Over the past couple of years WordPress has grown into much more than just a blogging platform. People are now using it as a CMS (Content Management System) to power many different types of websites. Using WordPress more as a standard CMS often requires some creative thinking when building themes and setting up the structure of categories and content. In this article we present to you 12 very useful plugins that will give your WordPress install extended CMS functionality.
Pods CMS
Pods is a CMS framework for WordPress. It’s a plugin that sits on top of WordPress, allowing you to add and display your own content types.
Flutter
Flutter is a plugin that gives the administrator custom write panels with the ability to add radio buttons, file uploads, image uploads, checkboxes, etc. Another key feature of this plugin is simplified templating.
WP-CMS Post Control
WP-CMS Post Control 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 you use WordPress more like a CMS, alowing you to totally customise what your authors see and use.
PageMash
PageMash give you an Ajax interface allows you to drag-and-drop the pages into the order you like, modify the page structure by dragging a page to become a child or parent and toggle the page to be hidden from output.
Role Scoper
Role Scoper is a comprehensive access control solution, giving you CMS-like control of reading and editing permissions. Assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories.
CForms II
CForms II is a powerful and feature rich form plugin for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.
Scissors
Scissors adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to WordPress’ image upload and management dialogs. This plugin also allows automatic resizing of images when they are uploaded and supports automatic and manual watermarking of images.
TinyMCE Advanced
TinyMCE Advanced adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras.
Side Content
Side Content enables you to define a set of widgets which are effectively placeholders. Each one is empty until you assign content to it when editing a page. This enables you to extend the content of the page into the sidebar.
Multi-level Navigation
Multi-level Navigation adds an SEO friendly, accessible dropdown/flyout/slider menu to your WordPress blog.
Dashboard Pages
Rather than have a majority of the dashboard widgets focused on new blog posts and comments, Dashboard Pages puts the sites page listing front and center in the dashboard for easier and quicker content management.
Custom Admin Branding
The Custom Admin Branding Plugin allows you to re-brand the WordPress login screen, the admin header and footer with your own custom images.