Using WordPress as more than just a blog?

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I have been making plans to create a site that would contain several different sections, such as several blog feeds for reviews and articals, a forum, and also a stock site where people can sell/buy photos.

I was planning on doing this in PHP, but have recently started using wordpress and found it to be very powerful. is a site like this too “advanced” to be done in wordpress?

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5 comments

  1. WordPress can be used for more than just blogs, having recently won an award for best CMS proves that!

    The reviews and articles would just be posts, in different parent categories.

    The forum could be implented with bbPress (http://bbpress.org) or SimplePress (http://simplepressforum.com)

    The buying/selling photos could be done with a combination of either the built in WordPress gallery or a wordpress plugin such as NextGEN (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery) and a shopping cart or paypal plugin.

    It would take some integration work, but it certainly is all possible with WordPress 🙂

  2. This is not the question you should be asking IMO.

    The question to ask is: “Does using wordpress make creating this website easier ?”

    If the pages you will be creating are related to the blog posts, then yes. For example, with WordPress, your posts categories can be listed as sub-menu items.

    But, if your pages are not related to the “main” blog, why bother using WordPress?

  3. You mentioned you were gonna do it in PHP but now are thinking about WordPress. I just found that funny because WordPress IS written in PHP ;). WordPress has been used as a CMS for a while now and I think it’s often a great place to start. I love WordPress but it’s not the only CMS out there you should look at Drupal, Joomla, Movable Type, or one of many other Open Source or even commercial CMS’. You may also want to look at other products in the Automattic family such as WordPress MU, BuddyPress and BBPress. I would say using someone else code can save you a lot or time but not always. In certain situations writing your own CMS may be faster and better.

    Hope this helps.

  4. But, if your pages are not related to
    the “main” blog, why bother using
    WordPress?

    • It’s a well known plataform, tested and used by millions of people;
    • A Huge plugin ecosystem that deals with SEO, Backup, Twitter, E-commerce, you name it;
    • A great documentation;
    • A great admin interface with WYSIWYG editors already implemented;
    • An interesting approach to use “static pages” along with your posts, so you can have a full blown CMS application.

    These are just some advantages. I don’t recommend WordPress for huge enterprise portals, but if you’re not doing a complete different way of interaction (like stackoverflow, which is unique in it’s way of work) for a website, I think it’s a better approach then trying to code everything from scratch.

    To write plugins you just use php, html and some functions aviable at plataform’s core. No useless XML configuration files, no proprietary template languages inside the plataform, nothing. Write a bunch of php inside a directory, put inside “plugins” and you’re done.

  5. Here are some sites that I’ve done with WordPress that are more than just blogs:

    • Driia’s Dreams, which is blog and online store for my wife’s jewelry business. (I take no responsibility for her theme.)
    • Barking Mad Productions, which is primarily a CMS for an event production company, with a blog.
    • Ludus, which tracks the games that we play each week (blog), along with information about the games themselves (CMS).
    • Craig’s Chaos Machine, which documents everything I’m learning about Chaos Toy and Chaos Machines. (Still a work in progress.)