Why move?

There could be any number of reasons for moving your site to a new location. Perhaps you are changing hosting providers (as we all do at one point or another) and are moving all of your stuff someplace new. Most of the time, for me, it’s because I’m setting up a client’s site based on a local or remote testing installation.

A better question would probably be: why test? More often that not you will be moving a WordPress site to a new location because you first had it in place, testing it. And this is only smart. Live testing, where people know how to find it, is never smart. Testing it in secret can help you foresee and diagnose many of the potential problems, and help you save face once you turn it live.

In the 100 or so odd times I’ve moved a WordPress site from one location to another, I’ve casually put together a mental checklist that I go through to make sure I hit all of the points I need to, and to speed the process up. Consider this a mental brain dump, for your benefit.

First things first: handle your content

The most important part of your site, you’ll want to move over your content first. When I say content, of course, I’m talking about a couple of different things. Most obviously it’s your database export. You can grab the XML file of that content at Tools > Export. This is pretty straightforward, and shouldn’t really confuse you.

If you are moving from one remote host location to another, then moving content is pretty simple. In your new WordPress installation, go to Tools > Import and select the file you just exported from your other site. Be sure to check the box that will download and import all of the files from the other site you’re moving from. This will grab any images/files you uploaded and reconstruct the uploads folder appropriately.

If you’re moving from a local WordPress site to a remote one (let’s say you’ve been testing locally, for instance) then this process is a little bit more difficult. You can’t actually trust WordPress to find and import all of your files, since your site is hosted locally, and WordPress won’t look on your computer. So in this case you’re going to have to grab your wp-content/uploads folder manually, and move it over.

The easiest way to make sure all of the files are linked up correctly throughout your site is to use a nifty Plugin called Search and Replace. It will run through all of your content — pages, posts, everything — and replace any string with another string. So, have it replace your original site’s URL (only the beginning, before the /wp-content part starts) with your new one. This should cover your bases pretty well.

Move over relevant Plugins

Now turn your gaze to your wp-content/plugins folder. One of the reasons I like testing before pushing a WordPress site live is that I often go through a couple of Plugin options when solving simple problems. Odds are that I’ll have a number of Plugin choices that I didn’t use lying around, cluttering things up. So when I push everything to its live location, I’ll only take the Plugins I’m actually using. I suggest you do the same thing.

Match relevant settings

You’ll want to make sure that your settings are the same between your two installs as well. The easiest way to do this is just to open up two tabs and run through all of the screens within your Settings tab of the Dashboard and make sure everything is the same. Depending on the number of Plugins you normally run, this may be a fairly large endeavor.

A couple of things I always watch out for:

• Be sure that the home page and blog page are set correctly on the Settings > Reading page.
• Check that your comment settings (in Settings > Discussion) are set the same, specifically the number of threaded comments you’re allowing.
• Set your permalinks (Settings > Permalinks) to be what you had them before. Otherwise, any linking you did within your site will likely be screwed up, even using the Search and Replace Plugin.

Note: If you do happen to change your Permalinks structure, use a Plugin like Redirection to send URLs to their new locations.

What do you do when moving your sites?

Every site move brings its own problems and frustrations. Odds are you’ve discovered your own methods for making this a painless process, and that you’ve come across some ideas that I haven’t. Speak up in the comments.

Even with these options, however, WordPress lacks a killer invoicing app… for now.

Introducing InvoicePro

InvoicePro, slated for a Fall 2009 release, is an open source theme for WordPress currently being developed by John Kolbert. The best part about InvoicePro, in my opinion, is that almost everything will be done on the frontend without having to use the WordPress admin. This was my problem with many of the other options I’ve reviewed in this series and I’m glad to see one project really making an easy-to-use interface a priority.

What will InvoicePro do?

