WordPress as you and i know is a great piece of software but it’s geared more towards blogging and so if you plan on using WordPress to build your client’s site or other projects a good amount of tweaking is neccessary, the good thing about it though is that WordPress is so flexible that you can use it as a core structure for your projects and with the help of some plugins, themes and a little php know how your on your way to creating a beautiful site.

I always find myself using WordPress to build my clients sites, i mean why build the wheel when it’s already invented?, with that being said tweaking WordPress to work for you and your client is essential, every client has their own needs and ideas so it would be good for you to familiarize yourself with WordPress and know it’s capabilities and have a working knowledge of the tons of plugins and themes that are freely available before you even start to think of accepting your clients projects.

CMS (Content Management System)

One thing that almost all your clients will need is a way to manage their content, WordPress has slowly but surely been moving in the direction of becoming a full fledge CMS but it’s not there just yet and so here i would like to share some plugins, themes and tips that should be useful to you if you plan to embark on using WordPress for your projects.

Let’s start at the very beginning……a very good place to start!

Okay, i borrowed that line form “The Sound Of Music”, nevertheless let’s focus on what you need to do to get the ball rolling:

Install Wordpress (duh!)

Get the latest release of WordPress and install it on your clients server, some prefer to use Fantastico but i would suggest against it considering that Fantastico rarely install the latest version of WordPress.

Install the “One Click” Installer

(**if you ever used the Mambo/Joomla CMS before than this feature will be familiar to you)

Trust me this little plugin is going to be a lifesaver, the plugin allows uploading of a plugin or theme without the need of manually uploading by FTP, allowing the upload from the Admin panel. All you have to do is browse for the zip file and click “upload” and the plugin does the rest.

Permalinks/SEO

Nothing is worst than to have a person who doesn’t bother to do some SEO work for their client, WordPress has made it a tad easier to have a good SEO optimized site, just changed your Permalinks and you already on your way, next you should install the All in One SEO Pack.
If you need SEO help, i suggest you get the Seobook.

Customizing WordPress

Most probably you would not want your client to know that your using WordPress to build their site and even if you wanted them to know it’s always good to customize and tweak a little so that it doesn’t look “out-of-the-box’ and to achieve that you will need:

Custom Admin Branding - Customize the login screen, header and footer of the Wordpress Admin.

Clutter Free - Clutter Free is a plugin that lets you hide portions of the WordPress posting interface that you rarely (or never) use. Instead of being minimized (and still taking up room), they’ll be completely invisible.


WordPress Admin Themes - A list i compiled a while back about Admin Themes.


Custom Admin Menu - This plugin gives you full control of your Wordpress administration section, without requiring any changes to any files! All customizations are done using a very intuitive graphical interface.

Admin Drop Down Menu - This plugin makes life a little easier (Live Demo)

Wordpress Organizer - This plugin helps you or your client to manage the files uploaded to the site.

Custom Write Panel - In WordPress, a user could be assigned a role and, accordingly, that user will or will not have the capability to write a new Post.

With this plugin, a custom write panel could be accessible to certain roles only. For example, a custom write panel “Music Review” is created and a role “Music Review Writer” is invented. This custom write panel could be set to be visible to this new role only.

Dashboard Editor - This plugin allows you to add whatever you want to the Dashboard through PHP and HTML and allows you to even add Sidebar Widgets. You may also wipe the entire dashboard or individually remove some of the more irritating sections like the Dev news, Planet Wordpress and the getting started section.

Other Plugins to consider

Here’s a list of plugins that i found to be extremely useful when i’m working on my projects:

Contact Form & Forms

I’ve come across people who wanted not just a contact form but a form with many entry fields and i would highly recomend using the Dagon Design Form Mailer or cforms to accomplish this.

Gallery

There might be a need to run a gallery on the site and luckily for you there are already tons of “Gallery” plugins out there, you can find them all here.

Search Everything

One thing that bugs me about WordPress is the incapability to search anything that it outside of a “post”, if your projects requires you to have a good chunks of content on pages instead of posts than your going to appreciate the Search Everything plugin.

Page Navigation,Polls,Post Ratings,Print Page

All 4 of these plugins were created by Lester Chan, and it really does come in handy, you can find the plugins here.

QuickTags
Quicktags are those useful ‘one-click’ buttons that insert code for you,your client might not be as tech savy as you and so you could help them out by adding some quicktags, here’s a tutorial on how to add a quicktag.

‘Category Visibility’ Plugin

This plugin is ‘da bomb” UNFORTUNATELY it does not work with WordPress 2.3 and as far as i can tell it only works with version 2.2 and below which is really a sad thing considering what this plugin is able to do, with this plugin you can prevent a post from appearing on the frontpage and you can set it so that it enevr appears unless you link to that particular post…really really cool, i wish the author would update this plugin!.

Comment or No Comment?

Well if it’s going to be a site that a comment form on every single post is not needed so don’t forget to remove that from your theme, most of the time you can find and edit the code in the single.php file.

(if for some reason your using comments that don’t forget to activate Akismet)

Themes

This is a rather huge topic, there are tons of WordPress Themes out there and now there’s also quite a few Premium theme, i’m afraid i can’t say muuch about this topic because it’s really up to you to find the perfect theme and tweak or you could just design and code your own theme or buy a Premium Theme.

if you need help in finding themes you should read this.

That’s basically the steps i take when i am using WordPress to power up my clients sites, hopefully this post will be useful to you BUT remember this is just the tip of the iceberg, there are tons on tutorials, pluigns and themes out there to ensure that you wil be able to bring out the best from WordPress.

All The Best!

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