Two of the most common WordPress affiliate centered sites are reviews and online shopping. A WordPress review site plugin let’s you build a site that focuses on product reviews that are laced with affiliate marketing links that give you a cut of each sale the site generates. By using a WordPress plugin to manage the site you get an incredible level of control over the site’s content. On the other end, using a WordPress shopping cart plugin will let you build a store to sell physical or digital products in a matter of minutes. I know how hard it is to get an online shopping cart up and running and a WordPress plugin will go a long ways to making your life easier.

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I recently took on a small site project for a local client and we decided to save time and money and use WordPress as the site’s backend. Normally, I would use a stripped down version of my own custom-built CMS for this kind of site but I was interested in trying something new.

So far I have the basic template made and the next step is converting it into a WordPress theme. After that, we’ll have some brief WordPress training and the site should be live.

What’s interesting about this project is that we won’t be using any of the blog features associated with WordPress. The only portion of the WordPress admin we’ll be taking advantage of is the “Pages” interface. All of the site’s content will be controlled with pages, and not posts, because we don’t want this site to look or function like a blog.

I’ve debated in the past whether or not WordPress (especially the 2.5 release) was ready for primetime as a content management system. I’m still not 100% sure it is but I’ll learn a lot with this local client. I’ll report back in a few months on how this all worked out.

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For those of you who don’t remember, CommentLuv is a plugin for WordPress that will append a link to the latest blog post a person has made to any comment they leave on your site. I use the plugin here so if anyone wants to see how it works just leave a comment on this or any other post.

It’s a cool little plugin that may or may not inspire more people to leave comments on your posts. The clever trick though is something I came upon while going through my stat logs here. It turns out with a really simple Google query you can find blog posts related to specific keywords you are interested in that have CommentLuv enabled.

In the Google search box type something like this: commentluv inurl:golf

Replace the word golf with whatever keyword you’re looking for and you’ll be presented with a list of blog posts that have that word in the URL and have CommentLuv enabled. Visit one of the posts and leave a comment to get an easy link to your latest post. It’s that simple.

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Still Not Enough

I still think WordPress isn’t right for any of my clients at the moment. I really wish it was flexible enough to be used in all of the situations I run into in my freelancing work and maybe 2.5 is a step in that direction.

Part of the problem is that I have a very strong “do it yourself” mentality and would much rather invest the time in building my own content management programs than waste energy forcing a program like WordPress to meet my demands.

Now if a client wanted a blog (side note: not once have I been asked to build a blog for any of my clients) I wouldn’t hesitate to use WordPress with a custom theme built to match their current site design. WordPress is, without a doubt, still the best blogging platform available today and with 2.5 it’s gotten even better. There’s no denying that.

If you haven’t given 2.5 a try you need to find the time to download and install it soon.

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Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg posted a short introductory video on the WordPress.org blog showing the new admin. It looks like a huge improvement over the current release so I’m pretty excited for 2.5.

The current admin is just so terrible that I’ve long been on the fence about switching to another blogging platform. In the end, I always stick with what I’ve got and just grin and bear WordPress’ faults.

This new look and feel for WordPress is a pretty big step for the project in my opinion. The easier WordPress is to use for the “common man” the better chance it has of finally crushing its competition like MoveableType once and for all.

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City White

City White is a widget ready, fixed-width WordPress theme with a right sidebar and a very simple, image less layout. It’s the first theme I’ve released without any images at all, as a matter of fact.

Since this theme is so minimalistic and white it’s going to be very simple for anyone to expand upon it and make it their own. I actually thought about using it as a base for a series of sports related themes but I’m putting that idea on the backburner for now.

Blue Gloss

Although it’s very simple like City White, Blue Gloss does have a bit more of a style to it. It’s also a fixed width, widget ready WordPress theme with a right sidebar.

Right now I’m leaning towards making Blue Gloss the newsletter exclusive theme. Future issues of the newsletter will have a special download code to give verified subscribers access to this and any other exclusive themes I release.

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404 Notifier is an admin-side plugin that logs any 404 errors your visitors encounter while visiting your blog.

The neat part of 404 Notifier is that you can subscribe to a special RSS feed that will automatically notify you of any new 404 errors.

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With PhotoDropper you can browse Creative Commons licensed photos from flickr based on keywords and attach them to your blog posts.

This sounds really good but there’s a catch. PhotoDropper automatically includes a credit link to the photographer (which is fine) but it also includes a link back to the PhotoDropper site with the anchor text “photo” next to the credit link.

So if you think that’s a bit shady you might want to look elsewhere for photos for your blog. I always recommend stock.xchng.

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Speaking Of Contests…

As an incentive to subscribe and to help promote the launch, I’m going to be giving away a Single-Use License for the popular Premium News Theme for WordPress to one of the newsletter’s verified subscribers. It’s free to subscribe so you’ve got nothing to lose by signing up.

Subscribe Now

In fact, I’ve made it really easy by including the sign up form right here:

I’ll be picking the winner of the free premium WordPress theme at midnight on March 7th, 2008. Feel free to tell everyone you know about the contest and have them subscribe to Jack’s Newsletter for their chance to win.

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Another nice feature of Redirection is its 404 monitoring. It will track the 404 errors your blog generates so that you can then create redirects for them. That’s pretty slick.

If you’re interested, head on over to the Redirection page for a list of even more features and help installing and running the plugin (including a video tutorial).

Credit for this week’s WordPress Plugin of the Week goes directly to Viking Blogger. He wrote a post about it recently that I just read this morning.

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