We have all heard about using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) at some point or the other. Some laugh at this pointing out that WordPress was never built for use as a CMS and therefore will never be able to fully function as worthy CMS Site. After doing just a little bit of digging online, it actually becomes apparent that many people have used WP as a fully functional, scalable and complete CMS implementation. This includes the US car giant Ford.
There so many plugins to choose from in the WordPress directory. Plus, a simple search on Google will reveal that there are so much more that are not in fact listed on the WP directory. This becomes overwhelming to anyone looking on. So I decided to make a little bit of time to write about the best WP plugins to add CMS Functionality to WP. (Notice: I didn’t say ‘CMS like functionality…’). This very much will change your WP installation into something rather outstanding.
Flutter
Flutter is a feature rich WordPress CMS plugin that focuses on easy templating for the developer and simplifies content management for the administrators by creating custom write panels that can be fully customized.
Custom Admin Branding
Custom Admin Branding Plugin allows you to not only re-brand the WordPress login screen, but also the admin header and footer with your own custom images. This will actually give your client an idea that the CMS is tailor for his business.
More Field
More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write/Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post. This is extremely useful if you are making use of custom fields, it will make the way you input data through custom fields more user friendly.
MailPress
MailPress allows you to send beautiful styled HTML and plain text mails based on dedicated themes and templates. Very often, there will a need to have newsletter subscription on the site for the visitors. MailPress is awesome when come to handling newsletter, It can track the newsletter that have been sent out and even schedule for the blast with additional FREE addon modules.
PageMash
PageMash allow us to customize the order your pages simple Ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus, if you find the default page ordering is not user friendly.
Multi Level Navigation
Multi Level Navigation generates the code necessary to create a Son of Suckerfish horizontal dropdown, vertical flyout or horizontal slider menu. The plugin produces W3C valid HTML and CSS and only requires Javascript to function for very old browsers such as IE 6.
Role Scoper
Role Scoper is a comprehensive enrichment for access control in WordPress, giving you CMS-like control of permissions. Assign reading, editing or administration roles to users or groups on a page specific, category specific or other content specific basis.
WP CMS Post
WP-CMS-Post not only allows you to hides unwanted items like custom fields, trackbacks, revisions etc. but also gives you a whole lot more control over how WordPress deals with creating content! This helps to make WordPress more CMS like, and allow you total customization of what authors see and use.
WP eCommerce
WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online. This will come in useful if you want to sell something on your Blog or site, there is no need for a change in CMS.
cForm II
cForm II is a great and flexible contact form builder. It is a feature rich plugin, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.
Tinymce Advanced
Tinymce Advanced will add 15 more plugins to the default TinyMCE. This will help user that does not know much about HTML, to be able to draw table, insert break, search and replace and many more and even if you do know anything about it, it stills helps you to quickly and easily change things around and add things!
Well that’s my round up for now. As usual, I will have many more for you to consider and many more scripts coming on as well. So enjoy!