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I have a Web site that consists of several pages, with different layouts, and also a blog.
I would like all these page to be editable through Wordpress, rather than having them as custom pages through wordpress which I then have to manually edit the html for in a html editor.
Is it possible to have multiple editable areas in a wordpress template?
What I'm trying to achieve is a multi-column layout which is fully manageable in wordpress, is it possible?
Thanks in advance!
You can actually achieve anything with wordpress. But by design, wordpress is not a CMS with a built-in feature that it offers multiple editable areas of which you can classify and manage the content for while being able to configure those in layouts that are understand by the theme. Not even the default one.
As wordpress is being marketed is a CMS these days, this might sound contradictory. Saying so, CMS just means here that you can extend wordpress with your own plugins to the extend that you can actually achieve a more structured approach in managing different type of content for different layouts.
For example, a file-system is a CMS as well. The term is just quite broad.
More differentiated Web Content Management is a growing part of use of Wordpress over the last years and features that support such are more and more integrated with each release.
Custom Post Types for example is a feature that get's introduced since about 2.8 or so, a little bit more for every release since then. Or the menu for example, since 3.0 there is a build in menu that might be useful if you have a site with it's own content structure.
So you are only limited by your imagination to build stuff, as wordpress can be fully extended and even re-written.
There are an unnumbered amount of tutorials how to achieve certain things in content management and editing as well for themes and layouts for wordpress, so probably a search on the web might reveal the best information for you.
So I can only give quite a broad answer that stuff is possible but with a bit more information what you actually want to achieve in specific, this probably can be answered even more specific like suggesting a certain tutorial, plugin or theme.
It just always depends on what you want to achieve.
You might check out the Carrington Business theme. It's a commercial theme, but I think it does what you are asking.
For each of the pages you'd have to make widget content areas and then populate each with content area from these. So if you had a services page, you might set up a page with "About our services... [blah]" as the main content that shows up from the loop. To then get stuff into columns below it you could add a widget area with html widgets. It requires setting up a page template for each of these pages, but if you don't expect the pages to change structure very often, this is probably the most user-proof.
The other, easier way is, if the people you're working with can handle simple shortcodes ie. [col1]content[/col1], [col2]content[/col2], [col3_last]content[/col3_last], just use those and tell them to edit between the shortcodes. Check out some of the popular themes on Themeforest for their extensive formatting and column shortcodes.
