Wordpress for more than blogging?

[David Boddie]

Okay, who's thinking about (or has done in the past) using WordPress for something other than blogging. I'm thinking about using it for news article gathering and publishing on our web site. Anyone else?

[Michael Fienen]

I used it for a proof of concept newsletter. Ultimately I fashioned it in our CMS, but early on we designed it in Wordpress first.

[Mark Greenfield]

We use WordPress for a variety of newsletters targeted mainly at current students. We also use it as a CMS for a couple of sites. Our experience has been very positive. (I am a big fan of WordPress.)

[Michael McGlynn]

There are folks who use WP as a CMS. It surely has ease of customization, but some of the free CMS tools like Joomla may be wroth investigating.

[Stephanie Leary]

I use WordPress for lots of things other than traditional blogs... it's easier than large CMSs for users to learn, and frankly it's better than most of them. (Don't get me started on Joomla.) I've used WP for press releases (comments off, excerpts only on the home page), an internal news clipping service (registered users only, headlines on the home page, calendar in the sidebar since articles are posted in a daily batch), and an internal project management site -- it's not so great for that last, but it was at least easy to teach people to upload files and attach them to posts.

The WP-SNAP plugin is brilliant for any alphabetical index. Earlier this week I ran across a great article on using WP with Feedburner to build a low-cost, low-effort newsletter. And just yesterday Matt Herzberger pointed me toward PayBox, which allows for group membership (free or paid) with private content and lots of other features useful for organizations.

WP is maturing fast, and I think we're going to have to start filing it under 'CMS' instead of 'blog.'

[Brian Steere]

We use it for Press Releases (which is a lot like blogging, but without the comments) and so far it has been a very positive experience.

[Teri Hoyer]

We use WordPress for both college news and the alumni magazine. Both are perfectly suited because they are consistently text-based articles. We use the RSS output of the news to feed headlines to our home page, as well as faculty and staff resource sites.

WordPress is very easy to setup and customize. Here are links to the two sites I mentioned:

www.cudenver.edu/clas/news/
http://clas.cudenver.edu/pinnacle/

[Eric Hobart]

David,

At Norwich University (Northfield, Vt.), we use Wordpress as a mini-cms:

Academic Affairs news

(we don't have an enterprise cms) for our Academic Affairs "news" presence, which allows our non-tech Academic Affairs writer to post stories without help from web communications staff. It's working well, but we have yet to implement adequate security measures that will allow the writer to ftp images in addition to posting text. Our IT folks are very wary of opening security holes by enabling ftp, since the blog is inside the network on our internal web server and creates the possibility of malicious access the web server and possibly core data.

It's working well in that limited capacity, however, and allows a separate venue for "academic insider" stories to be handled in the blog so we can keep articles on our primary "news" presence focused on prospective undergraduate students.

Norwich News

Eric Hobart
web communications manager
Norwich University
[e-mail]

[Ryan Pharis]

We just launched a WordPress based site for our news, stories clips, and videos: Texas Tech Today.

It was very easy to customize with the plugin system. Making a theme that fit with our web identity guidelines couldn't have been easier either.

You can check out the about page, and my site for a little more background on the project.

[Mark Greenfield]

Ryan - Nice work!

[Ryan Pharis]

Thanks Mark :) I'm really liking your blog btw. Good stuff.

[Andre Tan]

That is one of the best news/magazine themes I've seen out there. Great, great, job.

[Ryan Pharis]

Thanks Andre. I appreciate the comment.
That was one of my goals with this: "to be the best university news site on the web". I guess I was inspired by Good to Great ;) So hopefully it's up there with the best of breed sites.
WordPress was just a pleasure to work with and to get the theme just right.