InvoicePro will be able to take care of the things you are using Freshbooks or Harvest for. John Kolbert has published a list of planned features for InvoicePro. For a freelancer, these features include:

• Track client contact info
• Create estimates
• Receive notification of client approval of estimates
• Send invoices
• Allow client viewing of invoices/estimates through encrypted link or force registration
• Send and receive comments to/from clients directly on the estimate page
• Collect payments via PayPal
• View historical data (and save to PDF)

and for your clients:

• View estimates and invoices quickly by using an encrypted link
• Returning clients can view work history (if registered)
• Save invoices directly as PDFs
• Approve estimates
• Pay invoices directly via PayPal
• Leave comments on projects

WPHire.com - The Premium, Hosted InvoicePro Solution

InvoicePro will be totally free and open source. That means anyone who knows how to setup a WordPress blog can download it and use it for themselves. However, John will also be releasing a hosted invoicing solution based on InvoicePro called WPHire which will be specifically marketed as an invoice solution for WordPress developers. It’s expected to cost $5 - $10 per month and will keep users from worrying about maintenance, setup or hosting.

Conclusion

Of everything I’ve covered, this project is by far the one I’m most excited about. The mockup looks very promising and John Kolbert is very capable. As a slave to Freshbooks I can’t wait to try it out for myself.

If you’d like to help with the project, John is taking donations here (scroll to the bottom). You can also get updates about WPHire by signing up for the newsletter at WPHire.com.

Thank God I learned a little more about WordPress!

While WordPress’ project management capabilities are still developing and its contact management is adequate, creating and managing a portfolio is where WordPress really shines! There are almost too many portfolio themes to count and new ones are being developed all the time. Here are a few of the best portfolio themes for WordPress.

Paid Portfolio Themes

Proudfolio | Demo

Photo Graphic | Demo

Black Canvas | Demo

Maven Portfolio | Demo

Free Portfolio Themes

Snapshot | Demo

Sharpfolio | Demo

Portfolio WordPress Theme | Demo

Linquist | Demo

]]> http://wpcandy.com/articles/portfolio-using-wordpress.html/feed http://wpcandy.com/articles/portfolio-using-wordpress.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wpcandy/~3/SqLJcXl9ZMY/freelancing-with-wordpress-contact-management.html http://wpcandy.com/articles/tutorials/freelancing-with-wordpress-contact-management.html#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:18:27 +0000 JD Bentley http://wpcandy.com/?p=1911 In the course of your freelancing career you’ll run into plenty of people for every project you work on. It can be pretty hectic to keep everybody organized in your head so it’s highly recommended that you use some form of contact management system. For some of you that might be Outlook or Gmail or Thunderbird. Others might use 37signals’ Highrise or manage contacts within Basecamp and others still might use a simple notebook.

But I offer you another solution, arguably a better solution — WordPress!

Introducing WP Contact Manager

Unlike using WordPress for Project Management, contact management for WordPress has a clear-cut and nearly complete solution that is a pleasure to work with and easy to learn. WP Contact Manager is a stand-alone theme for WordPress by Artisan Themes that allows you to turn WordPress into a full-fledged contact management system. The theme can also be used in conjunction with plugins such as Members Only for keeping your contacts private, Related Posts for displaying related contacts, and Search Everything for displaying custom search options.

The Interface

WP Contact Manager has a very organized and professional-looking interface, one that you would expect from a more mature commercially-developed app. The homepage displays a list of the most recently added contacts, a search form and a tag cloud.

If you click on any contact’s name you are taken to a more detailed view. You can see (and add) pretty much any information you want for your contacts — name, address, email, websites, phone numbers. Each contact also gets User Notes, which are more or less a comments section for the contact. I can imagine this coming in handy if you are collaborating with others or even just working alone and you want to keep track of the actions already taken and the next actions for the contact. Additional Notes are more permanent notes for the contact, maybe a description of how you met or why the person is important. These are added as a normal post would be in WordPress.

