Using WP as a CMS with Separate Installs

Hi there,

I want to be able to use WP because of the community features it has but don't want it to look ike a blog. Its for a ravel magazine type site and there will be a traditional travel blog as part of the site but there will be other sections as well. For the other sections I want to have a unique sidebar for each because my main navigation will be up top. So for example, the blog bit will have a traditional blog setup in the sidebar, then I want an area with guides that will have a list of countries in the sidebar, then I'll also have a featured articles bit that will use the sidebar to divide the articles into categories. All of these will be unrelated completely.

I am thinking that to accomplish this I will need to install WP to three separate directories and then build a custom index.php page for the main page and any other pages that aren't related.

Is this feasible? I've had a look at magazine-style themes but haven't been able to fnd anything that wil let me have entirely different sidebars for each section.

Any help is much appreciated!

Thanks,
Kirsty

 

I don't see any problem with that

 

I'm pretty sure three installs is unnecessary. I believe you can do what you want by simply adding a few template files. A premium theme like www.revolutiontheme.com might be an easy way to accomplish it.

 

Depending on the page, you can code what goes in what sidebar.

Something like:

<?php if (is_page('About')) {
echo "do something here for only your About page"; } ?>

Code (markup):

 

they are not necesary, but why not have them? Having 3 redundant wp installes, each for seperate part of webpage will give you more stable and safer work of your webpage. Disk space can't be a problem, wp is small when it installs, so why bother with some exotic setups and themes.

 

Try WordPress MU. I think that's what you're looking for.

 

Why would three installs be safer than one, with a few simple templates added? It sounds more like a royal pain in the butt frankly - you have to login multiple times to work on different sections of your site, you have to make design changes to three sites instead of one, etc. Sounds like a potential productivity drain to me.

 

Thanks for the ideas guys. I'm sure there are ways to accomplish what I want but I'm not sure I'm at the level to be able to pull them off so this is a quick fix for now. I'll check out the things you've suggested though and see if I can manage them. Three installs is a bit of a pain because it means having to upload my theme 3 times whenever I make a change, I doubt I'll be able to have things like top commentator across all three installs etc.

Thanks again, lots to think about!
Kirsty

 

Do some research into page templates. WordPress would then give you a menu when you're creating the page, you then select the template you want to use.

 

If you are simply asking if it's possible then of course it is... Now this seems stupid as I would never do this... I would use a better cms for example drupal or joomla... But if you are fixed on WP I would recommend trying to do one install.. It makes life easier.

 

drupal and joomla are not better CMS than wordpress...

 

then you obviously dont know anything about drupal or joomla they are far more advanced in so many ways. I am not going to sit here and argue a "fact" .

I am also not saying wordpress is bad at all. Yet it was created to be a blog script.

please do some more research before making comments like these