How I Converted a Non-Blog Site to Wordpress

This post may have a few follow-ups - because it is a big subject. However, I just last night launched PC Mechanic as a Wordpress -powered website. Easy right? Not so much. PC Mechanic is not really a blog. In fact, it doesn’t even resemble a blog. WebbyOnline (this site) is also Wordpress powered, but it has the classic blog look and feel. It took some doing to get PC Mechanic to be powered by Wordpress. It’s taken me a few days of pretty solid work to get the job done, and I still have some things to test and fine-tune. But, its never easy switching publishing platforms on a site with over 1,000 articles and large amounts of existing traffic.

Wordpress Versus Other CMSes

Well, a pretty obvious question: Why go through all this work? PC Mechanic was being powered by Miraserver. Miraserver is my own creation and it has been a great platform for PCMech. Moving away from my own product wasn’t a light decision, and it in no way is because Miraserver is not a capable product. However, there is a big difference between a blog and a traditional CMS. Yes, Wordpress can be used as a traditional CMS (which is the point of this article), however blogs have certain things that “normal” websites don’t. Blogs, by design, are built around community interaction. RSS feeds. Pinging. Plus the fact that blogs are LOVED by search engines (namely Google) - especially if updated often.

So, why did I convert to Wordpress?

• Being a blog site opens PCMech up to the blogging community
• Pings make it easier to bring attention to new content
• Strong community support and user comments handling
• LARGE network of plug-in creators make it easier to expand the system

Strategically, I thought it would be beneficial to turn PCMech into a blog - even if it doesn’t look like one.

Wordpress As a CMS

Right “out of the box”, Wordpress is designed to be a traditional blog. Blogs usually all share the same basic structure: posts in chronological order on the homepage, with older posts cycling off the homepage into the archives. However, magazine-style sites don’t usually work this way. Typically, the site homepage is more involved. The PCMech homepage lists content of different types: “Latest Videos”, “Latest Articles”. I have a sub-blog called the “PCMech Wire” that needs to be listed separately as well. Also, nowhere on the homepage am I displaying full text of any posts. Any text I do show for a post comes from the excerpt field of Wordpress.

So, some of the “out of the box” shortcomings of Wordpress for a site like PCMech were:

• Lack of control over user privileges other than what was already built in
• Very different method of dealing with multi-page posts
• No support for a glossary
• No support for ads-free display of the site for members only (more on this later…this one was kinda complicated)
• Limitation of some of the Wordpress template tags to display how I wanted
• No apparent way to add more fields to author/user profiles.
• No support for post images or ability to feature articles

The good news is that practically anything can be dealt with by taking advantage of the plug-in functionality for Wordpress. I have managed to solve all of these issues without having to hack ANY of the base code for Wordpress. It has all been done with plug-ins.

Wordpress Plug-Ins I Used

I had to use my share of plug-ins to get the job done. Some plug-ins worked right away. Others I had to modify. Some I had to program myself. A site like PCMech CAN be done with Wordpress, but nobody said it was easy. Some of the plug-ins I had to make use of were:

• Cimy User Extra Fields. A useful plug-in which provides an easy way to add custom fields to the user profiles. What was weird about Wordpress is that it has a “usermeta” field for custom fields, but no apparent way to USE them. It didn’t make much sense to me, but this plug-in made it child’s play.
• EasyFeeds. This plug-in was created by - me. Yeah, that’s right. Its actually a pretty simple plug-in, but I needed it in order to create the news page on PCMech and display news headlines from other sites’ RSS feeds inside of a Wordpress page. This plug-in makes it really easy, and I couldn’t find anything else like it.
• Feature Image for Post. Stand by on this one because I will be releasing it soon to the public. The concept is not new, but I liked the way it is implemented this way. I created this plug-in myself as well, and it allows an easy way to assign an image to a Wordpress post. I used it to assign video thumbnails to video posts.
• Fold Category List. Simple plug-in which allows you to display categories in a nested fashion. Wordpress’s default function displays all categories at once. What I needed was a way to display only the root level categories, then expand the tree only as a user clicks one of the categories. This is used in PCMech’s main left side menu, which is actually a direct pull of the categories. Clicking on a category will expand that category as well as highlight it.
• Fold Page List. Similar to the plug-in above, but for pages. Wordpress allows nested pages (not posts), but has the same limitation on displaying them. I had to use this plug-in to display the steps of the “Build Your Own” tutorials on the right side of those pages.
• Headspace 2. This is an awesome plug-in that allows you to customize all kinds of things, such as meta tags, page titles, per-post themes, etc.
• PHPAdsNew. This is a simple plug-in that allows easy integration of PHPAdsNew powered ad banners into your Wordpress theme. You CAN do this without the plug-in, but it does make it a little slicker.
• podPress. This is the famous, killer plug-in for podcasting out of Wordpress.
• Popularity Contest. Very cool plug-in from Alex King to show all kinds of stats on readership as well as allow you to display your most popular posts.
• Random Category w/ Random Posts. I had to use this little plug-in in order to display the “PCMechTV” video in the right sidebar of the site. It is a randomly selected video, so I fixed the category and allowed it to randomly choose the post. I had to modify the plug-in to pull in the video thumbnail.
• Role Manager. A very slick plug-in that allows fine-tuned control over the roles for users in Wordpress (Administrator, Editors, Subscribers, etc.). It even allows you to rename and add your own.
• Search Everything. A plug-in which extends the Wordpress search functionality so that it searches pages, comments, attachments - everything. You can control what it searches, but this is a quick solution to the fact that the search engine, by default, only searches posts.
• Search HiLite. Not really necessary for making Wordpress into a CMS, but it is cool nonetheless. Detects search terms of search engine referred traffic and highlights their search terms in your content.
• SpotMilk. Again, not useful. But, it does make the Wordpress control panel look a HELL of a lot better than the default layout.
• Subscribe to Comments. Allows your users to subscribe to the comments from an article and automatically get notified via email of new comments. Great for repeat traffic.
• The Feature Rotator. Another one I plan to package and make available as a plugin, but it took some doing to get that feature rotator on PCMech’s homepage. It’s a plug-in, and it’s coming soon to you if you want it.
• UserMeta. Provides an API interface to working with user custom fields.
• WP-Contact Form with Departments. Another one created by your’s truly. What I did was take Ryan Duff’s well-known WP-Contact Form plug-in and hacked it to allow for multiple departments with different emails, selectable by the user in a dropdown.
• WPB-Paypal. This is a paid plug-in that allows paid subscription memberships to your Wordpress site. Essentially, it turns the registration process for WP into a paid sign-up. Obviously, you would NOT want this if you actually use user profiles for something more broad. But, I have a paid membership program on PCMech and I needed a way for them to sign up for it, get the ads-free display of the site, etc. This plug-in was the best way I could find to do it, short of totally custom-coding something. I did pay $25 for this plug-in. It isn’t perfect, but its still pretty slick. I have never paid for a WP plug-in in my life, but sometimes its worth a little scratch to save myself MANY hours of work. More on this a little later…

Stay Tuned

This post is getting long enough, so I will tell the rest in another post. I will talk about some of the complications of doing what I did and how I got around them. The plug-ins above played a VERY large role.

Wordpress is very capable software. But, as you can see, to expand it beyond the normal blog setup, you need to start getting technical with it. I have learned more about working with WP in the last week than I ever knew before that.

You Might Also Like:

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4. Wordpress and Curing High Server Load
5. Wordpress Makes a Twitter Clone

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