Wordpress - Tips for using WordPress as a CMS?

The killer feature that caused WordPress 3.0 to cross over from an extensible blogging tool to the CMS for 8 out of 10 needs is Custom Post Types (with the addition of Custom Taxonomies from v2.9) with an honorable mention going to the new Menu system in 3.0.

So if you want to learn WordPress as a CMS then study Custom Post Types. Here's a few articles to get you started:

• Custom post types in WordPress
• Rock-Solid WordPress 3.0 Themes using Custom Post Types
• Everything You Need to Know About WordPress Custom Post Types
• Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0
• The WordPress Codex on Custom Post Types
• Adding Custom Field GUI to Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0
• Explore the Power of Custom Post Types to Maximize WordPress as a CMS
• Smarter Custom Post Types

There are also several plugins to make Custom Post Types easier in no particular order and albeit all of them are still a long way from being fully mature so Caveat Emptor!:

• WP Easy Post Types
• GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools
• Custom Post Type UI
• Simple Fields

As for Themes, that's a different subject. While blog themes all implemented the same use-case pattern, each person's CMS needs are likely to be different because each business is different (a restaurant needs different layouts than a yoga studio than an movie theatre than a fabric store.) At least early on I think you'll be hard-pressed to find the perfect ready-made "off-the-shelf" theme for your business; best to find one that's generally good and plan on modifying it or get a WordPress designer to build you a custom one. Having them layer on top of themes like the Genesis Framework from StudioPress can be a good option.

Best I can suggest is to look for ones that support the WordPress 3.0 menu system and then make your decisions from there. You can google for that and look for articles like this one:

• 22+ Fresh and Free WordPress 3.0 Ready Themes

P.S. If you are asking about streamlining the admin user interface so that the Posts and Pages and other blogging tools take a back seat and your specific CMS content is featured in the admin instead then that's a different subject; can I suggest you ask another question for that one?

UPDATE: Here are some screen shots from some projects I'm working on to give you an idea of what can be done:

If custom post types are too hard to manage for you

Take a look at the famous "pods" plugin. it has a lot of Killer features and there's some "add-on" or child plugin called "pods ui". Pods itself allows you to add any sort of table(s) to your DB. It also allows linking them to existing wp DB tables. So if you want to (for ex.:) extend the data saved with an user, you just add a pod named ex. "extended userdata" and link it to existing user data. That's it. "Pods UI" then allows you to make a nice user interface with close to no effort.

Both help you to easily manage and build everything you might need. All of the developers are more than just nice, they have a perfect forum and you can meet them nearly every day in their irc-chat room. I build myself two pretty large sites for managing events plus the whole background organisation and i'm still impressed how good it is performing even when you got hundreds of visitors at the same moment. :)

I sympathise. In fact, I asked a related question over on webmasters. I'm not sure about themes or plugins, but there are some useful links there.

I'm still at the early stages of using Wordpress as a CMS, but my advice so far, for what it's worth, is:

• Read as much of the function reference as you can, in order to really understand some of the inner workings of wordpress
• Explore custom posts and custom fields
• Understand that you can do quite a bit just by including Pages - just as you would in any CMS or basic system in which content is shared