WordPress as a Review Site and Podcasting Site: Advanced Uses of WordPress

Posted on 06. Nov, 2009 by Alex Denning in Advanced Uses of WordPress

1. Day 1: WordPress as a Tumblelog
2. Day 2: WordPress as a Review Site and Podcasting Site
3. Day 3: WordPress as a Social Network and Twitter clone

You should never say “oh, you can’t do that in WordPress”. Because you probably can. That’s the beauty of the platform – at face value, yes, it is a blogging platform, but be a bit creative and you’ve got yourself a full blown CMS.

WordPress as a review/podcasting site

Above is a picture of Nometet.com, a games reviews site which also has a sporadically posted podcast. Nometet uses a gallery theme to great effect – each post has its own image (set through a custom field) which gets auto resized to create a lovely gallery. But where the ‘review functionality’ really kicks in is with the star ratings for reviews plugin. Each review has a star rating – simple enough, but this star rating, along with other bits of data, is sortable through a rather nice jQuery table:

As for podcasting, look no further than the excellent podPress plugin. It offers you a ton of options for iTunes integration, includes a flash player and various other bits and bobs:

WordPress as a CMS

We’ve been building up to using WordPress as a CMS. With the plugins mentioned above, you can really easily use WordPress for any number of uses. However, using it on a client project as a CMS? Use custom fields to your advantage and you’ll be fine – as I’ve said before, custom fields are what turns WordPress into a CMS – you can use them to store all sorts of information. Here’s an example. I want to display the place where an article was written, and if I haven’t entered that I’ll just display the date. Using custom fields, that’s easy:

<?php
$Place = get_post_custom_values("Place");
if ( is_array($Place) ) { ?>
Plublished in: <?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "Place", true); ?>
<?php }	else { ?>
Published on <?php the_time('n/d/y'); ?>
<?php }	?>

Just create a custom field ‘Place’ and enter the place where the article was written and it’ll appear. If no custom field exists, then the date the post was published on gets displayed instead.

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