CMS Development - WordPress as a CMS – II - WordPress CMS Development

In the last post, WordPress as a CMS – I we saw what magic could be done using wordpress. This post would focus on some of the different techniques and tricks to get the CMS feel on wordpress.
1) A Custom Front/Landing Page. Blog sites normally have a basic list of latest post, some simple widgets and that’s where it all ends. But WordPress can do a lot more than that. To set up a different landing page on wordpress, below are the steps :

1. Go to the Settings > Reading Page.
2. Select the front page drop down and select the required page as the front page.
3. Create a blank page and set that as the Posts page (that permalink would point to the posts page)
4. In case if we want a custom front page, then that page can be put in the themes folder as ‘front-page.php‘. Then, the Front page displays in the settings > reading pane would also point to a blank page.

2) A Custom template for particular Pages.

There are times when some pages have to have a different look and feel than the others. At such moments a custom template has to be created for the page. The custom page template has to be put in the themes folder and the following piece of code must be added to the top of the file


Once, the template file is added, the template can be activated from the Pagee Attributes section of the page create/edit page.

Next up in this series we would see
a) Custom Post Types.
b) Custom Menus.
c) Featured Images.