Using WP Contact Manager

With WP Contact Manager, a new contact can be added by clicking “Add New Contact” in the top menu of any public facing page. This will take you to the WordPress post admin. All the contact information is added using custom fields except for the Additional Notes which can be added with the WYSIWYG editor. It’s kind of quirky at first. For example, the first two contacts I added never took because I didn’t give the contact a title. I just added in the custom fields information. So, I had to type the name twice, once for the title and once for the custom fields. It’s not a big deal, just redundant.

Conclusion

WP Contact Manager is great. It really does get the job done and, for me at least, it is comparable to Highrise (which I love). It’s a pleasure to use and does exactly what you expect it to. There are a couple things that could be done to improve it, though.

1. Theme Options or Child Themes

I would love to see the ability to change colors and background images. Even better, maybe, would be the availability of some child themes for it. Just something to make it more slick and contemporary.

2. No WordPress Admin

It really shouldn’t use the WordPress admin for adding contacts as it’s not particularly friendly to newcomers. Adding new contacts but saying “Add Post” is confusing. I’d like to see a custom made admin page that follows the same design as all the other pages without extraneous options like the WordPress admin sidebar. It really needs an admin specifically designed for someone adding a contact.

WP Contact Manager isn’t being actively developed right now, so I don’t know when (if ever) we might see these improvements, but even without them, WP Contact Manager is one of the best solutions out there. If you haven’t given it a try, do so today!

Download WP Contact Manager

Do you use WordPress to manage contacts? Is there a way to use it that I haven’t found yet? Let us know in the comments!

JD Bentley is a freelance designer, WordPress developer and entrepreneur. His writing can also be found at wageslaverebel.com and jdbentley.com.

As a freelancer who makes a living with WordPress , I couldnʼt help but feel like a sellout using Basecamp when I knew my site was sitting on top of arguably the most extendable and powerful publishing platform on the web. Realizing I could save myself $12 per month and keep in line with my open source philosophy, I set out to create my own self-hosted project management app built on top of WordPress from resources freely available on the web.

There turned out to be a few different options.

WP-Project (download the Plugin)

WP-Project is a plugin written by Nick Ohrn that allows WordPress users to manage projects from within the WordPress admin. You can track clients, track projects by client, add and track tasks by project, and track the amount of time youʼve spent on a project. WP-Project is the most complete solution that Iʼve found for managing projects using WordPress. Itʼs fairly easy to use and has enough features that it could potentially replace Basecamp for a user like me.

However, itʼs not without itʼs quirks and shortcomings, most notably the interface. The Dashboard doesnʼt summarize your information in any useful way. It has a smashed sort of look to it. Thatʼs not to say itʼs bad, but the author knows its shortcomings and clearly intended to improve upon them.

With a better interface, this could be one of the top WordPress plugins for freelancers, period.

P2 (download the theme)

If you donʼt mind stepping outside of the project management box (you know, the one that dictates all project management systems resemble Basecamp), then youʼll see P2 is actually a pretty elegant and minimalist solution.

For those who havenʼt yet seen or used P2, itʼs a theme that allows WordPress to exist somewhere between a traditional blog and Twitter. Once youʼre logged in, you can send messages directly from the homepage via a box that resembles a Twitter status update box, but without the 140 character limit.

Why use P2 for project management? It updates in realtime! This allows for quick collaboration and planning, which is especially handy when dealing with remote workers. In fact, Automattic — the company behind WordPress — created P2 precisely for this reason.

Plain Old WordPress

Thatʼs right, you can use WordPress, unaltered, for project management. To me, this has turned out to be the least frustrating and most efficient system precisely because it uses features already built into the platform, features you already know how to use.

For each project you have, create a category. Itʼs really that simple. You can create a post with whatever information, images, videos or other files you need attached, connect it to the project category and then youʼll be able to sort and comment every task as you go along.

