The way blogs look is changing. While the standard front page chronological list of posts is still alive and kicking, more and more bloggers are looking for different ways to effectively present their content.

In the last few months we’ve seen an increase in the number of quality news and magazine style WordPress themes. These themes break the traditional mold of post-by-post content presentation by allowing for multiple post categories to displayed side by side on the front page. Last month I released a fully customizable WordPress theme called NewsBox which can can display 9 user selected categories on the front page including a featured category. The interesting thing about NewsBox is that the user can easily customized not only the colors and graphics of the theme but also the order in which the 9 categories appear. With themes like NewsBox, Mimbo and Revolution a lot of people are asking: Can WordPress be used as a CMS?

In its simplest of definition, a CMS is a content management system. It’s a script that allows you to manage the images, text and services that appear on your site. Is WordPress able to do this? Heck ya!

The question is: Can WordPress do more? When, people are looking for a CMS they are usually after something that is able to run a blog, but is not a blog in itself. They usually want something that can handle forums, but is not a forum alone. When it comes to a CMS people are looking for something to manage, display and arrange all the other content management systems they want to include (such as blogs, forums, social networking, forms, e-commerce . . .). In short, they are looking for the thing that manages all the other things. Is WordPress up to the challenge? You bet!

WordPress is flexible.
There is quite a lot you can do with its core classes and functions.

WordPress is extendible.
f you can think of it there is probably a WordPress plugin that can do it (its probably free too).

Themeing WordPress is easy.
Currently there are many free options for standard blog themes, micro blog themes, news blog themes, video blog themes and many other experimental themes.

WordPress can be A La Carte.
You don’t have to use all of the features that come with WordPress. You could literally take out everything but the post titles and comments and use WordPress as a discussion forum. You could take out all the post loops, set the front page to be a page and use WordPress’ templating engine to simple manage pages.

Is there room for improvement?
Definitely. There are lots are areas that WordPress could improve to allow for a more flexible publishing system. One of my main gripes right is WordPress’ ability to manage users. I know there are plugins to change the login and register areas and I’m aware of the control panel themes but those aren’t enough for me. I would like to see true customization and flexibility with the user registration, login, forgot password and control panel. Ideally I would like there to be seperate admin and user back ends. I would like the user back end to have its own widget system that allows me to theme the user area independently of the admin area while adding widgets for features I’d like registered users to have.