WordPress is still regarded by many as just a blogging platform, even though it’s capable of much, much more! The flexibility offered by the WordPress engine is phenomenal - being able to publish anything from a basic blog to a forum, from a web showcase to a corporate CMS site! Here we take a look at some of the great ways WordPress has been used so far.
Content Management System
Using WordPress as a CMS has become pretty common recently since it makes a perfect platform for most small-to-medium corporate websites. It doesn’t quite offer the more advanced details of Joomla, ExpressionEngine or Drupal; but what it lacks in advanced features, it more-than makes up for in the usability arena!
The recently re-designed 10 Downing Street website - home of the British PM - is running WordPress and make a bloody good job of it!
iThemes have an excellent sub-site dedicated to providing tutorials on the best ways to use WordPress as a CMS; check it out!
Magazine
A magazine theme is an excellent way for blogs publishing lots of content daily to present visitors with their most important articles first; their a number of fantastic magazine/news themes avaliable at ThemeForest right now.
Job Listings
One of the most unique ways I’ve seen WordPress used is as a job listings site. In fact, I wouldn’t have even recognised it as WordPress if it weren’t for the tag at the bottom. This is a fantastic theme, complete with forms for visitors to list their own vacancies available at DailyWP for only $59.
Showcase
WordPress has been used numerous times to power a ‘Best of Web’ showcase, and is another excellent example of its flexibility.
Their is also a very popular showcase theme available on ThemeForest for $30!
Portfolio
The use of WordPress to power designer’s portfolios really comes as no surprise. There are hundreds of designers who decided it would be a great platform to show off their work, as well as host their own blog alongside it. “Nuff said.”
Real Estate
Another ‘outside the box’ use of WordPress - using it to power a listing site for an Estate Agent. By making good use of Custom Fields, it really begins to show just how flexible WP truely is! This is another theme where I wouldn’t have thought it were powered by WordPress if it wasn’t written in the header.
This theme is available on ThemeForest for $30.
Game/Film Review
Another great example of pushing WordPress through the use of custom fields. This is a theme by me, designed for a “News & Reviews” website - giving an excellent way to emphasise your featured content and make your reviews stand out. It’s sort of a ‘branch-off’ from the magazine layouts.
This theme is available for $40 on ThemeForest.
A Forum
Wait, what? Yep, a very aspirational user on the FreelanceSwitch Forums has use the WordPress system to develop a forum which doesn’t have the traditional “look and feel of a forum”. Complete with a custom Dashboard to allow all users to make new ‘topics’, this is definitely worth a look and a fantastic job!
Twitter?
By Automattic, the main guys behind WordPress, this is a fantastic idea - allowing members to post an update (or a “tweet”, if you like) directly from the homepage, which will then join the other updates in the feed.
I’m not sure if the theme is still supported, but it’s definitely worth a look!
Now It’s Your Turn
Know of any sites using WordPress in a unique way? Or perhaps your selling something truely special on ThemeForest yourself. Leave a comment below!
JamieO
October 15th, 2008
I could not agree more! In fact, I gave a presentation at a recent Wordcamp (2-day event with speakers all talking about things that have something to do with Wordpress) about why and how Wordpress can be used as a platform for more websites than just a blog. Feel free to check out the Presentation Slides + Video, it might be useful fodder for those who want to do so but need to build a business case to convince their peers that WP can go beyond a blog.
A couple of links from the slides that answer your question of other unique ways to use WP:
-Comics
-Classified Ads
-eCommerce
-Help Desk Ticketing System
-Completely Custom CRM Tool
Kel
October 15th, 2008
Great list - As for the FreshOut CRM link, the Freshout folks have sure been hard at work upgrading Flutter (prev. FreshPage/Post) I think a better CRM might be either of the following:
http://designintellection.com/downloads/wp-contact-manager/
(Reliant on FreshPost / Flutter)
or http://www.cregy.co.uk/crm-wp-plugin/
And there’s another listing here - http://wordpress.org/tags/crm
liam
October 15th, 2008
A great showcase of the power of Wordpress, it’s easy to see looking at this why its so popular!
Matt
October 15th, 2008
This is an cool post it’s just too bad you chose to highlight mostly commercial themes (that violate the GPL license) versus the numerous GPL and free themes that do the same thing.
Steven
October 16th, 2008
I used WordPress to build a number of directory websites. For instance, one of them is about aggregating and presenting information of around 1000 Hong Kong schools. Each Wordpress post is for an individual school. I then used categories and tags to make many index pages. I used the commenting function of WordPress to ask users to provide particular information about each school. In the post template, I also wrote some code to automatically aggregate other information about each school. Here is an example:
Post page: http://www.findaway.hk/primary/school/ying-wa-primary-school
Category page: http://www.findaway.hk/primary/schools/district/sham-shui-po/
Tag page: http://www.findaway.hk/primary/schools-tag/boys-%E7%94%B7%E6%A0%A1
Mike
October 18th, 2008
Love the post.. Thanks
Whilst I am obviously not protecting my company like the messiah “Matt”, it would be great to run a post that perhaps offers a free alternative or such like.
loveprone
October 20th, 2008
WoW! Amazing usability of WordPress Blogging Platform.
Please sort in some more projects.
enjoy
small business websites
October 21st, 2008
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Jason Cypret
October 23rd, 2008
Thanks for the link love! I am currently designing a Wordpress CMS theme for Theme Forrest. I love and follow all your sites. Keep up the good work!
GetMeOnline.org
October 29th, 2008
Hey. Thanks for the link to TheMorningMoan - the forum implementation.
I created this site as a personal project to see if it could be done. It is a work in progress. Thanks for the brilliant review!