There are probably more elaborate systems for using an unaltered WordPress for project management, maybe with themes designed with the purpose of properly organizing each project category and the posts they contain. It also might be helpful to install one of the many to do list plugins.

For me, though, simple is best and if simple works, why clutter it up with extra “features” anyway?

Conclusion

After checking out all these options Iʼve found the “WordPress-as-Project-Management-System” experience to be extremely lacking. The options are either simple enough that they could be replaced with Google Docs or a simple notebook or so complex that trying to use them is nearly impossible. There simply is no killer project management plugin for WordPress… yet.

I think it is worth noting that the best replacement Iʼve found for Basecamp is an open source project called Project Pier which does almost everything Basecamp does. Itʼs even themeable and they have some pretty slick options. If you want a self-hosted project management solution, Project Pier is definitely the way to go.

Iʼm sure this isnʼt a definitive list of project management solutions for WordPress, though. Maybe youʼve even found something thatʼs better than Basecamp. Maybe youʼre developing it. If you know of any other plugins or methods for using WordPress as a project management system, let us know in the comments!

JD Bentley is a freelance designer, WordPress developer and entrepreneur. His writing can also be found at wageslaverebel.com and jdbentley.com.

wp_head() an action hook which is located in your theme’s header.php is a prime example of how action hooks work. wp_head is located in your theme’s header.php. Let’s take a peak at the source:

/**
 * Fire the wp_head action
 *
 * @since 1.2.0
 * @uses do_action() Calls 'wp_head' hook.
 */
function wp_head() {
	do_action('wp_head');
}

As you’ll notice, there’s nothing actually in wp_head that prints out any scripts or meta tags. wp_head simply calls a do_action function with the first parameter being wp_head. And that’s where the magic lies: do_action();

In order to create an action hook, you simply need to create a placeholder function that calls do_action(); with the first parameter being the name of the desired hook. Typically, you’d want the name to be exactly what the function name is, but it can be anything you’d like; as long as the name isn’t already in use.

Now here’s how the magic works: Once you call the do_action('wp_head'); with the first parameter being the name of the desired hook, WordPress registers this call into the system. With the hook now registered into the system, we can now call the add_action(); function allowing us to hook into wp_head.

Viewing the source of default-filters.php where WordPress hooks into the wp_head action hook reveals this:

add_action('wp_head', 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 1);
add_action('wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3);
add_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link');
add_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');
add_action('wp_head', 'index_rel_link');
add_action('wp_head', 'parent_post_rel_link', 10, 0);
add_action('wp_head', 'start_post_rel_link', 10, 0);
add_action('wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link', 10, 0);
add_action('wp_head', 'locale_stylesheet');
add_action('wp_head', 'noindex', 1);
add_action('wp_head', 'wp_print_styles', 8);
add_action('wp_head', 'wp_print_head_scripts', 9);
add_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

More than a dozen functions get hooked into wp_head by default. You’ll notice that the first parameter is wp_head, with the second parameter being a PHP function. What add_action does, is register those PHP functions to the wp_head action hook. So whenever a do_action('wp_head'); is called, WordPress checks to see if any PHP functions are registered to wp_head, and if so, execute them. And that’s how the WordPress actions API works.

Now why go through all that trouble when WordPress could have easily included all these functions into the actual theme itself? Well for one, the actions API makes your theme future proof. If you noticed right above the wp_head function, there was a comment stating that it was there since WordPress 1.2.0. That’s a pretty long time, and I can assure you that all those PHP functions registered to the wp_head hook weren’t there back in those days. Using the actions API, WordPress was able to use one placeholder function and hook in functionality later down the line when needed, like feed_links_extra, which was introduced in WordPress 2.8.

Using the actions API, you can also remove PHP functions registered to a particular hook using remove_action();

remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_generator' );

The first parameter indicates which hook we’re targeting, and the second is the actual PHP function we’d like to remove. This function is useful if your using a theme framework and would like to remove some of their default behavior.

