We all know WordPress is an amazing tool for making blog. With its widely capable of customization and tons of plugins making WordPress almost a perfect way for newbie even for IT pro to create their own website. Since I’m getting more and more interested to customizing WordPress I just wondering whether it possible to make WordPress into CMS.
Well… The answer is of course it could. The process seems to be working for me, so these are what I found out so far:
Making a Frontpage
The first thing I want to do is to make my blog page into my second menu page not the main page or home page. If you’re using WordPress ver 2.5.0 above you can easily modified this. Just log into the admin panel and go to settings - reading, and you’ll find Front Page Displays customization. Before you do this, you should have write 2 pages. First page is the homepage (you can write title Home for example) which will display on your frontpage, and the second is your blog page (you just need to write the title) which will display your post page in second menu.
Customizing the Sidebar
Ok, Now you have a frontpage, the next thing is to customize your sidebar. Sidebar is the other column that showing your other information. A frontpage should describes only the purpose of your website and what do you want to offer to the visitors. It’s also display your latest news or latest projects. In WordPress default you can’t customize your sidebar into different contents for each pages. For example you don’t want to display your recent comments, recent trackbacks, or arhive on your frontpage. So how do we do this?
Here is the tricky one, you can customize your sidebar contents by using the conditional method. I’ve finally found out that each pages have their own ID except the blog page. So before you using the method, you must know your each page’s ID. You can easily find out by adding this magnificent script into your page.php:
<?php echo $page_id; ?>
This script will display your page’s ID on each pages. So the next step is putting the conditional script on you sidebar.php by using $page_id variable. For the example my homepage’s ID is 47 and my workpage’s ID is 19, and I don’t want to put recent comments information on those pages, so I insert:
<php if (($page_id != "47") && ($page_id != "19")) : ?>
<div class="widget">
<?php if (function_exists('get_recent_comments')) { ?>
<h3><?php _e('Recent Comments'); ?></h3>
<ul>
<?php get_recent_comments(); ?>
</ul>
<?php } ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
The script above makes my homepage and workpage won’t display the recent comments information. But it appears only on my blog page. Pretty cool huh?
But if you’re using custom permalinks, the things will much easier. You don’t need to find out your page’s ID because it is the same as your page’s title. The different is you must use $pagename for determine the value. Here goes for example:
<?php if (($pagename != "home") &&($pagename != "works")) : ?>
<div class="widget">
<?php if (function_exists('get_recent_comments')) { ?>
<h3><?php _e('Recent Comments:'); ?></h3>
<ul>
<?php get_recent_comments(); ?>
</ul>
<?php } ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
It’ll give the same result. For more information about conditional statements you can check here and for logical operator check here.
However, if you’re using widget you can’t customize the contents, unless you determine each function into a single widget or more which are little complicated. Thats why I prefer use standalone script. 
Page Links to
If you have another site like flickr, facebook, last.fm etc and you want to integrate it in your WordPress page, Page links to maybe the simplest way to do that. It’s also good for making link to sections of a page, rather than an entirely separate page.
Voila, now you have your own website 
PS: sory for bad english
