Deservedly considered to be the best blogging platform WordPress is not just that. Its ease of use and maintenance makes it the most ultimate CMS (Content Management System). CMS is a Web application used for creating and managing HTML content. CMSs usually provide tools that allow creating and managing content with little or no knowledge of programming. The easy to understand and operate WordPress admin tools allow you to create literally every possible type of website without tech skills from your side. There are hundreds of ways to use WordPress not as a blog but as CMS, creating an online portfolio is one of them. So how can you actually do that? Well, there are few ways.
* You can add image gallery WordPress Plugins to your blog thus adding the new functionality to it. This is an easy way to show your pictures to the world.
* The other way is to change your WordPress theme to a pre-made theme that is especially designed to be a gallery. Here you should decide whether you want a free or a premium theme for your online gallery.
Portfolio Extended is a brilliant example of a free wp theme for online galleries. It’s three column, adSence ready skin performed in nice red color palette.
Flipbook photo blog wp flash template is an awesome example of a premium theme for portfolio. The use of Flash makes it live and vivid.
Here are some brilliant examples of WordPress used as a portfolio website to inspire you:
Freshivore. A personal page of a designer from California featuring a very nice portfolio of his works.
Best web gallery. A brilliant web design showcase built with WordPress.
How would you use WordPress as a CMS?
Archive for April, 2009
WordPress as a CMS: how to build a portfolio website
April 30th, 2009Twitter tools for WordPress
April 28th, 2009
Twitter seems to become a must have for every blogger nowadays. Not only it is a popular social network but also a very good promotion tool. So, here are some useful twitter tools for WordPress for you.
WordTwit
This WordPress Plugin utilizes Twitter’s API to automatically push your newly published post to your Twitter account as a tweet. This plugin also converts the links into tiny URLs. It’s a good additional way to let your readers know you’ve got a new post published.
The Twitter Updater
WordPress plugin that sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account automatically when you publish or edit a post. You can specify the text of the update and turn it off/on.
WP Twitip ID
This little plugin adds a field to your comment form for your commentators to put their twitter username
Twitter Tools
The plugin integrates your blog with your Twitter account. This nice plugin allows you to pull tweets into your blog and create new tweets on your blog posts.
Twitt-Twoo
This simple plugin gives you an opportunity to update your Twittr status right from your WordPress blog sidebar. The quick and easy status updates even do not require a page reload.
Twitter Feed
Another plugin that posts your weblog updates to your Twitter account.
TweetBacks
Very popular plugin that displays what people are saying about your blog posts on Twitter.
TickTweet
This small plugin allows you to show tweets that contain some particular keyword.
Twitturls
Displays the most popular tweets.
Commentwitter
Allows to send your comments as tweets.
What are the Twitter tools you use at your WordPress blogs?
The greatest free WordPress themes related to nature
April 23rd, 2009
Yesterday, April 22, the whole world celebrated the Earth Day, thus I’d like to dedicate my today’s post to the day that is meant to inspire appreciation for the Earth’s environment.
Well, here they are - the best free nature WordPress themes from WPDaddy collection.
Fishy 1.1
Plain design with beautiful header created by freewptheme. It is two columns, left sidebar with very clear navigation. I love the small fishes at the header.
Pets Wordpress Theme
I don’t really know why this two columns, right sidebar, widget ready WordPress theme is named a Pets Theme, I honestly can’t imagine the beautiful white bears from the header of this awesome skin to be someone’s pets. Nevertheless the design by iwordpressthemes is really great.
Ocean Beach
When I look at this 3 Columns, adsense and widget ready WordPress theme by SkinPress I feel an unbearable need of a vacation and invincible desire to go somewhere warm and close to the sea. 
Seabreeze
I simply love the beautiful header of this awesome two columns, right sidebar WP theme designed by WpZoom.
How do you protect the Mother Nature?
The best image gallery WordPress Plugins
April 21st, 2009
Running a blog for a while you’ll eventually feel the need of an image gallery, even if your blog is not a personal page but a business oriented one for instance. Creating an image gallery at your weblog is extremely easy, the gallery feature is integrated into WordPress since version 2.5. But if you want your gallery to be something more unique and beautiful you better use plugins, they can make your blog look more attractive and the galleries they create look more pleasant as well. I picked the best of the image gallery WordPress Plugins for you to choose from:
PhotoXhibit
This plugin allows you to upload pictures and create albums as well as use photos from your Flickr, Picasa and SmugMug accounts. Among the main features are the styles editor that allows you to customize each gallery’s appearance, independent gallery creator and the ability to create and upload albums with one thumbnail or two thumbnails of different sizes.