So to recap, the actions API allows you to create placeholder functions in your template files, allowing other functions to hook into that particular spot just by registering them using the add_action call. To read more on this topic, here are a few links that also explains the matter:

• WordPress Codex Plugin API
• An introduction to Action hooks
• Using Action Hooks in WordPress Child Themes
• Understanding Action Hooks In Wordpress

The actions API is exactly how plugins are able to add features and functionality to WordPress as those little do_action() calls are made all throughout the WordPress core. Nowadays, themes are starting to get more advanced, so they started making use of the actions API to allow more flexibility and future proof. In the next article, I’ll demonstrate some creative uses for action hooks that you can use in your themes.

While WordPress is the world’s most popular self-hosted blogging solution, it’s also an open source CMS (Content Management Solution). WordPress is known for it’s blogging capabilities, but being a CMS as well it can do nearly anything that can be done within a web site. Like a Forum, photo gallery, web directory, classifieds site, jobs board, news site, and more! The advantage of doing these kinds of things within WordPress are that you can use it for either blogging or other features in as well!

Imagine being able to create a web directory, but use WP RSS, comments, pingback, plugin, and theme features? Consider the ability to add a blog within a subsection of a web site without having to install a separate instance of WordPress there (because WP runs your entire site!).

There are probably hundreds (if not thousands) of things you can do with WordPress that aren’t blogging, but here are the top 10 ones I could think of to get the gears turning inside your head!

1. Create a Static Web Site

I’m amazed sometimes when people don’t understand why I would want to create a static web site using WordPress. There are 3 reasons this is the best solution I can think of:

1. Sheer speed of Setup
2. Plugins and Themes
3. Future Growth

I can setup an entire WordPress web site including database and initial setup options in about 10 minutes. I can customize it very quickly with a theme. I can add a very detailed contact form in about 5 minutes with a simple plugin. With another plugin I can generate an XML sitemap to register with the 3 major search engines. To do the same with static HTML (even Dreamweaver) would take soooo much longer, and would require extra scripts for a contact form and XML sitemap.

In addition if I created a 10 page static web site for a client using WordPress, I could create a login account for them and they could update their own web site (or add pages) in the future without needing my assistance. You certainly can’t do that with a static web site!

If you create a static web site in the future using WordPress - here’s what you need to know:

As soon as you setup the site, change permalink structure by going to settings -> permalink in your dashboard. Change the default date based permalink to /%postname%/ like this:

Next, since you’re building a static site you need to assign a static home page. In settings -> reading in your dashboard assign a static page to display for the home page. If you’re going to use the blogging function as well, you can assign it to a sub-page of your blog here as well:

Last, turn off comments. You can turn these back on for any invidual pages (or posts if you use the blogging feature later). Go to settings -> Discussion to turn comments off by default:

2. Build a Directory

Web Directories are old school Internet! A Directory is just a listing of sites, categorized in some way. There are blog directories, business directories, web design directories - just about any niche you can think of is available. To this day people still like directories because unlike a search engine (with millions of results), a good directory usually has great sites categorized by exactly the topic you’re looking for. From a web site owner point of view, directories are usually viewed as a great way to build links, traffic, and authority for your site.

Most web directories are built on some custom PHP script developed specifically for that purpose. Many directories I’ve seen had a script running the main web site, and then WordPress installed in a sub-folder running a blog. You don’t need to do that, because you can actually easlily build your own directory right in WordPress.

You could of course just build a static site, and then create your own pages building a directory by hand. But that would be a lot of work! Why not use a free plugin to automate the process a bit.

Build a Link Directory:

With Sean Blueston’s WP Link Directory Plugin you can build little directory of links with features like categories, search, reciprocal link detection, and the ability to allow paid premium links for a fee via paypal.

