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16 kinds of websites you didn't know you could build with WordPress

I've been using WordPress lately to build websites for businesses and nonprofit organizations.  For any project that's more large-scale, I assumed that I'd have to use Drupal, Magento, or a framework like Ruby on Rails.

 

Reading this article got me excited about developing websites with WordPress:

16 unusual ways to build great WordPress websites

 

Inspiring stuff.  With the right themes and plugins, it seems like anything is possible.

 

Has anyone built e-commerce sites (selling over 10 kinds of items) or social networks with WordPress?  Those are the two categories I thought I'd have to learn another platform for. 

 

P.S. Here's a weirdly similar article about its rival: 16 different clones you can build with Drupal.  From the look of things, WordPress is catching up fast.  Maybe by the time WordPress 4.0 rolls around, they might be equals.  Unless it surpasses Drupal. 

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Replies to This Discussion

Yes, e-commerce, real estate, activity sites..all done in WordPress..

Very interesting - Thanks Marcus.

I've been looking for a wiki that could be integrated with WordPress. I've had MediaWiki installed but am very dissatisfied. It requires config file editing & updating to admin, and we still get lots of spam pages.  Adding images is a pain.  I like the ease of WordPress, but need a wiki to augment our blog. 

There are two in that article. Anyone had experience with them?

http://mashable.com/ is built on Wordpress ... maybe one of the most trafficed sites I know of built on Wordpress. Fredrick Townes, CTO of Mashable, is the man.

When you boil it down, serve configuration & proper caching goes a long way for larger WP sites, enter Fredrick & his W3 Total Cache plugin ... big mahalo to guys like this who make Wordpress scalable.

 

 

Cool to see other WordPress developers in the islands! 

@Matt: Good read that WordPress can scale for higher traffic.  I've installed W3 Total Cache on all my websites, it's a great plugin.

 

@Jerry: I wish I could help, but I haven't created any wiki websites yet.  I'd say to read the comments on their ThemeForest pages to see what the feedback is like.

@Anthony: Nice to see that WordPress is so versatile.  It's no longer "just for blogging."

 

@Patrick: I didn't know the Aqua Resorts website was built with WordPress.  That's awesome!  I was wondering whether WP could do features like reservation systems and things like that.  Congratulations on the site making it into the WP Showcase!

NinjaWeb is a great domain name.  I got into the ninja & samurai scene myself in Japan.  Wrote about it on my travel blog: Marcus Goes Global.

With custom taxonomies you can do a lot of neat things with wp now. For social networks you'll most likely be playing with buddypress.

"P.S. Here's a weirdly similar article about its rival: 16 different clones you can build with Drupal.  From the look of things, WordPress is catching up fast.  Maybe by the time WordPress 4.0 rolls around, they might be equals.  Unless it surpasses Drupal. "

 

This is a really old article. Drupal 7.0 recently came out of beta and is really cool. A lot of the modules you used to have to configure separately are built into the core now so it's really quick to get a complex site up and running. I'm not bagging on WP-- I actually like the way it themes, but after using both frameworks, I've found Drupal to be the more developer friendly and feature rich of the two frameworks.

@ Kevin Luttrell

I agree, Drupal is more developer friendly.

 

You can create complete applications, but theming in Drupal is a bear! For the life of me I can't find a person who is a Drupal theme rockstart. Even with Woothemes doing Drupal stuff, it not as nice as their Wordpress designs.

 

http://www.woothemes.com/why-drupal/ I have not use any Drupal themes for TF, don't know how it's going? Anyone try'em?

Wow Marcus, thanks for the great post.

@Fred: You're welcome!

 

As a little follow-up, here's an article that appeared just before the newest versions of those two CMS's were released: Drupal 7 vs. WordPress 3.

 

In that article, these tweets were quoted, which summed up their strengths and weaknesses nicely.  Power and flexibility vs. ease and user-friendliness.

 

Dries: RT @chx1975: WordPress is now approximately where Drupal was around Drupal 5 w/ content types. See you in 2015.
Dries: Agreed, and fair enough. RT @newoceans_en: @Dries Drupal 7 will hopefully be where WordPress was around 5 years ago regarding UX.
While those 16 are great, they are all pretty mainstream uses of WordPress...  if you want to get crazy out there, check out this art site http://6q.com/

Yes, it uses a tiny bit of flash but it's entirely built on WordPress and almost all the animation is Javascript...  It was shown to me at WordPress Developers in Vancouver last month.

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