Category: social networks

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Innovative uses for WordPress

While most of us love using WordPress as general purpose content management tool or blog, others have adapted for internal communication or as a knowledge base. Let’s take a quick look at three free WP themes that transform it into something a little different.

P2 – “Twitter-lite”
Want something like a private Twitter system for your company or group without the rest of the world seeing your messages? Check out P2, made by the WordPress peeps (Automattic) themselves. You can use this theme to quickly communicate with people on your team about your status or ask questions.

Quality Control – Case Management
The QC theme turns your WP install into a simple ticketing system to create tickets, assign status, and milestones. Use categories and tags to filter tickets. You can use this as a customer facing system for customer service or an internal bug tracking system. The theme seems to be well supported and maintained.

WikiWP
How about a WordPress theme that lets you create a Wikipedia-like encyclopedia? WikiWP has a very similar look to a real Wiki application with a left thin navigation column and main content area. And yes, there’s a commercial WP theme called WordPressWiki, but why not give WikiWP a try first?

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WordPress Plugin of the Week: Related Ways to Take Action

Related Ways to Take Action pluginThis maybe the longest plugin name I’ve seen in a while. It’s called “Related Ways to Take Action” (RWTA). This will interest you if your site is about social and philanthropic issues. It’s a plugin that adds relevant links to non-profit organizations based on your content to the bottom of your post or page.

According to the developer’s info page, the plugin will show relevant content from “Change.org, GlobalGiving.com, Idealist.org, DonorsChoose.org, Kiva, Care2 and over twenty other social change websites.”

For example, if you’re talking about about “micro finance” on your blog post, then this plugin, RWTA, will add links from Kiva.org. The only thing I’ve noticed is that it takes 1 or 2 refreshes of a page for the plugin to find truly relevant content.

Get it: Related Ways to Take Action

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WordPress plugin of the week – Sociable

Update: I don’t recommend this plugin anymore due to the poor customer service outlined here.

Here are three alternatives for your WordPress social sharing plugin needs that are free and work well.

Original article follows:

This week’s WP Plugin spotlight belongs to Sociable. It’s an amazing way to allow your visitors to publicize or bookmark page(s) on your site using Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, etc. The installation is no brainer from the WP self hosted admin panel, just go to Plugins and Search for “Sociable” and select the “Sociable for WP 3.0”. Note there are several choices, but this is the one that works best for me.

Once it’s activated, all your pages and posts will have a bunch of little social network app icons at the bottom (like this post) where visitors can recommend or bookmark your pages easily. Sociable is another “must have” WordPress plugin in my book.

 

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Yet another way to quickly post content with new Tumblr-like feature

I’d like to think of myself as fairly web savy. But today I learned something new – a web app called Tumblr. Yes, it’s yet another social media platform to allow you to post updates and more about your life. For whatever reason it’s gotten a popular following and yes their website looks web 2ish. What’s the WordPress tie-in? Woothemes and Konobi studios are now offering WordPress users a way to update their WP site using a system similar to Tumblr.