Creating a blog part three Using Wordpress as a simple CMS

This article is the third in a series of articles about the popular blog software ‘Wordpress’. In this article I had intended to show how to use Wordpress as a simple Content Management System (CMS) rather than a blog. However, in the gap between my writing the last article and this one, Wordpress 1.5 was released which contains new functionality called “Themes” and so this article will use the new Wordpress themes in order to create a site that uses Wordpress as a CMS type application rather than a blog.

Installing or upgrading to Wordpress 1.5

This article assumes that you have a working copy of Wordpress 1.5 installed on your server with the default template installed – basically just what you get after installing for the first time.

Creating a blog part two

This article is the second in a series of articles which discuss how to create your own blog using software available for download. In the last article I explained how to download and install the popular, free, blog system “Wordpress”, and by the end of the article we had a running installation of Wordpress using its default template.

In this article I will be discussing how to create your own template for a blog. I will be using Wordpress as my example however the techniques used here could just as easily be applied to another blog with a similar templating system, and while this is a follow-up to the first article it could be followed as a standalone article if you already have blog software such as Wordpress installed and want to know how to create your own templates for your blog.

Creating a blog

A “blog”, short for “web blog” is an online diary or journal, organised in date order. Blogs are popular as a personal site – a way to share places that you have visited online, your daily life or thoughts on a particular subject. There are personal blogs on almost every imaginable subject. More recently businesses have discovered that a blog is a powerful way to communicate in a more informal manner with customers, to keep them up to date with industry developments, or highlight interesting features of products. Macromedia are a good example of a company that is using blogs in this way, you can read blogs written by several of their employees, such as John Dowdells here: http://www.markme.com/jd/.

In this article we will explore how to create a blog using one of the popular, and free to download blog applications that are available - Wordpress. This is the first of two tutorials looking at Wordpress, this one is suitable for absolute beginners with this tool and will look at the basic install and some of the most important configuration options once it is installed. Next time we will create a completely customised template for your blog and look at how to select which features you want to use.