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Creating an Online Magazine or E-Commerce website with wordpress

Andre recently blogged about how many people are using wordpress as more than just a blog engine, they’re using it as a full blown content management system (CMS). I’m pretty well versed in WordPress and what’s available for it and today I was looking around today for new themes and plug-ins we could integrate with the AppliedI One-Click WordPress installer and came across a couple items that caught my attention, Mimbo an online magazine theme by Darren Hoyt and WP e-Commerce, an e-commerce solution for wordpress by Instinct Entertainment.

Creating your online magazine with WordPress

image Mimbo is a magazine-style WordPress theme that makes use of the WP template tag system to create a very non-traditional layout. You can see a live demo of mimbo here to get a feel for just what it does out of the box.

On Darren’s blog you’ll see many posts of sites that are based on the Mimbo design. Here’s a few links to some of the sites that are mimbo powered:

So with wordpress, a theme like mimbo and a little creativity you should be able to launch a pretty impressive online magazine yourself.  Mimbo isn’t the only magazine style wordpress theme out there as there are a number of commercial solutions available too:

And that’s just a sampling of the vast number of magazine style themes out there for wordpress. Not to mention the thousands of other themes available.

Creating your WordPress powered online store with WP e-Commerce

Let’s face it, the Internet has completely changed the way today’s consumer shops and has made virtually every brick and mortar store with an online store an International business.  E-Commerce is here to stay and as technology changes and evolves so does E-Commerce.  Enter, the Web 2.0 era of E-Commerce, blogs/CMS applications merging with shopping carts.

WP e-Commerce is a new plugin for wordpress that allows you to e-commerce enable your wordpress powered website.  WP e-Commerce is available as both a free version (for personal use), an upgraded version (GOLD version, $15) and a business class solution ($250).  For the features you get, even at $250, it’s a reasonably priced product.

Here’s a quick run down of the features:

  • New – Search Engine Friendly URLs / Permalinks (latest RC)
  • New – Marketing options under shop options (latest RC)
  • New – Members Only Module
  • Customizable pagination for product listing
  • Unlimited products & categories
  • AJAX powered Sliding Shopping Cart
  • Shop front highlighting for newly added products
  • AJAX powered Web 2.0 DropShop – additional gold module
  • Grid View – additional gold module
  • Fancy AJAX Alerts on Add to Cart
  • Purchase history for logged in users
  • New and improved Audio Player Module for selling MP3 files
  • Chinese Language file
  • Share this / Digg Product social networking promo tools
  • Downloadable CSV files
  • Detailed Purchase Log & Filters
  • Configurable Tax settings including USA & Canada
  • PayPal IPN
  • URL linking to products and images
  • – Next version
  • RSS product feed widget
  • Google Cart

Best of all, WP e-Commerce can integrate into your wordpress based site as either separate pages or widgets and the available widgets currently include:

  • AJAX Shopping Cart Widget
  • Categories & Brands Widget
  • Donations Widget
  • Product Specials Widget

A few sites based off of WP e-Commerce include (this list was taken from their website and may change at any time):

Best of all, the installation of WP e-Commerce couldn’t be easier, upload the plug-in, enable it and configure it. That’s it.

I can see WP e-Commerce being used by people selling online e-books or audio files, subscription based services, donations, merchandise (it includes the ability to assign attributes like size, color, etc to products) and any number of simple e-commerce needs. So if you’re looking for a low cost, easy to use e-commerce solution and already have a wordpress enabled site or plan to use wordpress, give WP e-Commerce a peek. It may not have the features and functionality of the larger, more expensive solutions but for the price, it packs a pretty nice punch.

I encourage you to visit the WP e-Commerce site and experiment with it today.

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Posted in E-Commerce, Web Applications, wordpress

About Jess Coburn

It's Jess's responsibility as CEO and Founder of Applied Innovations to set the direction of Applied Innovations services to ensure that as a company we're consistently meeting the needs of our customers to help drive their success. In his spare time, Jess enjoys many of the things that made him a geek to begin with. That includes sexy new hardware, learning new technology and even a videogame or two! When you can’t find him at the office (which admittedly is rare), you’ll likely find him at the grill or in front of his smoker getting ready for some lip-smacking ribs to enjoy with his wife and two kids.

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