There are many ways of using wordpress not only as a blog platform. here’s a collection of the top unusual uses of wordpress with links to other posts who already gathered the best uses also. comment here if you want…

CMS

10 Downing Street – http://www.number10.gov.uk/

twistnshout – http://twistnshout.com/twist/

here are top examples, a post by wpfeed.com

Magazine

A list of nice uses of wordpress as a magazine

Another nice example

Job Board

The Job Poster

ShowCase / Gallery

http://welovewp.com/

Portfolio

SharpFolio – http://webrevolutionary.com/sharpfolio/

here is a list of some portfoilio themes we collected for you, here

Real Estate

http://themeforest.net/item/real-estate-theme/17730

PhotoBlog

http://codex.wordpress.org/Photoblogs_and_Galleries

WordPress Photoblog – http://www.wordpressphotoblog.com/

Game Reviews

http://themeforest.net/item/gamepress/17397

Trailers Portal

http://www.press75.com/demos/ondemand/

Twitter

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/introducing-prologue/

E-Commerce

http://www.markettheme.com/buy

you can also read our post about the plugins and themes of the WordPress E-Commerce here

Link Directory

Website , and Download the theme here

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Here is a list of other posts collected unusual uses of wordpress

http://performancing.com/blogging-tools/48-unique-ways-use-wordpress

http://bloggingbits.com/5-odd-and-unique-uses-of-wordpress/

http://impresslab.com/wordpress/11-ways-to-use-wordpress/

http://www.jasonunger.com/2008/08/28/5-unique-ways-to-use-wordpress-not-as-a-blog/

http://blog.themeforest.net/wordpress/the-flexibility-of-wordpress/

Popularity: 17% [?]

A very unique and easy way to implement amazon products in your blog or even build an online store with the products you wish to sell and get affiliate commissions from amazon. here are the top plugins. comment here if you know other great amazon plugins for wordpress.

Amazonify™ for WordPress

Amazonify is a WordPress plugin that allows you to insert Amazon Product and Omakase links within your posts.  The easy to insert tags greatly simplify the task of promoting Amazon Associate sales through your blog.  Amazonify also supports the addition of Amazon Context links and the Product Preview rollover script.

AmazonSimpleAdmin

AmazonSimpleAdmin lets you easily integrate Amazon products into your wordpress pages. By using the template feature, you can present the products in different styles on different pages. All by typing simple BBCode tags. AmazonSimpleAdmin requires PHP5.

another URL – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/amazonsimpleadmin/

Amazon Media Manager (AMM)

The Amazon Media Manager lets you add items from Amazon’s catalogue to your wordpress blog. It keeps a list of things you’ve added, too, so you can choose what to display, how to display it and more!

We’ve tried to make it as simple as we could for the amount of flexibility it provides and over time we’ll be adding more features and “How to…” guides here to help you out.

WP-amazon

Have you ever wanted an easy way to link to a book, movie, or product that’s relevant to what you’re writing about? Typically, this is a pretty cumbersome task — open up a browser, go to Amazon, look for the product you’re interested in, copy the URL, then paste the link to your entry. Not anymore. With WP-Amazon, the Amazon product catalog is available right from WordPress. This plugin will allow you to search Amazon as you compose your post or page entry.

Popularity: 11% [?]

maybe a new tradition and maybe not, i don’t know yet, but here are some interesting news from the world of wordpress for this week.

WordPress 2.7

released officaily this month, beside the change of the admin interface, a lot of improvements comes with this new WP version.

actually we upgraded too but you can’t see it becasuse it only affects the admin area. here you can read more about the many changes of 2.7 and here is a video from wordpress.org blog about the new version:

Buddypress

the long anticipated official beta version of the Automattic tool for social networks. here is a link for the buddypress website and this one is for the download. Make sure you have WordPress MU set up and working correctly.

BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, each plugin adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact.

here is a link for a test of mine with wordpress – ajaxexample.com

WordPress Plugin Releases for 12/18

each week weblogtoolscollection.com release a list of the weekly updated and new plugins. also pay attention to the themes released every week. you can see everything here

this is it for this week, have a great weekend.

Popularity: 7% [?]

One of the common ways to use wordpress not as a blog platform is when you want to build a portfolio website, for you or for your client. here is a list of the top portfolio themes we found for you on the web.

hope you’ll find it useful.

