10 Cool Ways You Can Use WordPress

WordPress is definitely the hottest platform to build web sites on these days. Officially a blogging platform, it is so flexible that people quickly found many creative uses for it. In assisting my clients and working with Alice Seba, I've often found myself recommending Wordpress time and time again, for a variety of projects. Almost always, it works out well. Sure, depending on the complexity of the project, you can expect some bumps in the road as you would for any software. But rarely have I experienced a dead end. There's always a way to work it.

Before we go into the different uses, you need to know that some of the following suggestions may require advanced tweaking. It is always good to get the input of an experienced developer proficient with WordPress to get a general idea if your ideas may require a lot of work or will run 'out of the box' with just a few simple plugins.

Content Management System (CMS)

An increasingly popular use. With the advent of beautiful themes both free and premium, you can configure WordPress as a system to manage content with multiple categories that can be customized for each category. You can even have multiple authors posting and assigned to different categories.

This may not require special plugins but it all depends how you want to work it. In the past we have used the Bind User to Category plugin to limit authors' ability to post in a specific category.

There are also CMS like plugins that extend WordPresse's functionality so it behaves more like a real CMS. For example, creating 'templates' so that authors are reminded to add special information in each post. Here are some a few plugins that help you do that:

• Pods
• Flutter

Niche Blog Host

So this is not exactly using WordPress.org system, but WordPress MU which is the multi user version of WordPress. Using it, you can create a blog host environment much like the way WordPress.com works. Users can sign up automatically for their own blogs and have a blog that looks like it stands alone on your domain. A word of caution, WordPress MU is not meant to be used on a shared host. You can install it but you're going to run out of resources pretty quickly and get a (not so) sweet email from your web host. If you host your site on a Virtual Private Server or Dedicated host then definitely you're good to go.

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