yarn store in the country listed on mine. I thought about actually using the article diretcory an making each store it's ownarticle bu that made my head spin. Also, I have foudn that you can really customize wordpress to make it look really "non-bloggy"
first you have to choose the most appropriate theme or develop your own. CMS speaks for itself, content management system, so everything about layout should be done separately.