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Once again, the popularity of the Content Management System Wordpress has yielded a great collection of useful links for any avid Wordpress user. 13 Helpful Cheat Sheets for Building Worpdress Themes is a great list of resources that will be especially useful to Wordpress Theme designers. The best was the Advanced Wordpress Help Sheet that was a follow-up to the much used basic version of which the link seems to be inactive.

Check out the links and PDFs listed. You may even find that some are useful enough to print a paper copy version. Considering how rarely anyone does that, it’s a true indicator to a cheat sheet’s usefulness.

Since Wordpress is an open-source CMS, it is a very popular tool. This means there are a lot of plugins developed for it and a lot of commentary given about it from people who feel like their knowledge could help others. This is seen in this article which talks about a new e-book and tutorial for Wordpress novices. The authors has this to say about the product -

I use WordPress myself, though with a slight difference I’ll explain below. I cannot count the days, weeks, months even I’ve spent learning just how WordPress really works and how to bend it to my purposes. I have three guidebooks on WordPress that I turn to continually. but it’s still been a task. I wish this package had been available when I started out.

We can not provide any insight as to the usefullness of this specific package above anything else, but we do think it’s something Wordpress users might want to look into.

As CMS options go, Wordpress tends to be the one most written about. Once again, we’ve found another great collection of information regarding Wordpress and the plugins that could save you time. You can read all 10 suggestions here. The favorite we see is the Tweetable Twitter:

Tweetable Twitter is a great plugin if you use Twitter. Tweetable Twitter allows the user to integrate Twitter into your Wordpress blog and automatically Tweets the latest post that you publish. The automatic Tweeting can also be configured to choose the URL shortening service of your choice.

The popularity of Wordpress for first-time website owners has grown over the last few years. It’s a free download and with script installers like Installatron (which Alpha Hosting offers to all customers) the installation is simply a few clicks away. However, once it is installed, any don’t know how to personalize it. How does a beginner change from the default layout?

There are hundreds of free theme downloads for Wordpress. The most popular one on many counts is here and allows many choices in easy downloads. By choosing a free theme, a website owner won’t feel tied to the design in the beginning. This gives the freedom of changing your mind once your site develops a life of it’s own. Some wordpress users never pay for a design, but if you choose to? It’s better to test out a few different layouts first so you’ll know what to look for in a paid template.

In October of 2008, Drupal won an award as the best Open Source CMS for 2008. As part of the prize, they were give $20,000. Alpha Hosting is proud that Drupal is one of the one-click installs offered with any hosting package. However, not only is the #1 open-source CMS available for free, but so is the #2 choice: Joomla. Of course - this blog is run on Wordpress, which is a very popular blogging platform. What some call a micro-CMS. As of last year, 34 of the top 100 linked-to blogs on Technorati were run on Wordpress. And in case you were wondering - yes - Wordpress is also available as one of our one-click installs. So, you can build a website using any of the top-ranked platforms for only $2.99 a month if you use Alpha’s smallest shared hosting package. What are you waiting for?

At Alpha Hosting, any of the shared hosting packages come already equipped with a set of 1-click installs for your web needs. We make setting up a website easy and inexpensive. However, there are also other free tools online to assist you with any design needs you may have. The Web Design Ledger listed some of the best free resources around for design in this article. There are free fonts, icon sets, and Photoshop brushes.

Specifically, there are also freebies for those using the CMS Wordpress. (One of the many one-click install packages available from Installatron.) There are two free Wordpress themes here and here that would spruce up any Wordpress site. And then, Smashing Magazine even provides a list of free headers that could be used on any site, not just Wordpress.

With these free design tips and a $2.99 hosting package from Alpha Hosting, your first website could look professional at only a fraction of the cost.

If you’re running a very simple site that is almost never updated, then building it with HTML pages might be the way to go. Sites like that are becoming very rare though. Most sites are updated fairly often. Some are being changed constantly. So what is powering these sites?

Content Management Systems

A Content Management System, or CMS, is the software that keeps a site running. It’s function is to make sure that your site does what you want it to and allows you to update, add or remove content easily and effectively. If you have a site that requires membership, then it probably handles that as well.

Just a few of the popular systems include Drupal, Joomla and even WordPress. They work in different ways but each has a community of dedicated people that swears by them.

WordPress as a CMS? Isn’t it a blogging platform?

Didn’t think of WordPress as a CMS? A lot of people don’t, but the ability to easily modify an installation of WordPress along with the huge amount of secondary functionality provided by plugin authors makes Wordpress very flexible. For smaller sites, Wordpress may be all they need.

Even as a blog, WordPress is still functioning as a CMS. Handling the posts and making it easy to upload different types of media. WordPress is a CMS, and one of my favorites.

With all the different options available there’s just one more question to ask…

What’s running your web site?