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Using WordPress as a CMS

A couple of years ago if I'd said WordPress would make a great CMS, you'd have probably thought I was totally mad! These day however, when you need a simple CMS WordPress is a brilliant option. In this post I'm going to show you how to make your WordPress CMS even better with some simple bits of code and some not so simple plugins.

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Plugin-less WordPress e-Commerce

I recently worked on a typical small e-Commerce site: about twenty products, a couple of buying options, a couple of pages for about and whatnot and a little blog added on the end. Naturally, I looked to WordPress to handle everything -- the products, the blog and the pages. With custom post types, this wasn't a problem; a custom post type for the products and then an individual entry for each of the products, with standard posts being used for the blog and custom page templates for the pages. We're not going to look at those, though, instead we're going to look at how the e-Commerce part of the site worked.

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Drop Caps For WordPress

Drop caps are a really simple way of making your posts just that bit more interesting. They're easy to do too - in this post we'll find out how we can use a mixture of CSS3 and plugins in order to spark up posts with minimum effort.

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Featured Content For WordPress

It's surprisingly easy to build a neat little featured content area in WordPress, using a custom query to grab a couple of posts from a selected category, tag or even custom field. In this post we'll find out how to build a simple featured content area for your blog, rather like the one I recently added to WPShout.

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Really Easy Custom Post Backgrounds For WordPress

As I mentioned before, I've been having great fun with the new Nometet.com design. It's now sporting a feature that allows the author to set a custom background for the post just by uploading an image. This image doesn't even need to be the correct size; that's all done on the fly. Uploading isn't hard either; I've implemented an uploader that sits inside a meta box so the hardest bit is choosing the image! In this post we'll have a look at how it's done.

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Optimize WordPress For Heavy Traffic

Following on from Faster WordPress, which went up on Shout a couple of weeks ago, this post explores how to optimise WordPress for high traffic. We'll take high traffic in a small blog context -- 1,000 or so visits in a day, but exactly the same techniques apply to much larger traffic blogs. The average WordPress theme isn't optimised. Whilst it may claim to be or may in fact be to an extent, the nature of WordPress themes means they have to be able to fit in any situation and so they are never going to be as well optimised as a theme which has been designed specifically for a single purpose. I'm not saying don't use an off-the-shelf theme, just you'll need to customise it in order to get the best performance out of it. This post shows how to make your site faster.

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Integrating Facebook With WordPress

Despite Facebook being the most successful of all of the social media sites, I've never made WPShout a presence on the site or attempted to integrate Facebook onto WPShout in any way. I tend to view Facebook as more personal and other sites such as Twitter more appropriate for both marketing the site and interacting with the people who read it.

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Backup Solutions For WordPress

Backing up your blog is something you'll probably only start doing once you've lost everything. That's probably not the best idea. In this post we'll look at the various options available -- the plugins, services and manual ways of backing up your blog.

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Email Newsletters For WordPress

As you may have seen in last week's competition post, I recently created an email newsletter for WPShout. You may have also noticed I ended up using MailChimp instead of a built-into-WordPress solution. This post shows the how I did it.

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