Category pages contain pagerank info, link, and description:

If you’re looking for something a bit more complex (that you could scale a bit), you need to check out Open Directory Links. You could definitely build your own open directory in WordPress with this:

It’s got great style and layout and even RSS feeds available at the category levels. It even has pagerank, refer to a friend, and add bookmark for each link:

Maybe you have more of a business site and a “business directory” for your niche would add great value for your client. The difference between a business and link directory is that a business directory has name, link, and description attributes, but also the ability to support phone number and physical address as well:

An advanced type of business directory might be one where you have an event that people have to register for, and you want to feature all the companies they work for online. In that case the Social Events and Registration Directory Plugin is exactly what you’re looking for. People can register for an event, get a confirmation email, and it can even support social networking links, RSS feed links, and custom fields.

3. Start a Classifieds Site

Maybe you’d like to start a classifieds site for your group, organization, commnity, or business. The coder of the open directory links plugin also makes a WP Classifieds WordPress Plugin!

It’s fully featured with post dates and view counts, and a fully featured submit form. Users can add contact information an image, and they have an wysiwig editor for ads! Users don’t have to create an account at all to submit ads, spam is controlled by captcha, and all category pages gave RSS links available for visitors.

You can also add classified to a WordPress site with Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin. It has nice layout, but support the ability to charge for listings.

Browsing ads is a breeze with the very flexible layout which shows image, location, date posted, and views. It’s very easy to change categories with the dropdown at the top of each page and the ability to change how many ads are listed per page:

4. Create an Article Repository

Maybe you’ve seen all those great article repositories online and thought it would be a great idea for a site of your own! It’s a great way to get free content and traffic, and there are lots of scripts and programs out there that make setting one up a breeze! With these plugins you can create your own article directory right in WordPress, and use all the normal WP features and functions available!

Using the Article Directory Plugin you can easily setup an aricle repository in your WordPress powered site. It allows you to accept articles submissions, and you can even get targeted content from the article dragon network (you have total control to accept or reject articles). You can quickly build an article repository with this plugin.

5. Make an Image Gallery

Are you a photographer? Are you the “tech guy” of your family tree? Are you in charge of the web site for a local group or organization? Having a baby or wedding? I can’t believe the amount of times I got an email with a link to somebody’s Yahoo account for pictures to a corporate event or small business picnic. I can’t count the number of photographers paying big amounts for online photo managers when there are free tools that would allow them to manage photos within their own web site. There are incredible free plugins available for WordPress for showcasing and displaying images.

NextGen Gallery is the end-all be-all of plugins for photo management in WordPress.

Some of it’s abilites are random pics in the sidebar:

It has the ability to manage hundreds and thousands of pictures in sortable and categorizable galleries. You can upload an entire zip file with pictures for inclusion, and it boasts a fully integrated flash slideshow.

You have complete control of home many galleries are displayed per page, you can have an index page listing all galleries, and you control how the galleries are shown, from the size of the images to the attributes beneath them (title, description, link, etc.).

Another plugin worth mentioning is the Page Flip Image Gallery. If all you need to do for yourself or your client is display some sample work, show a portfolio, or just a simple image gallery - this is awesome! It features full screen mode, and you can even use either JPG files or SWF flash files for gallery display! It has batch upload, upload from URL, and zip file upload.

If you just need something basic and simple, then the Lazyest Gallery Plugin might be just the right one for you! It offers automatic thumbnail and slide creation, and you can add comments on images and folders. It has widgets for random pic and folder list, and you can add captions to all folders and images:

If you’re really lazy, maybe all you want to do is just include your already existing photo galleries. If that’s the case you might want to check out the plethora of Picasa Plugins or Flickr Plugins for WordPress.

6. Build a Review Site

Another great idea is to build a “Review Site” in WordPress. Let’s face it, the bulk of the blogs online are talking about something and giving an opinion (review). There are many sites that review products and services, and there are countless ways of displaying them. I had said that all 10 of my ideas in this article would be alternatives to blogging, but reviews can be done in pages, but also in running blog fashion with individual posts. It just depends on how you decide to setup your site and which plugins you decide to utilize.

