Hello Tomorrow™

Answer: Yes! It work’s really well.
I mentioned over a week ago that I’d decided to use WordPress (2.3.1) as the solution to provide a full CMS for a site I’m building (I’ll post a link to the final site when it goes live, along with some information on how I managed certain aspects of it).

It turns out it was quite easy to implement and the client seems happy with it. There’s a quite a few WordPress plug-ins used, but that’s a good thing for me as I’m in no way a developer. There wasn’t really anything I needed it to do that couldn’t be worked out some how.

Like I said I’ll go into more detail later but as a quick review I ended up using…

• All in One SEO Pack - easy implementation of lots of nice SEO features
• Breadcrumb Navigation XT - customisable breadcrumb
  
• cforms II - really easy contact form integration
• Dashboard Lite - gets rid of a lot of the guff off the Dashboard that the client doesn’t care about
  
• Google XML Sitemaps - supposedly helps in getting the site indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN
  
• My Page Order - allows the client to order the new pages as they see fit
• Post Image - lets them show a custom header image for each page/post if they want
• Role Manager - stops them messing around with things they don’t need to know about
  
• Search Everything - searches everything
  
• Upload+ - renames anything they upload to remove unfriendly characters etc

Making the actual XHTML templates (or in WordPress terms the Theme) was nice and easy too.

All in all I’d highly recommend using WP as an easy solution to making a quick CMS site. MUCH easier to understand and implement than say a Joomla or Drupal site (at least for non-developer types like me), and for small sites it’s just as powerful.

I found out about CMS Made Simple the other day, after I’d started building this project in WP, and that looks quite promising too, but it’ll need to be really simple to get used instead of WP when I next have to build a CMS for someone.