Transform WordPress into a Powerful CMS

Introduction

No one would deny that WordPress is the leading blog platform at the moment. With huge collection of free and premium themes and plugins, setting up and personalize a beautiful and powerful WordPress platform can be very quick and easy. In the backend, its clean user interface and support of simple CMS features such as pages have made many of us using it as a CMS to manage a website. Therefore, WordPress is no longer limited to blogging only, it has evolved to manage content of websites such as corporate and portfolio websites (some even integrated with shopping cart!).

Here in this post, I have chosen a few top notch WordPress plugins that allow you to do that - transform WordPress into a powerful CMS. We have a few that creatively use WordPress custom field and magically transform a page into a unique layout that will accomodate to your design and requirements. We also cover user role and privileges management plugins. With some more tweaking and customisation, WordPress can be a featured rich and powerful CMS.

CMS Plugins

• Advanced Custom Field

  The Advanced Custom Fields plugin gives you the tools to create your own custom edit screens. Boasting a professional interface and a powerfull API, it’s a must have for any web developer working with WordPress. Field types include: Wysiwyg, text, textarea, image, file, select, checkbox, page link, post object, date picker, color picker, repeaters, flexible content and more!

• Simple Fields

  Add different kind of input fields to your edit post page. Field can be of type textarea, TinyMCE, checkbox, radio buttons, drop downs or files.

Menu

• CMS Tree Pageview

  Adds a CMS-like tree overview of all your pages and custom posts to WordPress - much like the view often found in a page-focused CMS. Within this tree you can edit pages, view pages, add pages, search pages, and drag and drop pages to rearrange the order.

• CMS Dashboard

  Improve the usability of your WordPress CMS system. This plug-in creates a dashboard widget with clearly labeled large buttons of the most common tasks one would perform when using wordpress as a content management system.

Editing

• Edit Flow

  Edit Flow gives you custom statuses, a calendar, editorial comments, and more, all to make it much easier for your team to collaborate within WordPress. It has a built-in calender view, custom statuses, editorial comments, editorial metadata, notifications, story budget and user groups.

• WP CMS Post Control

  Post Control from WordPress CMS Modifications gives you complete control over your write options for every user level/role. It not only allows you to hide unwanted items like custom fields, trackbacks, revisions etc. but also gives you a whole lot more control over how WordPress deals with creating content.

User Roles and Privileges Plugins

• Role Scoper

  Role Scoper is a comprehensive enrichment for capability enforcement and administration in WordPress. Assign reading, editing or administration roles to users or groups on a page-specific, category-specific or other content-specific basis.

• User Role Editor

  User Role Editor WordPress plugin allows you to change standard WordPress user roles capabilities with easiness of a few mouse clicks. Just turn on check boxes of capabilities you wish to add to the selected role and click “Update” button to save your changes. That’s done. Add and tune your own custom roles which you can assign to the users then. You can create new role as a copy of existing one. Delete self-made roles. Change defaul user role.

• Adminimize

  Visually compresses the administratrive header so that more admin page content can be initially seen. Also moves 'Dashboard' onto the main administrative menu because having it sit in the tip-top black bar was ticking me off and many other changes in the edit-area. Adminimize is a WordPress plugin that lets you hide 'unnecessary' items from the WordPress administration menu, submenu and even the 'Dashboard', with forwarding to the Manage-page.

• TAGS:
• Cms
• Plugin
• Tools
• WordPress