One way to do this is with the Review Box plugin. By using a simple shortcode, you can add a “review box” to any page or post in which you can summarize up pros, cons, and then set a percentage rating:

There are also tons of premium themes and plugins for sale so you can create a “review site” in WordPress, but if you want to do it on the cheap, in my opinion the best plugin for that is GD Star Rating.

If you want users to be able to rate or review pages or posts, one of the best plugins for that is WP Post Ratings by Lester Chan. It allows live ratings by users, and shows vote counts, and average rating:

7. Start a Discussion Forum

A discussion forum is probably one of the greatest sources of content you could ever ask for! It’s the epitomy of give and take online, usually people asking for help, and experts answering questions to give their expertise (and signature links) greater exposure.

There are countless hacks and plugins for integrating a “stand-alone” forum or bulletin boards into WordPress, but most people I’ve talked to don’t know that you can can actually create an entire forum inside WordPress itself!

Simple:Press Forum allows you to create an entire (and fully featured) threaded discussion forum within WordPress itself. It has as many (if not more) features than most standalone forums I’ve used. It has search, user registration, rss feeds, pagination, breadcrumbs, full stats, fine grained user control. I’ve used this plugin several times, and I haven’t setup a standalone forum script since.

Another plugin available to create a fully-fledged forum in WordPress is WordPress Forum. It’s last update is Sept 2008, but it does appear to work with WordPress versions 2.02 or higher.

8. Aggregation

I hope I don’t catch a lot of flak for this one, because WordPress aggregation is probably the single most abused feature available. It’s true, there are so many autoblogging plugins available it’s not funny - plugins that sploggers and spammers use to create sites with automatic content hoping to get indexed in search engines and make money for free on autopilot.

Aggregation can be used for good, and I don’t see that many web sites using it that way anymore. RSS feeds are available for readers to subscribe to your content. They are also available to keep track of the most recent updates, and you can aggregate the titles, links, and short excerpts of these updates on your web site for your readers (or even just for you). In addition, there are RSS feed available for things besides blogs you may not have even thought about, AND there are some plugins that provide aggregation without RSS at all - maybe they use an API!

Let me give you some examples….

Are you a twitter-holic? You could use a plugin like Tweet Blender to aggregate tweets from multiple users and / or specific hashtags:

Next I’ll show you some great uses of RSS feeds (first) and then directly after I’ll show you how to “aggregate” these feeds into WordPress using a plugin…

Nearly every category on Craigslist has an RSS feed you can use. Maybe you belong to an organization, group, or even a band that could benefit from including such a feed on your web site. A real estate site could list the latest Craigslist rental listings, a musician site could list the latest gear for sale, etc.

You could do the same thing with eBay. Maybe your client has a business that lists things on eBay. Do an advanced search and the bottom of that page has an RSS feed you can use. Maybe you have a sewing club, you could use an RSS feed from product searches you wanted to track, like fabric sewing machines, patterns, etc.

On ANY eBay search page after the auctions:

scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the RSS link:

You can search on nearly topic using google blog search, and every search there has an RSS feed as well. For example, my could could benefit from a page with an aggregation of the lastest blog postings about WordPress!

Now that I’ve given you some RSS ideas, let’s take find out how to aggregate them into WordPress in a usable fashion. I’ve used a few RSS feed aggregator plugins over the years, but the only that seems to still exist (and be updated frequently) is Feed WordPress.

By using Feed WordPress you can “aggregate” RSS feeds and publish them as WordPress posts. You can see where this can be highly abused by unscrupulous bloggers who want to steal content from other places so they can profit at the original author’s expense. There’s also no reason why you can’t use this for good, and aggregate simple titles and excerpts of posts that might be useful to your visitors. In that regard it’s no different than what a search engine or news compilation site does anyway. If you’re worried about duplicate content, you can go as far as to add an entry into your robots.txt file for noindex, nofollow, and you could even manually remove it from your XML sitemap.

