For one of my ecommerce sites I needed a very simple CMS. I always use WordPress for my blogs, and love it, but I wanted to have a more CMS than a blog. After spending a few minutes, I have turned the wordpress blog into a CMS. I’m pretty sure this has been done millions of time before, but I wanted to share it, because I know it will help somebody who’s looking for a similar solution.
Step by Step Guide to Turn a WordPress Blog Into a CMS
- 1) Download and install WordPress.
- 2) Download and install all your plugins. I specifically recommend All in One SEO Pack Plugin. You may setup the details of this plugin at Options > All in One SEO. Always remember to check Use noindex for Categories (no uncheck).
- 3) Under Options > Permalinks, choose Custom, specify below and enter /%postname%/, This way you will not have the post date in your post URL’s. You will have domain.com/post-title/ instead of domain.com/2007/08/23/post-title/ , it will look more like a CMS.
- 4) Do not use WordPress Categories, instead we will use Pages as categories. So remove or do not add Categories to your sidebar.
- 5) This will be your only manual step. You will need to setup the Pages as categories, and enter the link to the right page after each blog post. This may sound extra work, but wordpress categories only pull the summaries of blog posts, and it is not very useful for SEO and usability purposes. You will benefit greatly from SEO perspective. You can also write descriptions, and add images to your categories (pages).
- 6) Since we will not use categories, we need to remove the category link every post. Go to Presentation > Theme Editor, and choose Single Post (single.php), and remove < ?php the_category(‘,’) ?> , this is the link to the appropriate category for that post.
This is it. It took me around 10 minutes to install a wordpress blog onto a brand new domain, and turn it into a CMS.
