WordPress 2.6 released

WordPress 2.6 has been released with several worthwhile improvements. Check out the brief tour video.

Why WordPress to manage your site?

WordPress is far more than a blogging platform and that’s why we’re so satisfied in promoting it as a wonderful tool for powering all kinds of websites. But sometimes people need convincing. Why use a content management system or CMS to power my site? Or maybe the question is why WordPress? ithemes.com offers 5 great reasons for using a CMS and they apply very well to WordPress.

Go read 5 Reasons to Use a Content Management System.

WordPress Theme as a canvas for your site

You may not be a web designer but you want an eye catching website.

Thankfully there are thousands of free WordPress themes available that can serve as a canvas or starting point for your site.

This site illustrates my point. With a few subtle tweaks to a very simple theme developed by Upstart Blogger I’ve developed a look that’s given the site a unique design, which is less like a blog and more like the resource I want it to be.

If you are looking for WordPress themes to use as a canvas for your site you’ll find of few of my recommendations by clicking here.

WordPress 2.5 on the horizon

WordPress 2.5 is coming. Check out this screen cast showing the new image upload and gallery features.

Screencast and WordPress 2.5 RC2

WordPress as a CMS and plugins that help

ThemeShaper.com has a good article on using WordPress as a CMS and lists a few plugins that come in handy for this: Use WordPress As a CMS: Plugins, The Bare Minimum

I have a few recommendations of my own to add to the list.

  • Feed Control is a plugin that lets you add your WordPress pages to your RSS feed, and will also allow you to remove pages or posts from your feed.
  • Sitemap Generator is a good tool for providing a site map to your visitors.
  • Order Pages is a plugin that allows you to easily and visually arrange the order of your pages in navigation bars and menus — you can certainly edit the “page order” number by hand for each page but if you have a lot of pages this makes ordering those pages a breeze. And the My Page Order plugin can do this well also.
  • Category Order — while the above plugin arranges the order of your “pages”, this plugin arranges the order of your blog “categories” — which is handy if you are using your blog categories in an unusual way while using WordPress as a CMS — Category Order can be found near the bottom of the linked page here.

Update: Here is a great list that contains some very helpful plugins for leveraging WordPress as a CMS — Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins at Blueprint Design Studio.

Update: (Friday; April 11, 2008) — Obfuscate E-mail is a plugin I find I need on most WordPress powered sites I setup — you can post email addresses as links and this plugin will obscure the address in the html so as to confuse spammer bots.

Update: (Tuesday; May 6, 2008) — the Role Manager plugin gives fine control over which users have access to what features on your WordPress install.

Update: (Tuesday; October 21, 2008) — Search Unleashed – Advanced WordPress searches with highlighting as well as searching of pages and posts.