In this article we will show you how you can turn around the regular wordpress blogging platform and turn it in a variety of different things like: membership directories, e-commerce stores, premium membership sites, social media feed aggregates, musician/band website, design gallery, podcasting site, review site and more

.

Membership directory

A membership directory is a site that allows people to join, add their details and then create some sort of membership listing. So for example you might use WordPress to create a directory of tourist activities and accommodation in a certain location. Then small businesses could sign up, add their business details and images and create a listing.

WordPress’ out of the box user management is fairly sophisticated and includes a solid login and registration system. To create the membership pages you need to theme up a special author.php layout. You can also add in special user fields using the WP-User-Manager plugin
A great tutorial on building a membership directory, including information on how to deal with privileges that authors have can be found here: How to use wordpress as a membership directory.

WordPress as an E-Commerce Store

Add a shopping cart, integrate with PayPal or Authorize.net and sell products using WordPress? Not as hard as you might think. Here are three options for setting WordPress up as a store:

Use a Plugin:

The most popular e-commerce plugin is definitely: WP e-Commerce which is not only free but includes PayPal integration and an AJAX shopping cart.

Use a Theme:

MarketTheme – is a premium theme (so you need to pay) that includes a large featureset for creating an e-commerce store. Like all themes it’s customizable with a bit of theming knowledge and all of the hard work of sales integration is taken care of for you.

Use a Third Party Service:

E-Junkie – is a service that lets you sell items from anywhere by pasting in a few lines of javascript. Create a WordPress theme that turns Posts into product listings, Post categories into product types and then add E-Junkie code to each Post to let visitors buy products.

WordPress as a Premium Membership Site

A premium membership site is one where visitors pay either a subscription or one-off fee to access special members-only content. WordPress can be used to build a premium membership site in one of two ways:

Use a Plugin
There are several PayPal-integration plugins for WordPress that allow you to add paid-for membership functionality, including:http://wp-member.com/, http://tinyurl.com/easypaypal

These work by boosting the WordPress membership system to let you create member’s only sections which can only be accessed after a new member has paid for their account.

Use a Third Party Membership System

Many popular membership systems have plugins to work with WordPress. The best example is aMember which can be easily integrated using a standard add-on. The aMember software then protects either the entire WordPress install or certain parts. When a visitor joins aMember they automatically become a user in the WordPress installation, however you have access to a host more membership management features through the aMember console. This means you can run voucher promotions, give out free memberships, integrate with other systems and more.

WordPress as a Social Media Feed Aggregator

With all the many social services out there, there are two reasons why you might want to make a feed aggregator. You might want to build a popurls type service to display content from popular feeds or alternatively you may simply want to aggregate all your own feeds onto a single page as a type of homepage.

Arguably the best PHP RSS aggregator plugin is SimplePie and fortunately SimplePie have a freely available WordPress plugin to help you get going.
Using SimplyPie you can create a theme that pipes through content from any site that produces an RSS feed – in other words virtually any modern web service.

While SimplePie is perfect for processing any type of feed, there are also specialized plugins for specific types of feeds, for example: FlickrRSS will port in photos, Smart YouTube will bring in videos, and Twitter for WordPress will display your twitter feed. Search the plugins library for a specific service and chances are there’s a plugin made specially for it.

If that seems like a lot of work, you could just customize ericulous’ OneNews WP Theme that is a popurls clone right out of the box.

WordPress as a Musician/Band Website

There are several great plugins for turning WordPress into a musician’s site. First grab Discography – which automatically creates a page for every track and album you enter where fans can comment or listen. Second add in a Gig calendar with and you can automate upcoming gigs the band is playing and keep the fans informed. Using plugins like FlickRSS or SmartYouTube you can port in images and videos to provide some visual goodness. And of course with WordPress’ regular blogging and content management abilities you have all the makings of a great band site.

WordPress as a Design Gallery

Some very well known CSS galleries including BestWebGallery are powered by WordPress. The basic principle behind building a theme that acts as a design gallery is to make your Posts into the gallery entries. So the Post title becomes the entry name, the Post body becomes the entry’s description. To add an image you use Custom Fields as we did in the Portfolio theme. Using Custom Fields you can add all sorts of extra data about the gallery entries and with a rating plugin or javascript add-on like JS-Kit’s Rating service you can add user scores.
There are also plenty of Design Gallery themes out there that you can grab and modify including: CSS-Gallery-Theme and Design Showcase

WordPress as a Podcasting Site

WordPress is a great platform for creating a podcasting site because all you really need is a way to post up your latest podcasts. At its most basic you can simply place a link to each podcast in a Post and be done with it. WordPress’ page on Podcasting – explains about setting up feeds so iTunes users can subscribe in a single click. You might also want to look at using http://feedburner.com services – be sure to click track enclosures so you can measure your podcast downloads.

The best known podcasting plugin is which adds a player to your page amongst other things. But at the end of the day building a podcasting site is no different to building a regular blog, you just need to add the actual podcast files in.

WordPress as a Review Site

Review sites can be tailored to virtually any niche from restaurant reviews to electronics reviews. Creating a WordPress theme for such a site is mainly a case of clever design. Regular Posts can be used as the editorial reviews and the addition of rating plugins like JS-Kit’s Review and Navigator widgets allows user interaction in the review process.
If you’re looking for a paid product to create a review site, go no further than WPReviewSite – which adds some clever extra functionality like post sorting based on rating.