Posted by Justin Dupre on Dec 7, 2008

WordPress and Its Nearly Infinate Uses

Categories: Featured Articles, Technology | 1 comment

The production of WordPress has revolutionized the way blogs were produced. Had WordPress never been created, I’m sure most of you would be stuck creating clumsy blogs based off of Blogger or the useful but still lacking site script, Joomla. WordPress has become a communal meshpot of thousands of user created themes and plugins that no other site building software can come close to matching.

With many of these themes and plugins, the traditional blogging platform WordPress was originally created for has been ripped into several other types of websites making WordPress even more widely acceptable for building any sort of website, not just your typical personal blog.

Community Blogs

WordPress MU (multiple user) allows you to create a blogging platform for more than one person, building multiple blogs on one simple WordPress install, and using subdomains for separate users blogs. Imagine making your own Blogger community. Without custom software that could offer things that WordPress couldn’t (is that possible?) It’d be hard to get your MU blog network as popular and profitable as Blogger and the already available WordPress free blogging platform network. However, it could be great for creating your own individual network of sites on one domain, interlinking like a Wiki-style website for huge SEO bonuses. Another idea is to use it for like-minded individuals to share ideas and connect with others interested in the same topics (ex. Dog lover blogging network, Obama supporters’ network, etc).

Micro-blogging

Twitter has become a smash hit, almost as popular as WordPress itself. It’s spawned the creation of several other microblogging platforms such as Jaiku and Pownce. People have now started to take it upon themselves to create a self-hosted microblogging platform, and why not? It can be monetized, if you so choose to walk that path, and you aren’t always completely limited to 140 words. There is also the ability to be more flexible about posting images or videos directly to your blog.

Several themes and plugins have been created to help users create their WordPress micro-blogs. The Fresh Tweet theme imitates the Twitter default theme pretty accurately. Tumblelog is an open-source theme that integrates some interesting and easy to use microblogging features. Prologue is probably the most advanced and freshest engines released for microblogging on WordPress. It allows a community (say your work places employees for example), to communicate with one another on an open timeline. It’s similar to tracking your friends timeline in Twitter, but mixes in benefits found in the work networking platform Basecamp.

Photoblogs

A photoblog simply allows you to share your photos with users. Generally, they lack any text besides the titles, photographer name and perhaps the camera setting and location the photo was taken. Several plugins, like the YAPB plugin and PhotoQ plugin allow you to easily manage and create your own photoblogs to share with the world. The YAPB plugin page lists some nice themes you can use. Photojaunt also has a good top 10 list of WordPress photoblog themes. With the inclusion of gallery and Silver Light-style effects plugins, these can look really amazing.

Link Directories

Link building is essential to building good ranks in Google. Most webmasters will usually drop a few hundred to thousands of links in web link directories to try to establish those rankings. While most directories are rubbish anyways, I can see how using the same plugin we use for the Deeboo link directory might help change that. Sean Bluestone has created the WordPress Link Directory plugin which allows you to integrate a simple to use directory to your WordPress pages. Since Google loves blogs and WordPress instalations in general, you can expect to get spidered and ranked a bit better in our directory rather than a PHPLinkDirectory built site.

Vlog

Vlogging, or video blogging, is similar to a photoblog. Instead of posting photos, you post… that right! Videos! Several plugins make it easy to ad videos from services like YouTube, Vimeo, or Google Video. Revver is a plugin that makes it incredibly easy to manage a video blog, adding in extensions to the WordPress CMS that lets you monetize your vlog and upload videos directly from your server. Several themes are specifically made for vlogs. My personal favorite theme is the Evid theme that can be downloaded for a cheap $20 yearly subscription to the WordPress theme’s club at Elegant Themes.

Other Uses

These don’t even begin to explain what WordPress is limited to doing. Portfolios, business websites, theme viewers, review sites, e-commerce sites, and even forum integration have all seen their fair share of use within WordPress. And because WordPress is always ever growing with community interaction and constant development from WordPress’s programming geniuses, we can only expect any limits to be smashed away.