Wordpress is often still regarded as blogging software, however with an easily modified open source structure and massive user base; it’s certainly no longer limited to creating blogs.

With the huge variety of open source modifications and plugins available, Wordpress is rapidly becoming a flexible content management system that offers functionality to rival most other CMS, and we’ve noticed many people switch to wordpress because of its ease of use, especially when it comes to integrating it with social media apps like Twitter and Facebook.

Gadgetspy.co.uk is a very successful gadget blog. Originally built in Drupal, we were asked to transfer the blog from Drupal to the Wordpress platform. Unlike many other blogging platforms/CMS available, it is not a simple matter of running a script to transfer posts and all data across to Wordpress.

There are some mySQL scripts available which will do a very basic job, but simply running a script will often end in categories being mismatched with posts, “tags” and “categories” being merged together, and any Drupal modules have the potential to create havoc, as they will store pictures/links or any other content separately and basic scripts will miss them out. This means you really need to tailor the mySQL commands used to suite the specific blog you are moving.

We’ll go into this further in an upcoming tutorial.

After transferring the site we did a full redesign of the Gadgetspy site, it’s always nice to redesign an existing blog, as you have a full and “finished” looking website from the start. On that note, it’s always nice to see new blogs grow too!

www.playboyz.co.uk

It’s a really good idea, as many affiliates offering discount codes and offers would find this added function very useful.

A few plugins exists that will “expire” a post, but unfortunately they either delete the post, or move it to a draught version that can only be seen in Wordpres admin. This is bad for SEO. Old links expired or not, can still bring in traffic to a website and if a customer missed the offer the first time, they still know they should bookmark the site for the next time around.

SNIPPLR have written a modified version of the Wordpress Loop which will remove posts after a date that can be specified in the Custom Fields section of the WP text editor. The code compares an expiry date given with the date from the host server and if the date has passed, the wordpress loop will omit that post from being shown.

The code doesn’t show the posts in the archives however and only expires posts by date when our client needed a to expire a post at a specific time. We modified SNIPPLR’s code so it would do both and also added the ability to adjust the server time, which is handy if your website is hosted in a different timezone to the one you need to use.

All you need to do when writing the post, is enter a custom field with the key “expiration” and set the value in the format: “2010/01/01 18:20:00″ – this would expire the post at 6.20pm on the 1st January 2010.

We updated Mark’s logo, designed and built this theme with a dropdown jQuery menu as a slick addition to a simple layout. One feature that was required was an ability to put an expiry date on posts and there was no plugins available to do this in a satisfactory manner.

The idea was to have individual posts that would only stay present on the homepage as long as they were in date; after this date they would disappear from the homepage, but still show in the archives, and still be accessible at their original URL for SEO purposes.

We created a bespoke code for this that we will shortly be adding to our tutorial section.

www.nrbet.com

We provided a clean uncluttered design and then added features such as an “alternate view” – which allows users to choose to view the website as a grid of images, a magazine style list of posts – or as a standard blog with the full posts scrolling down the page.

Many usefull plugins have also been integrated to give users, numerous ways to access each post. and jquery has been used to create a dynamic dropdown menu. There have also been a number of modifications to simplify the use of the site for the owner.

Hopefully if time permits we’ll be introducing a series of tutorials to show how we created some of the features on this blog.

www.greatbabythings.com

Mike from ISIOTB loved the functional and “2.0” design of UKOffer.com and so our design was created on this basis, tweaking the design to incorporate a TV based theme. First draughts went along the lines of old TV test cards, but the result was too garish so then later toned down to only a suggestion of test card colours within the navigation.

Isawitonthebox.com

Cheap-Perfume.co.uk

The blog part of the wordpress theme has taken a back seat in this design to emphasise the important part of the site, providing information about all airports and destinations used by Flybe. The design demonstrates that wordpress on its own can be used to build full websites, and not just blogs. This means the whole site is fully updatable without rebuilding html web pages.

Quite a bit bespoke code was written for this, as the theme has been designed to display different external and internal links depending on the page being viewed. A user can click on an airport, read a full page of information and be provided links to only the destinations that are available for that particular airport. It’s this kind of information packed website that will prove to be successful for affiliates as google cracks down on single landing page websites that only exist to redirect traffic.

http://www.flybe-destinations.com/

Jules.tv is a blog we have designed for a top TV director and producer, who works with many channels including BBC, SKY One and MTV on programs such as Pimp my Ride. The blog’s purpose is to offer advice on the latest camera and TV productions techniques, reviews of equipment and news in the media industry.

Currently there are 6 repeating images across the top which are placeholders for jules.tv to add 6 top equipment picks which will link to individual equipment reviews. After a number of experiments, we did not make this section dynamic, as the link to an old post may need to stay on top for a while. We’ve used the WPAds plugin for this section so images and links can be altered easily by the blogger.

The homepage has been given a “magazine” style where a title, image and user defined “excerpt” is displayed  instead of the full post to allow for more content to be displayed. A TinyMCE plugin was used to upgrade the functionality of the wordpress admin’s excerpt editor, and bespoke code added to automatically link any image within the excerpt to link to the full post.

The sidebar was fully customised with bespoke graphics, but the client required the ability to add further “widgets” to the sidebar in the future. For this we added code so widgets can be placed underneath the customised sidebar.

www.jules.tv

Kirsty asked us to redesign her popular Affiliate Stuff Blog, to reflect her glamorous globe trotting lifestyle, her blog had previously used a slightly modified free theme that was used just to set the blog up – but due to some sage and informative posting, the blog has become very popular.

Kirsty is very happy with our design, and has give us much kudos on her blog, we’ve had some very positive feedback from her readers too!

http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/