WordPress — Not Just A Vanilla Blogging Platform!

People seem to think of WordPress as little more than a blogging platform.

They just updated it to V2.9, and I thought I’d take a minute to share some insights in the hope that you’ll spend a little more time with it.

In V2.8, they added something I consider AMAZING from a technical standpoint — the ability to update plugins, themes, and even WP itself right from within WP! WOO-HOO! They’ve managed to solve a very complex problem there, and I think it’ll just explode the use of WP.

Anyway, if you go to wordpress.org and click on the EXTEND link, you can see all of the themes and plugins that are available.

There are currently 7,716 plugins available, and over 1,000 themes! The vast majority of them are all free.

There are also hundreds of commercial plugins and themes.

Most of the plugins are for fairly small stuff. But recently people have started to release some pretty massive plugins that transform WordPress into something entirely different. Here are a few of my faves, most of which happen to deal with Pages and Categories, which are often neglected by most folks.

(To get any of them, go to Plugins | Add New, then enter the plugin name into the search box and click the search button. You can install it right from there! No more download / unzip / upload via FTP!)

All in One SEO Pack — Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.

article2pdf — This plugin let your visitors download an article as PDF file.

AWeber Integration — add one or more AWeber form(s) to your sidebar and optionally enable AWeber email web analytics for your website.

Display widgets — Lets you show or hide individual widgets on individual Pages (only works with widgets conforming to V2.8 hooks!)

Flexi Pages Widget — list pages and sub-pages in sidebar

HeadSpace2 — Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs

Mingle — Turns your standard WordPress website with a standard WordPress theme into a Social Network.

Misiek Page Category — Creates categories for pages and displays them as widget

My Page Order — Set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface.

Page Category Plus — Produces a list of tags in the write/edit post pages

Page Lists Plus — Adds customisation options to the wp_list_pages function which is used to create Page menus.

Page Manage Widget — manage pages in a sidebar (similar to Misiek Page Category)

Post Tabs — VERY COOL! Lets you split a long post into sections accessed through a set of horizontal tabs

ProjectManager — manage several different types of projects with redundant data.

Role Manager — set up and manage additional roles (beyond the default 6 or so)

SSG WordPress Google Audio Player — A slim, simple mp3 player plugin for WordPress utilizing Google’s free Flash Audio Player.

StatPress — Real time stats for your WordPress blog

Theme My Login — Themes the WordPress login, registration and forgot password pages according to your theme. Also lets you assign login redirection based on several criteria, and puts a login widget into your sidebar.

TinyMCE Advanced — Enables advanced features and plugins in TinyMCE, the visual editor in WordPress.

Simple:Press Forum — Simple:Press forum adds a fairly comprehensive discussion forum to your site
(you need to go to http://simplepressforum.com/ to download it.)

WP-SpamFree — I prefer this over Akismet; it’s very effective at preventing comment spam.

If you’ve got cPanel hosting with Fantastico, it takes about 2 minutes to install a blog on your site. I suggest you put it into a folder named ‘b’ or ‘blog’ or something, rather than in the root folder. If you want people to access it by default anyway, you simply copy the index.php from the wordpress folder (‘b’ or ‘blog’) into the document root and then edit it so the path in the ‘include(…)’ statement has your installation folder name in it as well. You also need to change a setting in the General Settings page that needs to know where people will be accessing it from.

While it can be tempting to use the “Free Website Repair” tactics to get customers, it’s not a lot of fun trying to actually “fix” their web sites if they decide to have you do that. You’ll often find yourself having to deal with a webmaster who’s natural inclination is to distrust you and feel their job may be in jeopardy.

As an alternative, consider just getting a new domain name, set up hosting and install a WordPress blog with some of these plugins. Include a name capture widget (not listed) to build a mailing list on AWeber or something similar, and set it up to give away some kind of free report. Drive traffic to it, then post articles with links to pages in their main web site.

Spend some time looking through the thousands of plugins that are available and play with them.

You might also consider buying a “Developer’s license” for some commercial themes, like from iThemes, so you can whip out custom themes for your clients. (iThemes just introduced their “Builder” theme, which lets you create a theme with virtually any kind of a layout right within the WP Admin area!) You cold also consider getting a copy of Artisteer for building really fancy themes — the license for it is in the same price range as many developer licenses from the theme vendors.

A good balance between some commercial stuff and free stuff will put you over the edge when it comes to your competition.

There are also a number of PayPal payment buttons (search the plugins list for “paypal”) and even some membership scripts (eg., Memberwing) that now work with WordPress, but most of them aren’t free. My favorite is Rapid Action Profits with the Rapid Action Press plugin.

I guarantee that if you spend 20-30 hours just learning about WordPress and some of these plugins, you’ll be able to run circles around their web guys and get stuff set up so fast it’ll make their heads spin! For a world that’s used to using shovels to move dirt, WordPress is like having a backhoe!

-David