wordpress

WordPress As A Social Media Platform

by Tim Elliott on January 19, 2009

Wordpress logo

Last week in a meeting with other social media consultants, we talked about how far WordPress has come in the last year. With a thriving ecosystem of themes and plugins, the open source blogging software has turned into a serious content management system (CMS) but is still relatively easy for anyone with reasonable technical abilities to administer.

We also noted that all the required social media services are supported making WordPress a great platform for conversational marketing. So I thought I would revive my earlier series on WordPress over the next few weeks and take a deep dive into exactly how a winery can build their website using this free software. Along the way I’ll build a demo site here giving you a place to kick the tires and decide if this will work for you.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a couple plugins that I’ve recently implemented on my wine blog that show the potential for WordPress as a social media platform:

  • Lifestream – Provides a running list of links on your sidebar as you post to various social networks or sharing services.
  • Facebook Connector – Implements Facebook Connect to send blog comments to your Facebook profile and also provide an easy way for your Facebook friends to interact with your blog.

I’ll spend more time in future posts showing exactly how these plugins are configured.

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Getting Ready For WordPress 2.7

by Tim Elliott on October 3, 2008

The Weblogs Tools Collection blog posted a nice overview of the new features in WordPress 2.7 yesterday so I wanted to get my hands dirty and get ready for the release scheduled for sometime next month. So I installed a test version here and loaded up my normal batch of plugins and a few themes. The plugins did pretty well with only a couple not working. Not so good with the themes but I’ll still be working with them over the next few weeks before 2.7 is released as the next stable version.

But the biggest change with 2.7 is the administrative user interface which gets a complete overhaul. I’ll be doing a screencast in the next week or two highlighting the differences from 2.6.x but you can get a sneak peak by logging in with the username and password of “demo” (no quotes). It’s a limited account but you can see some of what is in store for the future. As usual, it looks very interesting and another step forward for the WordPress platform.

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Build A Website With WordPress, Part 4

July 11, 2008

Last week we completed our discussion of plugins and we are nearly ready to start to create great content and launch our WordPress website. But there is one major consideration left to deal with; look and feel. Luckily, there are plenty of free themes available for download that can be further modified to meet your needs. The best place to start is at the WordPress themes directory. Another alternative is to start with blank theme templates and match the look and feel to an existing [...]

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Build A Website With WordPress, Part 3

July 3, 2008

When I left off last week, we had just covered my “must-have” WordPress plugins and I promised a list of favorites for adding more functionality to your website. The following are presented in alphabetical order as I look at what is installed on this site but I’ll add a few niche plugins at the end for special circumstances. Easy Gravatars – Ever wonder how you get those little avatars by your blog comments? They are Gravatars and this plug-in is the easiest way to add [...]

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Build A Website With WordPress, Part 2

June 25, 2008

When I left off on my first post about building a website with WordPress, I had just installed and slightly configured the software. The next consideration is what features you will need which are extended using plug-ins. WordPress ships with two plug-ins, the must-have SPAM filtering solution Akismet and the frivolous Hello Dolly (which posts random lyrics from that song to your administrative interface). There are thousands of others to choose from at the directory kept by the WordPress developers but which are right for [...]

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Choosing Social Sites

June 24, 2008

During my seminars in Napa and Sonoma last April I covered a number of social sites but really didn’t make recommendations on which of these wineries should choose for their online activities. In setting up a couple of new clients recently I’ve looked at the long list of sites I’ve used and pared it down to what I think is the right number for wineries to start with: Blog – I like the capabilities of WordPress and install this on client servers as the cornerstone [...]

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