There is a lot of information on the net about using WordPress as a cms (content management system), in other words using WP as the foundation for a regular (non-blog) website.  But that information is kind of spread out and not completely clear on the process required.

Fortunately, it's very simple for a modest programmer.  Very little programming is actually required for most things, like setting up a static front page.  A good theme and widgets (and the required plugin to use widgets) fill out the rest of the features.  You can even add some e-commerce support with e-Commerce Lite.

While I'd like to talk about all the details (and I hope to later, perhaps in an article for Linux Format or LWN.net), I wanted to note quickly that the e-Commerce plugin had a problem on fedora Core 5 that I couldn't find the obvious answer for.  The problem is that when you try to upload images of products the e-Commerce plugin fails with a PHP error about  PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function imagecreatefromjpeg().  This means that PHP can't make use of a function provided by the GD library.  While I had the right library installed, I didn't have the module that PHP needed to make use of that library.  On Fedora Core 5 that module is installed with the php-gd rpm.  Once that was installed, I was able to upload product images and the errors in the web logs go away.