WPCandy

Today you’re going to learn 10 things you can do with WordPress besides blogging, and whether you’re a WordPress newbie or longtime veteran - I guarantee that you will learn something after reading this post!

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!

Read more…

News

Automattic now owns WP.com - it doesn’t really have any great significance yet, but Automattic announced this week that they now have the ownership of WP.com and are brainstorming ideas of what they could do with it. News release

Smashing Magazine Community WordPress Theme Voting - Smashing Magazine is holding an awesome contest with PSD2WordPress to create a WordPress theme, in which the community gets to decide what kind of theme the team at SM will create. Voting is open now for another day, I think, so make sure to let them know what kind of theme you want to see! [Link]

WooThemes releases free Meta-Morphosis theme - WooThemes has a reputation for great themes with lots of features. Most of those themes are licensed, but luckily there’s a few on their site with great features that don’t cost a cent. Their latest, Meta-Morphosis, is one of those. Features include a widget slider, JavaScript font replacement, and an awesome backend packed with blog options including 8 different color schemes. Theme Info

Collections

13 Great WordPress Speed Tips & Tricks for MAX Performance - learn some handy tricks on how to speed up your WordPress blog, such as database optimization, caching plugins, compression, and more. [Link]

15 “PSDtuts like” WordPress Themes - if you’ve ever taken a look at ThemeForest, you’ll notice that a lot of themes are heavily influenced by PSDTUTS and its sister sites. Here’s a neat list of 15 themes that share similar design characteristics. [Link]

Tutorials

Tweet shortened URL of current page to Twitter - Derek Punsalan of 5THIRTYONE explains how to shorten your own blog’s URLs using .htaccess to leave more room for text in Twitter. [Link]

How to exclude specific tag from query_posts - as I’ve noticed from working on numerous themes at WPCoder, having “featured” posts is really a popular feature these days. The easiest way to do this is probably to tag posts with “featured” instead of having a dedicated category, so here’s how to exclude those posts from the rest of the loops on your site. [Link]

How to Integrate Twitter to WordPress Blog Comments - everyone likes a link back to their Twitter profile, right? (mine is @danphilibin) In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to let your blog commentators share a link to their Twitter profile if they enter that in the website URL field when commentating. Awesome! [Link]

Add a Widgetized Footer to Your WordPress Theme - who says widgets are just for sidebars? I’ve seen them used in plenty of other places, including footers, which is exactly what you’ll learn to do in this tutorial. [Link]

Happy Birthday!

WPZOOM is celebrating their first birthday! To celebrate the occasion, they’re giving away a copy of their own Yamidoo Magazine theme and are discounting the theme by 50% for the next week. Congratulations to Pavel Ciorici, WPZOOM owner, for putting together a great weblog. He certainly has something to be proud of! [Link]

News

WordPress HelpCenter Launched - Alex King announces a new site by Crowd Favorite - WordPress HelpCenter. They provide all kinds of WordPress-related services such as support, theme installation and upgrades, customization, and more. Pretty cool! [Link]

P2 Released - P2, the long-awaited upgrade to the Prologue theme, was released this week. P2 is a unique blog theme in that it’s made for short Twitter-like updates instead of full blog posts. [Link]

Tutorials

NETTUTS+ Complete PSD to WordPress Tutorial - NETTUTS+ has released a massive 14-episode, 3+ hour tutorial on how to convert a PSD into a WordPress theme. The only requirement is that you have a NETTUTS+ account, butu at $9 a year and loads of awesome content that comes with it, it’s most definitely a steal. [Link]

How To Make Any WordPress Theme A Blank Framework - “…any WordPress theme can be a theme framework” says Ian Stewart. And that’s exactly what this tutorial explains how to do. [Link]

10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks - Looking to learn a few more WordPress tricks? Smashing Magazine’s latest article has ten helpful tips to make your themes and sites even better. [Link]

How to widgetize your page menu in WordPress - take even more control over your pages by widgetizing your page menu, which will allow you to add things like custom drop down menus and other widgets to your dynamic page menus. [Link]

Collections

41 Great Looking Free WordPress Themes - who says great themes have to be paid for? HongKiat has a list of 41 cool, unique themes that might be a great choice for your own blog. [Link]

35 WordPress Theme Releases for April 2009 - WPZOOM rounds up 35 of the best themes released this past month. [Link]

The most rare and unique WordPress themes - if unique is your thing, then this collection is for you. Inspired Magazine presents ten free and premium themes with atypical layouts and features. [Link]

Discussions

On using WordPress Theme Frameworks - Ptah Dunbar offers his thoughts on how theme frameworks should work - parent themes provide the functionality, child themes build on top of it. Agreed. [Link]

Redesigns

There were three notable redesigns this week in the WordPress community. Must be that time of year!

WordCamp Central redesigned with a cleaner layout, better organization, and an awesome Google Map of past and upcoming WordCamps!

ThemeShaper got an overhaul last week to showcase some of the things that Thematic, the popular framework that resides on ThemeShaper, can do. Introduction Article

Theme Hybrid, the home of Justin Tadlock’s Hybrid framework and some awesome (free!) child themes, has a new look that, among other things, does a better job at promoting the downloadable themes on the site. Introduction Article

Happy Monday! Hopefully everyone had a good Easter. Our dinners were stuffing and I personally received enough jelly beans to last me for a year. Anyway, it’s been another interesting week in the WordPress-o-Sphere with some news about WordPress 2.8, a gripe about the theme directory, and even a WordPress Rap. Here’s a roundup of last week’s WordPress discussion. Read more…

WordPress as we know it is a great platform to build different sort of things, including our current subject: photoblogs. There are plenty useful resources scattered around the web, and here we’re gathering them together into a single package. Do let us know in the comments if we’re missing out something here! Read more…

Panic just released version 1.5 of the popular all-in-one website editor, Coda. Included with this release was the ability to import and export clips into and out of Coda. We took it upon ourselves to add almost every tag on the very useful WordPress function list to Coda and export them as a group for y’all to use. Just download the zip, extract, double-click the file, and you’re ready to go!

If you’re looking for individual clips, Sam Brown, the designer of the WPCandy layout, runs a nice site called Coda Clips with hundreds of useful clips.

Download the WordPress Coda Clips file