WordPress: As a news tool?

trogdor9

Now I don't mean to be relying on you guys for everyday questions, but I don't know much about web design and I'm becoming the webmaster (next year I start) for my robotics team. I want to set up news with an RSS feed and such. I hear a lot about WordPress and its awesomeness, but only as a blogging tool. You guys also use it for the podcast and Scott uses it for his blog. My question is, can I use WordPress as a news tool and only take up part of my homepage, leaving the rest for me to create?

Apreche

Not really. WordPress is a full-on CMS(Content Management System). It's designed in such a way that you use it to make sites in blog format. If you just want new items in the sidebar of your site, then WordPress is probably not the tool for the job. But if you wanted to make a separate site just for your Robotics team, then WordPress is a great idea. You could hypothetically create a WordPress theme where the posts were displayed only in part of the page, but that really defeats the purpose.

For something like a robotics team Drupal might be a much better choice than WordPress. But that also should only be used if you make a separate site just for the team.

techsupportrich

I've recently discovered that it's not too hard to make a wordpress blog look like a page of your website, but I think anything more than what I did would be painful to say the least.

I just added the header from the rest of my site to the blog and messed with the css file. www.simplysyndicated.com/news