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This article is the third in a series of articles about the popularblog software ?Wordpress?. In this article I had intended to show howto use Wordpress as a simple Content Management System (CMS) ratherthan a blog. However, in the gap between my writing the last articleand this one, Wordpress 1.5 was released which contains newfunctionality called ?Themes? and so this article will use the newWordpress themes in order to create a site that uses Wordpress as a CMStype application rather than a blog.

Installing or upgrading to Wordpress 1.5

Thisarticle assumes that you have a working copy of Wordpress 1.5 installedon your server with the default template installed ? basically justwhat you get after installing for the first time.

The new default template for Wordpress

Youcan install multiple copies of Wordpress by uploading the files to adifferent directory. If you want to use the same database and installseveral copies of Wordpress into it edit the table prefix inwp-config.php, changing the prefix in the line:

// Change the prefix if you want to have multiple blogs in a single database.
$table_prefix = ?wp_?; // example: ?wp_? or ?b2? or ?mylogin_?

WithWordpress up and running we can decide how we want to change it for ourpurposes. The purpose I am going to use it for is to create a bookreviews web site. What I want to be able to do is display the latestreview on the homepage and then allow visitors to browser categories ofother reviews on the site. To do this I will need to do quite a bit ofediting of the default template.

Themes

Asmentioned in the introduction, Wordpress 1.5 brings with it ?themes?functionality. The Themes make it simple for you to modify orcompletely replace the default template but still allow you to go backto it if you need to. They make upgrades far easier as anymodifications you have made to the way that the templates display aremade in your own theme, so they will not be touched by the upgrade.They also mean that you can try our different looks for your site, orchange them regularly without scrapping the earlier look if you want togo back to it.

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