Whenever someone creates a site, they think of all the things that they are going to do with it and all the things that they wish to achieve with it. The issue arises when they realize that there are additional tasks that are very tedious to do on a daily basis.

One way of dealing with this problem is by increasing your company’s productivity, and there are a whole lot of plugins out there that do just that!

So, today I will be reviewing one such plugin that allows you to increase productivity, boost your site’s overall quality, and also remove a couple of tedious tasks that one has to go through.

What is Cornerstone anyway

This plugin is essentially a workaround for certain types of “hacks” that you have to do in order to get the most out of your site. It simplifies the entire process of organizing your posts into different custom sections on your site.

I for one have been a little bit annoyed by how posts and sections are limited in regard to customizability. But when I found out about this plugin, I realized that it is exactly the thing that I have been looking for all this time.

The standard workaround came in the form of using WordPress categories in order to create the “illusion” of having a structure to your site. This works fine and it gets the job done. However, the problem with this is that it will cause an unnecessary headache later down the line when you have a whole lot of posts and categories. It will become a complex mess at one point and you will wish that you had something to help you out in this regard. That is where the Cornerstone plugin comes into play!

With this plugin, you can create very nice and defined sections into which you can then add your posts. Not only that, but you can also allow users to subscribe to individual sections.

This is good if you want to increase your site’s traffic by sending notifications to your subscribed users saying there is a new post in the section to which they are subscribed to. Pretty neat, right?

What are the main features of Cornerstone

This plugin has a couple of handy features with which you can further improve your site and make your workflow a whole lot more organized:

• Posts in sections – With this you can create your own custom sections and add posts to them. They are shown very nicely to visitors who navigate to that particular section and that is about all there is to it.
• Content types – This allows you to add custom fields to default things like pages, posts, and so on. You can also add custom post types in the form of properties, events, etc.
• RSS for sections – This is an awesome feature because it allows your users to subscribe to and receive updates on specific sections on your site. This is handy because you will see an increase in your traffic especially once more and more people subscribe to different sections.
• Structured permalinks – You are able to have permalinks in regard to your posts based on the section they are in. For example, your section’s name is fruit and your post’s name is bananas. This will create a permalink that goes something like http://mysite.com/fruit/bananas. This means that if you remove the bananas part from the URL, you will be redirected to the section fruit.

How to install Cornerstone

Well, first of all, you have to download and install the plugin before you are able to use it. Simply download and install it as you would any other WordPress plugin or alternately you could go and use the “Automatic Installation”.

After you have successfully installed the plugin, you can go ahead and enable it in your admin panel under Plugins.

How to use Cornerstone

It is as easy as it gets, but you do need some practice. Still, it shouldn’t take you too much time to get into it. You just create and then name sections however you want them to be called.

You can then add post tags, allow or disallow comments, allow pings, change the status (if it is published, waiting for review, and so on), and in the end, you decide in which section that post is going to.

And that is about it, the rest of the features that are available to you are a bit harder to explain, so I recommend going to the plugin’s website to check out their in-depth tutorial.

Costs, caveats, etc.

All in all, this is a great plugin once you get used to using it. In the beginning, you will have some difficulties in understanding how each of the functions works, and so on. But later on, you will be grateful that you installed and started using this plugin because it will save so much time and remove the needles organizing of your categories.

The plugin is free for you to use, so go ahead and try it out on a test site so that you can see for yourselves how it works and what its potentials are.