Viz Biz

buy | demo

Egallery

buy | demo

Proudfolio

buy | demo

SharpFolio

download | demo

f8 lite

download | demo

links:

Great list of portfolio themes

Portfolio category on ThemeForest

How to Use WordPress for a Portfolio Site – Part 1

Popularity: 8% [?]

One of the great options in wordpress is enabling other page to be the default page not just the regular posts page. and the best use for it is creating websites the CMS way and not the blog way.

here are some veryy nice examples:

Eye-Fi

Temple Bar TradFest 2009

Earth911

Bit Interactive

R&W Mosman and Neutral Bay Real Estate

Spotify

myshli

Some links about how to use wordpress as a CMS

Using WordPress as a CMS

How to use WordPress to run a magazine, news website

How to use WordPress as a Truly Customized CMS (Multiple Headers, Footers, Sidebars and more!)

WordPress WOW: Eight Top Sites using WordPress as a CMS…

Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins

WordPress as a CMS – Content Management System

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Some Videos About how to use wordpress as a CMS

Using WordPress as a CMS from YouTube

Using WordPress as a CMS From weblogtoolscollection

WordPress as a CMS css-tricks.com

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do you know of any other nice websites using wordpress as a CMS (not the new trendy use as a magazine), please share with us.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Beside using SandBox or other basic wordpress themes you can use on of the theme generators online to create your basic theme. here is a list of the top wordpress theme generators available online.

WordPress Theme Generator

This online generator creates your own custom unique WordPress Theme. Without any need for HTML, JS, PHP, or CSS knowledge.

WordPress Theme Gen

this one is also free to use, it’s not online but available for download at anytime. you download the EXE and install locally. Unleash your creative ideas and bring your WordPress sites to life with this free and powerful software.

Templatr

A very easy to use tool, upload the graphics and then use the css editor to style any part of your layout.

Pixopoint

find yourself a default theme and go through all the style elements to choose your own without having to touch a single line of code.

like any other theme generator you can export your design as a WordPress theme.

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Know any other good wordpress theme generator? please share with us.

Popularity: 9% [?]

There are several plugins to automate your blog content. if you own a domain and don’t want to park it, or just need to fill some content in a blog for other purposes, you can do it quit easy with this list of plugins, some more complex and others easier to use, but all of them have the basic feature of creating content to a wordpress blog by automate the write post procedure while using rss feeds.

feedwordpress

Actually i used this one on several blogs i owned and i really recommend it, you can automate all the content creation process and also have the option not to auto publish but to read the posts first and only publish them yourself.

FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for the WordPress weblog software. It syndicates content from feeds that you choose into your WordPress webblog; if you syndicate several feeds then you can use WordPress’s posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation (“planet”) website.

wordpress.org plugin URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedwordpress/

autoblogged

AutoBlogged is a powerful autoblogging plugin for WordPress that automatically creates posts from any RSS or Atom feed. With dozens of powerful features, AutoBlogged is one of the most flexible feed aggregating plugins available.

You can use AutoBlogged to build blog networks, to create automated video or photo blogs, aggregate posts from multiple feeds, or create your own keyword-rich topic portals

more details about the features, click here

this plugin is NOT free and you can find the last prices on their website.

wp-o-matic

Tried this one a few times, this is my second choice because of not being as friendly as the other two. i liked the ajax interface though.

WP-o-Matic makes autoblogging a snap by automatically creating posts from the RSS/Atom feeds you choose, which are organized into campaigns.

wordpress.org plugin URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-o-matic/installation/

Don’t forget to link to the original website, and credit them as well.

* Do yo know any other plugins to automate your blog? please comment and share them with us.

Popularity: 11% [?]

there are more and more video plugins in the wordpressphere (?) these days. quite hard to choose the right one for you.

you want it to be easy to operate and not too complicated but also to support a lot of features and include the most video portals in it.

here is a list of the top video plugins available.

All in One Video Pack

Right from the pretentious name you can guess we’re dealing with a huge plugin. a plugin that claims to answer all your video wishes.

to tell you the truth, it is not far from that, it includes every functionality you might need for video and rich-media, including the ability to upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix content with an online video editor, enable video responses, manage and track your video content, create playlists and much more…

Another great feature is the video comment. the plugin adds this option to every comment form. just look down here.

the flash control panel of the plugin sometimes too slow, but we can forgive them because of all the rich and many options featured.

watch this video with its original player (not using the YouTube or the Regular Flash Player like most of the plugins) and use the remix or upload functions to check it out.

