With the overwhelming popularity of Wordpress many designers and developers have turned to using it as a full blown Content Management System (CMS) for their client sites. The benefits of this are numerous and getting from Blog to CMS is covered below.

Setting up the static front page

The most widely used application of static page is on the front page as the main landing page is often custom. So let’s setup a static front page and a blog page.

1. Create two new pages call them “Home” and “Blog” (you can name them whatever you like).
2. In your Wordpress “Settings” go to “Reading” and Front page displays “A static page” and then select the page you want as your front page and another page for your normal blog (you don’t have to include a blog).

That is all there is to it now you will see the static front page whenever you visit www.yoursite.com and the blog whenever you visit www.yoursite.com/blog. Using this solution you can now edit your front page in the admin area of Wordpress via the Page Edit WYSIWYG editor.

Custom front page

Now that we have got our head around the static front page let’s go a bit further and add a completely new layout.

1. Create a new PHP file in your theme directory and call it myfront.php
2. At the top of the PHP file add:

<?php
/*
Template Name: MyFront
*/
?>

3. Add in all the HTML/CSS/PHP you want on that page. You can call other PHP scripts the header, sidebar and footer just like normal if you need them.
4. Go to the page you want to display this custom file for example the “Home” page and on the right hand side there will be an Attributes box with “Template” inside it. Use the drop down box to select “MyFront” and click update page.
5. You should also use this opportunity to add a number to “Order” which will determine in which order your pages are listed so for Home we will put 1 as we want that as the first item in our menu.
6. To edit any changes on your frontpage you will go into the myfront.php file unless you have coded your template to be fully customizable from the Wordpress admin.

Hopefully the above will help you when designing your own CMS solutions in Wordpress or you can try it on an existing theme like Blog Business.