Can a WordPress site be made to be more than a blog?

Question

I want to use WordPress for my personal website, but it isn't going to be structured like a blog. Can someone help me with a few concerns I have before I get too deep into it?

1. I want it to have a main page, and a hierarchy of content pages. Can I make the default page be a home page, and not a big chronological listing of posts?

2. I see that the DotNetNuke CMS has built-in support for auto generating your menus based on the pages you create. Does WordPress have anything like this?

3. Can I make the blog post section come up in a sub-directory like mysite.com/blogposts?

4. Is there anything about WordPress that makes it an obvious bad choice for a general purpose website? Does it have extensibility for thinks like shopping carts or whatever in case I want to add them in the future? I just want to make sure I am not doing something stupid by choosing a blogging software for a general purpose website with future requirements that aren't yet known.

5. Sean

Answer 1

1. Yes, current versions of Wordpress support designating a content page as the home page.

2. Yes, Wordpress will generate a set of nested lists that represent your content pages; it would be the job of the theme to style this into an appropriate menu (and most themes do not).

3. You can set up your permalink structure to do this, yes.

4. Wordpress is a good choice up to a point for many kinds of web sites, but if you want to integrate with a shopping cart or other complex application, I'd suggest looking at Drupal instead. Wordpress's developer ecosystem is mostly set up around extending its existing capabilities (blogging and content management) not on adding other unrelated functionality. Drupal is much more of a general-purpose framework for any kind of application or site.

Answer 2

I'm not a heavy user of WordPress but my feeling for it is that it is primarily a blogging tool. It sounds like you want a full CMS. I'd have a look at Drupal (as PSU_Kardi suggests) or Joomla. Both have built-in support for or add-ons for blogs, e-Commerce, ...

Answer 3

2: Multi-level navigation plugin: http://pixopoint.com/multi-level-navigation/

4: Some e-commerce plugins: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=e-commerce

Answer 4

1. Yes, available by default, configurable via control panel
2. Yes, it's usually on by default on modern templates (unless you're using something extremely exotic)
3. Yes, you can do pretty much everything with permalinks
4. I really don't see a reason why wouldn't you choose wordpress... many plugins available for this platform can do almost everything - even more than standard cms solutions. There are SEO plugins, e-commerce plugins, security plugins, forum plugins, modern anti-spam protection, design enhancements, advanced templates with easy to use control panels...