After using WordPress for so long on this Fatty Matty Brewing blog, I decided to use WordPress as a CMS (content management) with a few new clients’ websites including Greenspirit Farm and Free Congregation of Sauk County. Each of these unique clients has different business communication needs from WordPress and with the huge amount of WordPress plugins available, I knew I could pretty much accomplish any requests for website customization.

This list of WordPress plugins gives your website flexability to perform tons of fat website functions.

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

Plugins Used on the Fatty Matty Brewing Brewlog

• Akismet – A must have spam catcher for ALL WordPress websites!
• BrewPoll – For all you beer bloggers… Adds a BrewPoll icon to each post on your blog.
• WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Have you backed up your WordPress database today? Do this before you upgrade to WordPress 2.8!

WordPress Plugins Used on the Greenspirit Farm website

• All in One SEO Pack – Improve your website’s popularity on Google with super SEO.
• Force User Field Registration – Forces new users to register additional fields. As a WordPress admin, it is nice to know that your website’s members are human.
• Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO!.
• Login Configurator – Sick of looking at the WordPress logo on your website? Get your company logo on the WordPress registration / login page.
• Multi Column Category List – Want to create a WordPress Page with a list of categories? See the Recipes Category list at the bottom of this page. Requires the use of WordPress Page Templates and some custom coding.
• Page Links To – This plugin allows you to point a post or page to any URL you want. Very useful if you want a WordPress Page to link an external URL.
• Simple Login Widget – If you are using WordPress as a CMS, this simple widget will show just the login/logout and register links instead of all the RSS and Meta Feed crap.
• WP Render Blogroll Links – Display your blogroll or WordPress links on a page like this!

Plugins Used on the Free Congregation website

• Drop-down menu – Add a cool drop down style page menu to your WordPress theme.
• Event Calendar – After a ton of searching for the perfect Event Calendar plugin – this one is the BEST!
• Inline Posts – Allows you to include dynamic WordPress posts in your static WordPress pages (and in other posts). See an example here.
• Simple:Press Forum – as far as I can tell (and there are not many to choose from) the best WordPress Forum Plugin. See a brand new installation of this WordPress Forum plugin here.

There are a number of themes which I have tested out which would work awesome for a CMS website. I am not saying the themes listed below suck but, they do not allow this website to show the theme switcher in sidebar 1 by default. Because of this, these themes did not work for me on this website, here at Another Design by Matt Sweeny.

WordPress CMS Themes I Deactivated

Other themes I removed

• Nautica
• Reclamation
• iStudio
• Glowing Amber
• Suffusion
• MT white 2.6.2 by Tomasz Mazur
• Ink and wash 1.1.5 by Arne: page navigation bar at top not Widgetized!
• Under the Influence 1.02 by Spaceperson: not CMS friendly. WordPress “Pages” have some weird spacing problems.
• Constructor 1.0.4 by Anton Shevchuk – This theme gave me permission errors after I installed it and tried to access the theme setting options page.
• Traction 1.0 by The Theme Foundry – this theme was removed as it did not work with sidebar 1 right out of the installation box. I also found that when I tried to activate another font (in order to delete this Traction WP theme, I was not able to activate a different theme and had to manually delete the Traction theme directory from the FTP web server.
• Emptiness 1.8 by Cliffano Subagio – this theme was removed as it did not work with sidebar 1 right out of the installation box.
• Nature_wdl 1.3 by Webdesignlessons.com – this excellent looking theme might work for you but, the title of our website “Another Design by Matt Sweeny” is super long and this long title broke the theme’s header graphics not-so-flexible CSS layout.

Themes I killed today

I didn’t kill these free wordpress themes because they suck. They don’t suck at all, most of these are really good themes with dynamic menus and beautiful designs which function just fine as CMS themes for WordPress version 3. These are killed because I have 66 themes installed for the theme switcher and it just takes super long to load mattsweeny.com because of too many themes installed here.

Part of the problem is that I use Godaddy for hosting my WordPress websites and apparently their shared hosting accounts suck balls! In an effort to reduce the size of the WP installation on mattsweeny.com here are more themes I killed.

• Adventure
• Arras
• flashy
• Furry Family
• Tandil
• Tree House
• Vibe
• Arclite
• Blend
• BlueCloud
• Bold Life
• Cleanr
• diary-k
• vigilance
• smells-like-facebook
• LivingOS_UPSILON_wp_3
• inanis-glass
• regal
• luxury-press
• p2
• webbdesign
• underwater
• the-scenery
• starocean
• comment-central
• crafty-cart
• dynamic-dream
• whitehouse
• viala
• mondo-zen-theme

• Breathe 2.1 by Paul Cracknell

• Daßlog Screen 1.09 by Jonk

• diary-cute 1.8.1 by page

• EasyCity 1.3 by GFCC

• Elegant Grunge 1.0.3 by Michael Tyson

• Gravel 1.6 by Melle Wynia

• jarrah 1.7 by marsian

• Mystique 1.20 by digitalnature

• Panorama 2.1 by Themocracy

• Patagonia 1.7.0 by WpThemesPlanet

• Precious 4.0.1 by Kristin K. Wangen

• Retromania 1.5 by Jay Hafling

• Rusty Grunge 1.2 by Christopher Wallace

• Urban View 1.05 by cssmayo.com

These awesome themes are all available for download on the WordPress.org free theme directory.

CoppermineSC plugin because it is not user friendly enough for my CMS WordPress environment – my website clients need to be able to use a plugin without ANY coding expience.

The best choice is the WordPress Coppermine Widget. The plugin author is currently updating the plugin code to add an option to pop-up the coppermine photo in a new window which would fix a bug I found using IE7.

Another very cool bit of informationwhich I must share is an excellent forum post detailing how to port a WordPress theme into a Coppermine Photo Gallery theme. See an example theme I ported for a clients website – use the sidebar navigation to switch from the client’s “picture gallery” (Coppermine) to their WordPress themed page links.