NextGen Gallery Plugin
This is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin with a Flash slideshow option. Among the great number of awesome features are sortable albums, zip file uploads, AJAX thumbnail generator, Lightbox Effects, watermark function and much more.
Lazyest Gallery Plugin
Very good plugin, features include comments on images and folders, automatic thumbnail and slide creation, galleries and sub-galleries, adding captions and much more.
Lightbox Gallery Plugin
This famous plugin gives your galleries a lightbox view and displays the associated metadata with the pictures.
Cleaner WordPress Gallery Plugin
This awesome plugin gives you complete control over your image galleries. It creates valid XHTML code and uses the images that you need to be resized. CSS styling gives you control over the display of your pictures.
FlippingBook Gallery Plugin
Another awesome plugin for working with images in weblogs. All you need to do is download photos, the plugin will create a photo gallery out of them. The Flash gallery created resembles a real book, you’ll have to turn its pages to look through the photos.
These were 6 awesome WordPress plugins for creating image galleries I consider to be the best. Do you know more?
Be a smart blogger
April 16th, 2009
What I like about WordPress most of all is its being constantly improved, thus the system becomes more and more secure. And the errors a blogger faces are more and more frequently the blogger own fault not the CMS.
So, what should you do to avoid the most common WordPress errors?
* Update every time you have a chance to
Upgrading everything on your blog from WordPress itself to plugins makes your blog less vulnerable. Make sure you secured your blog well.
* Don’t do anything if you don’t know how
Don’t try editing your theme if you don’t know how exactly to do that. Messing the code can lead to irreparable consequences and cause the errors that are hard to fix.
* Make sure the plugins you add are up-to-date and safe
The plugins you add to your blog should be compatible with your WordPress version, up-to-date, any modifications have to be noted by the plugin author, there should be installation instructions, license and other documentation. Don’t think that checking these things is a waste of time, waste of time is adding a plugin that won’t be working and will cause errors.
* Learn some coding basics
If you want to modify your themes and change the way your blog is seen by your users you better learn some basics of coding. Knowledge can never be superfluous, read your WordPress help files carefully, ask questions at forums, don’t be afraid to learn new things.
We all once started blogging and I’m pretty sure every one of you faced the issues that baffled you. So share your experiences, what are the WordpPress errors you faced and how did you deal with them?
Create an online store out of your WordPress blog
April 14th, 2009
The majority of WordPress bloggers make money with paid advertising and affiliate programs, but there are some other ways to make money online, one of them is to actually sell things online. What do you need to make your WordPress powered blog an online store? Well, basically, all you need is a shopping cart.
There are some options available for you:
* WP e-Commerce Plugin
This application is the most complete, powerful, elegant and easy to use Shopping Plugin for WordPress.
* Quick Shop Plugin
This nice plugin adds a SideBar widget allowing the users to see what they currently have in the cart and gives them an opportunity to remove the items. The TinyMCE button is one of the greatest features of the Quick Shop Plugin, it allows you to easily add products to your blog posts and pages.
* eShop plugin
This powerful WordPress plugin has many great features. It allows to list multiple products, with add to cart form, on a single page and to use Wordpress pages or posts to create products, 3 methods for calculating shipping charges are available, products can have multiple options. These are only few of the features available.
* WP Live-Shopping plugin
The widget gives you the ability to display all live shopping offers at your blog in one single widget. The widget can be added to your sidebar and customized to look as you wish it to look like.
* WP Auctions plugin
This great plugin gives you an opportunity to host auctions on your blog and to sell anything you want to fee-free. There are many features: you can create and host as many auctions as you wish, upload multiple images for each auction, sell everything only on ‘Buy It Now’ basis, get payment via PayPal and many more.
* ArtPal plugin
This free WordPress plugin was originally created for artists to give them an opportunity to sell their art works online. The plugin simply integrates the PayPal with a Wordpress blog.
Have you tried any of these plugins and what was your experience?