[kaltura-widget wid="7tn8rkj0d8" width="410" height="364" addpermission="0" editpermission="0" /]

works great!

plugin URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-video-pack/

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Embedded Video

very friendly and easy to use plugin. 5 options of settings and one single line of prefix to add in the post and the video is on air. includes most of the big video portals to embed.
[youtube 83FWE_qBudU super video]

first chance

actually you can’t see a video here using this plugin because up to that moment i didn’t succeed embed it.

second chance

i guess it can’t work with other plugins using [].

third chance

but when i use the embed video button here at the editor i use, this is the result:

[youtube U7kmOdoNNo4 Please Work!!!]

Sorry, nothing here…

plugin URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/embedded-video-with-link/

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Flash Video Player

Great options for costuming the player and the appearance settings (here is a list of all the options)

very easy to embed

well, the author of the plugin writes: Simplifies the process of adding video to a WordPress blog.

it may be true 3 years ago, but with all the plugins we have today, we usualy don’t need this one with using FLV file we need to prepare.

here is a video example using the Flash Video Player

[flashvideo filename="http://wpfeed.com/wp-content/videos/parrot.flv" /]

N-I-C-E !!!

plugin URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/flash-video-player/

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Smart Youtube

you guessed right, from the name of the plugin you can tell, it supports YouTube only. the story here is the same, with so many video plugins, no real use for that one.

using it: really easy, just paste the youtube URL and add the letter V after the http. there are also some costumizing options, like those YouTube suggets.

now let’s see if it works:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7kmOdoNNo4

wow, works smoothly.

plugin URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-youtube/

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wordTube

A very rich plugin, with many layout and playlist options.

you can use your own video or audio file and upload it using the manage tab in the admin area or link to a YouTube video.

also has a counter option to show number of times a video watched by your visitors.

now let’s see if it works:

[media id="1"]

perfect!

plugin URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordtube

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WordPress Video Plugin

basiclly no options or manage panel tab at all (or maybe i just dodn’t fint it (-: )

just read the readme file attached to the plugin directory,

embed the video is very easy, just open [ write the name of the video portal you want to use and paste the id of the video. then close ].

supportes a lot of portals

[youtube 83FWE_qBudU 210 175]

OOPS, nothing here… doesn’t work. i guess it can’t work with other plugins using [].

plugin URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-video-plugin/

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Video Widget

Adds some YouTube/Dailymotion/Google… sidebar videos.

actually the only original plugin for the sidebar, you can use others as well but this one is dedicated for that mission, placing a video on the sidebar is easy.

this is why i can’t show you an example, we’re in a post here and not on the sidebar. you have to believe me.

plugin URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/video-widget

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Popularity: 36% [?]

The Plugin

WP-Ecommerce Plugin on wordpress.org The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online. WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind. Perfect for:

• Bands & Record Labels
• Clothing Companies
• Crafters & Artists
• Books, DVDs & MP3 files

you can download the plugin from here

Cart 66

Sell digital products and/or physical products with the Cart66 WordPress ecommerce shopping cart plugin.

Cart66 is a simple to use yet powerful ecommerce plugin for WordPress.

• Sell digital products
• Sell physical products
• Sell services
• Manage orders
• Promotions
• Tax by state (United States and Canada), zip code, or all orders
• Multiple shipping options
• Custom fields for products
• Product variations that can optionally change the price of the product
• Place products on any page or post
• Sell internationally
• Set your currency
• Customizable email receipts
• Affiliate platform integration

URL TO DOWNLOAD

Themes for WP E – Commerce plugin

wopshop

Name:  wopshop

URL: http://wpfeed.com/2009/11/wopshop-e-commerce-wordpress-theme/

Demo: http://wopshop.wpfeed.com

* Supports Up To Wp e-Commerce 3.7.8

price: $5.99

wpStore

Name:  wpStore

URL: http://wpfeed.com/2009/07/wpstore-free-wordpress-e-commerce-theme/

Demo: http://wpstore.wpfeed.com

* Supports Up To Wp e-Commerce 3.7.8

price: FREE

ShopMe

Name: ShopMe

URL:  http://wpbooks.net/shopme-wordpress-e-commerce-theme/

DEMO: http://shopme.wpfeed.com

wp – e commerce theme for versions 3.8 and above.

price: FREE

Market

Inspired by the popular Etsy.com marketplace, the “Market” WordPress theme is the first of hopefully several commerce theme solutions by Press75.com.

