For those of you using WordPress as a CMS or TMS (as opposed to just a blog), whether it’s designed by us or not, you’re squeezing the juice out of this great system. However, you’re nowhere close to be using it at full potential. In example, take a look at this tutorial about using WordPress as a Marketing Tool.

First of all, let’s not turn all philosophic about it, since one could argue that any site could be used as a Marketing tool no matter how it looks. Which is true, of course. What I mean is to turn your existing WordPress CMS in a distribution center for dynamic marketing tools. Now it sounds more interesting, huh?

So, the whole tutorial is extremely easy and although some PHP knowledge could come handy, it is not necessary at all. Let’s create an adult gallery with dynamically updated content using your existing WordPress database. Just follow the instructions below:

1. Create a folder in your server, with any name you want, ie marketing. It could be inside your WordPress folder installation or totally outside (ie if your WP installation is in its own folder)
2. Now, let’s create our gallery. You could use a gallery you already have to promote your site, we’ll do just some editing on it
3. Open your gallery with a text editor (such as Notepad or Notepad++) or use the edit source option of your web page builder program (Dreamweaver, NotObjects, CoffeeCup, etc)
4. At the very top of your page, place the following code:
   
   <?PHP require_once('yourthemefolder/wp-blog-header.php'); ?>
   
5. Want an example? Check our main page: we added the code at the top, and then at the bottom simply added
   <?php get_footer(); ?>
   and that’s it, our footer (which includes a widgetized sidebar code) updates every time we add more content!
6. And basically that’s it. Now you can include whatever part of your WP theme you want to include. In example, an obvious easy one would be to include your header and/or footer, but you can call the latest updates, show them as thumbnails (or text), you can show the new WP 2.9 post thumbnails, you can show a ranking of posts, or if you’re using model names, a ranking of models, you can show comments…. your imagination is the limit!
7. Before I finish, I’m sure you’ll be able to think some nice SEO uses for this technique!

As you may see, as everything WordPress, this is easy, fast and bullet-proof. In a future tutorial I’ll teach you how to create GeoIP banners on the fly using this technique (plus other neat tricks, of course). This is just one of many reasons why WordPress CMS is taking the world by storm and is the smartest choice for webmasters

Please comment below if you have any question or need any help

Tags: CMS, code, TMS, tutorials, wordpress