As you will have noted in my recent spate of articles I have become very pro Wordpress of late, this is because I have managed to develop and launch a number of sites recently in a record amount of time. As a freelancer designer and developer I can tell you that my effort to dollar or time:profit ratio is greatly increased when I used Wordpress as my Content Management System of choice.

That is correct, CMS system, it is not just a blog system anymore. It can stand shoulder to shoulder with any of the other open source CMS systems currently available. To illustrate this point I have scoured the web to find examples of Wordpress being utilised and extended to provide all manner of web sites.

As CMS for a major site: http://about.networksolutions.com/

I will start with Network Solutions. A massive organisation and once upon a time about the only organisation you could register a domain name through. They manage over 7 million domain names and nearly half a million websites today. This is a major company with a long history online. It also employs some of the best technical minds in the industry, and guess what they use to manage their massive “About Us” site? Correct, Wordpress! An excellent example of Wordpress as a CMS.

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There are different ways of preventing your Wordpress blog from becoming the target of spam and abuse. Which method you use will depend on a number of factors. I have used Akismet succesfully for example on a number of blogs, however I came up against a problem with a press release website.

I had developed this site using Wordpress and with the addition of Plugins it was designed to be a Press Release Center allowing PR Professionals and marketing experts to submit their news releases for online publication. I developed the site and tested it, everything seemed to work fine. We tested it in-house and then decided to go for a soft launch. We checked http://jkhanok.com and for the first few hours nothing. Where were all the submissions that we had been promised? That is right, the Akismet Plugin had grabbed them as spam.

This was going to be a problem, I certainly did not want the submissions to be a free for all for every idiot online, but I did not want every other press release trashed because it looked ’spammy’ to Akismet. So I had to take a look at what other options were out there.
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There is a movement within Wordpress and its growing fast. Their is a growing community of Estate Agents and Realtors that are begiining to use Wordpress to power their sites. This is likely to have been encouraged by some of the early players such as R&W Mosman and Neutral Bay Real Estate in Sydney  and Harcourts Luxury who were both featured in the Wordpress sites Showcase.

http://wordpress.org/showcase/harcourts-luxury/

The move to Wordpress can only be encouraged by the relatively recently introduced Widgets and Modules that have been specifically designed for Wordpress, the wide variety of themes now available and the upcoming WP Plugins due for release soon, read on to find out more about what I know on that.

Tasked with developing yet another Real Estate site I have decided to check the feasibility (in fact on the subject of Real Estate web sites a I am currently working on four, this is a hot market right now) of doing it in Wordpress. With a little research I realised it is certainly possible. To get the site right I wanted to thoroughly understand what was available and what they could do, so I set about doing some intensive research on the subject.
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