Interact with your blog readers
April 9th, 2009
When you launch a blog you without doubt want to be popular, one of the ways to make your blog more interesting for your readers is to make it more interactive. There are many ways to do this. You can actually build a social network with plugin for WPMU called buddypress. But Wordpress MU requires dedicated hosting and it’s not that affordable for all the bloggers.
You can easily put some social media aspects to your blog with plugins.
Encourage your visitors to comment providing a backlink to their website, make your blog comments DoFollow. The DoFollow plugin removes a “nofollow” attribute from the link to a commenter’s website which WordPress automatically puts there.
A good way to interact with your readers is a WP-Polls plugin. This little plugin adds AJAX polls to your sidebar or blog posts. WP-Polls gives your users an opportunity to be active contributors, besides they are more likely to leave a comment after they vote.
There is another great plugin to encourage your visitors to comment and leave their feedback - Show Top Commentators. This plugin displays names of the most active commentators, the number of comments they made and a text link to their website, thus the commentators are more likely to come back to your blog and leave more feedback.
Are there any other tools you use to interact with your blog visitors?
Revel In Best Flash Animated Wordpress Themes
April 7th, 2009Staying the leading flash website templates provider on the market of web development industry,FlashMint is glad to present its ingenious product - Flash Animated Wordpress Themes for web masters involved in everyday writing.
Flash Animated Wordpress Themes are known to grant the possibility of implementing interactive features within your blog supplementing it with flash animation and 3D.
Among new distinctive features Flash Animated Wordpress Themes contain you will discover support of new plugins which are responsible for more advanced paging navigation, allow you to display site tags via flash movies and 3D animated tag cloud and give more possibilities for email subscription.
Automotive Blog Flash Animated Wordpress Theme
Flash Animated Wordpress Themes are characterized by widget support for different sections of your blog. You may now make use of youtube.com inset displaying featured videos and create a kind of photogallery of the photos attached to your blog. If your blog posts contain photos they will be now displayed on the side panel within “Featured Photos” section which you can manage via Admin Panel. As usual you can add meta keywords and titles for your blog main page and manage blog posts with the help of Admin Panel as well.
Hi-Tech Flash Animated Wordpress Theme
Flash Animated Wordpress Themes comprise contemporary web design technologies and are aimed at web masters of different work experience and capabilities. So if you are involved in everyday writing and want to make your blog the most modern and live source you are welcome to browse ingenious Flash Animated Wordpress Themes offered by Flashmint!
The most ingenious Free WordPress themes
April 2nd, 2009
If you didn’t know - WPDaddy collection of free WordPress themes is updated every day. Today I’m going to show you the most ingenious wp designs from our recent updates.
Orangy
Nicely designed by Skinpress 2 columns, right sidebar, widget ready WP skin for personal weblog. I really like the pastel color scheme of this theme.
BeachlerMag
Very simple and yet very stylish design from HPA. The theme is 2 columns, right sidebar, widget and adsense ready. If the previous theme is more likely to suit a girl’s personal blog than this one will be perfect for boys.
Retrocar mag
Very nice WordPress design for personal pages from qualitywordpress with cute retro car at the header and very delicate touch of stylish green color at the body. The theme is 2 columns, left sidebar and widget ready.
Bingo 2
Simple and plain WordPress theme meant for blogs related to gambling from 99d7737 at bloggers.bz. If your blog is dedicated to casinos, poker and other gambling games than this 2 columns, right sidebar, widget ready theme is right for you.
Extravazine
Another great WP theme meant for a girl’s personal page with very cute header designed at designmag.net. The theme contains a slideshow gallery for featured posts, the posts are ready for social bookmarking. The theme is 2 columns, left sidebar, widget and adsence ready.
French Properties
This 2 columns, right sidebar, widget ready WordPress theme is designed at France Property Shop to suit weblogs dedicated to Real estate. To my mind it will perfectly suit for a personal page as well. The nice house at the header created a very cozy atmosphere.
GrungeD
I fell in love with this Theme created by SkinPress the very second I saw it. Very stylish grungy design with nice color scheme and a tiny touch of watercolors makes this WordPress skin ideal for any personal blog. The theme is 2 columns, right sidebar and widget ready.
Do you have some favorite themes at WPDaddy collection?