WordPress is pretty damn cool

It’s been a while since I’ve written a post (mostly because of life happening and a freelance project), and I thought I would get back into the swing of things by writing something on WordPress. I’ve been doing more work in it lately and have had the pleasure of seeing some cool things done by my manager. One of which is to get different menus, using WordPress’ Menu Manager, to display on different pages. For instance, you have a Services page that you want to display a services menu in the sidebar, and a portfolio page with a different menu. It is stuff like this, and the amount of support you can find on the web that makes me really like WordPress. Aside from it being relatively easy to theme.

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Using WordPress as a fully functional CMS

UPDATE 6/1/11: Added one line to the end of the second chunk of code (wp_reset_query). If you do not have this and place that block above the loop, the id does not get reset and will display the wrong content. Worked if after the loop, but probably a bad idea no to include it.

NOTE: Added one line of code to exlude this content block from search (‘exclude_from_search’ => true,).

There are plenty of ways to use WordPress as a CMS (content management system). There are different plugins that allow you to do it, like MultiEdit, but recently I have been working on building the new corporate site for work, and saw something that my manager did to make WordPress into a very powerful CMS. Normally I build sites in WordPress so that the client can make changes to the main content and widget areas themsevles. That doesn’t require any additional code or tinkering. But what if you need additional areas that the client has to be able to edit themselves as well?

In come “custom post types” to the rescue. I will show you how to easily do this to your own WordPress site, and it only takes a few minutes. I don’t know where my manager got the code for it, but I was impressed with how easy it is.

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Put it on your static home page

My main site is static since I am the only one who works on it. Just didn’t seem to be any point to creating in it WordPress. That doesn’t mean though that I don’t want some things from my blog showing up on my home page. I wanted the recent blog posts showing up in my sidebar, and after a bunch of searching (wasn’t quick like I thought it would be) I ‘kind of’ found what I was looking for, but had to modify it. If you are looking to do the same kind of thing though, it is actually quite easy. There are two small chunks of code that you need: the first is to open the database connection that your blog is linked to, and the second is to actually display the posts.

You don’t even need to know PHP!

Indeed you don’t, that is how easy this is. The first part is to put this code at the top of your page:

< ?php 
define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
require('blog/wp-blog-header.php');
?>

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