Post can be configured any way you like, giving linkback attribution (or not), and web sites can even be listed as authors (contributors) in your blogroll. You choose what tags and categories are assigned to them, and where the permalinks point. For the most part, the posts you aggregate just look like regular blog posts.

Maybe you want something a little bit simpler than turning RSS feeds into actual blog posts, and you just want to take that Craigslist RSS feed, or eBay RSS feed and list the contents onto a paged page. WordPress already has the ability to parse RSS using the included magpie library.

By using this simple bit of code in any WordPress theme page:

<?php include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');
wp_rss('http://example.com/rss/feed/goes/here', 20); ?>

…you can parse any Worpress feed into a list of simple linked titles. This is an incredibly simple way to add value to your blog, and you could add as many different feeds (or numbers of posts) per page as you want. Just keep in mind that this is live (nothing is cached) the more feeds, or more posts per feed you add, the slower the page might be to generate.

9. Membership site

There are bunches of reasons you might want to have a closed “members only” web site. Maybe you need something only your family can access, or a private site for your business or club. Maybe you want to sell access to content, and you need part (or all) of your site walled off from public view.

Memberwing is a WordPress plugin that allows you to setup a membership site. Like many plugins there’s a free and a “pro” version. While the paid versions have all kinds of bells and whistles, the free version does exactly what most people would need, by using special tags it separates “teasers” from premium (paid) content. In this example you can see how content is hidden and users have options to either login or “become a member”.

If you like to keep things a bit simpler than that, you could use the WP Private plugin to restrict access to certain content to registered users. This plugin only hides the content, it doesn’t managage any payment options - so it would be better for a business to use for internal employees, private family content, etc.

Honorable mention goes to the Private RSS Plugin, that would go well with a private membership site.

10. eCommerce Site (online store)

There are plugins that allow you to simple sell single items using PayPal, that’s exactly why the ArtPal Plugin was developed (to sell art). You create a post with a few custom fields and voila! you’re selling art! You could of course use this plugin to sell just about anything using paypal, it doesn’t have to be art.

Maybe your blog accepts donations, or you have a very simple service that you charge for. For that I suggest the Easy Paypal Payment or Donation Accept Plugin:

If you want a solution even simpler than that - I offer you the Paypal Shortcodes Plugin. It doesn’t even have an admin interface - once enabled it allows you to add paypal buttons automatically in posts by using simple WP shortcodes:

You could use Fat Free Cart if you want a bone simple actual shopping cart - but you still want to sell on your blog and accept payments through paypal or google checkout. This plugin is very similar to ArtPal.

There are several plugins that go well beyond the “basics” of selling something through paypal. The eShop Plugin is packed with features such as several payment options, automatic email on successful purchase, multiple options for products, stats, and various shipping options. It seems quite mature, and there are many example stores to view.

By far the most popular though seems to be the eCommerce Plugin for WordPress. It boasts social networking hooks, payment options like paypal, google checkout, Authorize.net and more. It has one page checkout, and lots of documentation and community support. I have to admit, the example sites that use the eCommerce plugin look nearly identical to any of the big box retailers online storefronts:

Conclusion

Well, your’re probably exhausted now - but I’ve definitely lived up to my word and showed you more ways to use WordPress (that aren’t blogging) than you can shake a stick at! I hope this gives you some great ideas for both your own blogs and web sites, as well as your clients!

About the Author

JTPratt writes about being a WordPress Consultant, and has recently launched his newest site - WordPress Directory.

Also, check out some other resources on WordPress 2.8 -

• Seven Reasons Why Wordpress 2.8 Is Better Than Ever
• WordPress 2.8 Beta Hands On Review
• Custom taxonomies in WordPress 2.8
• Authentication in WordPress 2.8

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