The Market theme requires the Cart66 commerce plugin in order to function properly. Cart66 forms is a leading commerce plugin for WordPress that goes above and beyond your average commerce solution. To read more about Cart66, head over to Cart66.com.

DEMO

DOWNLOAD

Ecommerce

Name: Ecommerce

URL: http://ithemes.com/purchase/ecommerce-theme-1/

Demo: http://demos.ecommercethemes.com/

price: $79.95

Crafty Cart

Name: Crafty Cart

URL: http://www.billionstudio.com/news/free-crafty-cart-theme/

Demo: http://demo.billionstudio.com/?wptheme=Crafty%20Cart

Download: http://www.thekingcart.com/wp/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=1

Price: free

WP-shop

Name: WP-shop

URL: http://themeforest.net/item/wpshop/22102

Demo: http://wp3.sarah-neuber.de/

Price: $30

Sommerce Shop

URL: http://themeforest.net/item/sommerce-shop-a-versatile-ecommerce-theme/542001

Other E- Commerce Solutions

Shopp – another plugin, we didn’t use yet, but it looks very good. The Shopp plugin adds a feature filled online store to your WordPress-powered website. It’s been designed to make it easy for just about anyone to get an online store setup in minutes while giving power users the capability to easily customize every aspect of the shopping experience.

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Name: niagakit

URL: http://wpecommercetheme.com/

Demo: http://wpecommercetheme.com/demo/

Price ?

Name: market theme

URL: http://www.markettheme.com/tour/comparison

Demo: http://markettheme.com/demo/

Price: $55 / $150

Websites already using WP E-Commerce plugin

bigliquid - http://bigliquid.com/

designs on jewellery – http://www.designsonjewellery.com/newshop/

seek and destroy clothing -  http://www.seekanddestroyclothing.com/

imagecubes -  http://www.imagecubes.com/

and the beautiful tabletalk - http://tabletalk.com

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You can read more building your own online store using wordpress, here.

Popularity: 55% [?]

WordPress first appeared in 2003 as is now used on thousands of websites. It is a simple open source blogging tool which is offered in two ways, either the hosted option or the free software download option.

WordPress offers many additional features which are otherwise know as WordPress plugins. These WordPress plugins allow you to customise your blog to suit both the audience and the genre of your website.

There are so many WordPress plugins to choose from, if you are new to blogging you may not know which ones will work best for you. Here is a list and explanation on just some of the most popular WordPress plugins available.

Top WordPress Plugins:

• All in one SEO pack – this WordPress plug in helps optimize your titles for search engines as well as generating automatic META tags. It gives you the opportunity to override titles and set any META keywords and description you want. Depending on the version of WordPress you are currently using ie 2.3 you can simply install this WordPress plugin and it will work straight away.

• Akismet - this is a fantastic tool which helps sort out the clutter of spam. Once installed, this WordPress plugin will check all of your comments against the Akismet web service to analyze if they look like spam or something genuine, it then allows you to review what has been found in the ‘comments’ section of your WordPress blog so that you can decide if you want to delete it or not.

• WordPress Stats – although there are many ways to capture data and stats regarding your website, most offer too much information especially if you are new to blogging. The WordPress stats system has been specially designed to focus on the most popular information a blogger needs.

• Twitter Tools – this plugin integrates your Twitter account with your WordPress blog. Twitter is a free micro-blogging and social networking service.

• Get Recent Comments – This plugin gives you full control over the appearance of excerpts of comments that are shown in your sidebar. You can determine the order, the number of excerpts and the length.

• DMSGuestbook – This guestbook can be easily customized allowing you to change not only the color but allows you to set mandatory fields where a user must fill out certain information. You can fully manage the user entries and edit/remove posts before they are shown.

• All In One Video Pack – This WordPress plugin offers every functionality you need for video and rich-media. It allows you to record/upload and import videos straight to your chosen post.

Each WordPress plugin has its own unique advantages and can really help to turn your blog into something user friendly. With so many plugins to choose from it is worth spending a bit of time searching through what is on offer and selecting the plugins that will benefit both you, your site and your readers.

New additions are constantly being added and developed so be sure to keep checking so that you do not miss out on something that could be of benefit.

Allen Jesson can provide you will detailed information about WordPress plugins, plus free access to Fruity Plugins, a WordPress plugin that gives you sticky zest & Link Love for your WordPress blog.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Allen_Jesson

Popularity: 8% [?]