Forum, wiki, ecommerce, transforming Wordpress in any CMS

Designed as a blogging software, used as a portal site too, Wordpress is becoming increasingly universal. We can transform it into any kind of CMS, through plugins. Into a forum, a wiki, a store, etc. ...

Online store

To create an online store, a specialized paid software is not necessary. Wordpress can do it with some plugins.
It must then support these functions:

• Managing a catalog of products.
• Order and payments management.
• Support for mobile.
• Monitoring the delivery of products and customer space.
• Detailed statistics of sales.
• Foreign languages.
• Affiliation.
• Sponsorship.
• Loyalty.

Examples of plugins:

• Woocommerce. A toolkit to make an online shop, which has a great success. It supports the Schema format for better indexing by search engines.
• WP e-Commerce. Marketing tools included.
• eShop. Shoping cart with stock control.

You can also prefer an open source CMS such as Magento Community Edition. There is a lot of alternatives in PHP: Avactis, Batavi, osCommerce, PrestaShop, Ubercart, VirtueMart, Zen Cart and Agent-Ohm a fork of Magento.
And in Java: Broadleaf Commerce, Ofbliz.

Forum

There are several plugins to transform Wordpress in a forum. This has no interest in itself, since there are many good CMS dedicated to that, as phpBB, FluxBB, SMF and others, except that using Wordpress gives you the opportunity to extend the software with a wealth of other useful plugins!

• Simple:Press Forum. The forum may be added to your blog or be a dedicated site.
• bbPress. Supported by the WordPress Foundation, it transforms WP into a forum.

Wiki

Once the plugin installed, just check a box so that it becomes a collaborative space to which visitors can participate and complete the article!

• Wordpress Wiki.
• Annotum. Created by Google, the purpose of this theme is to make collaborative website like Wikipedia, to replace Knol. It provides a set of tools to manage co-authors for a post and can export to PDF or XML. Fit perfectly a scientific publication.

Directory

Transforming Wordpress in a directory and import the contents of a site developed on Freeglobe is also possible. Of course, one wonders why all these directories exists, but these are the webmasters who know ;)

• List of plugins.

Digg-like

To create a website made by the visitors, who describe their articles, and vote for the articles, actually this is not a plugin but a simple theme associated with three plugins:

• Flickr RSS. View the contents of Flickr on your site.
• WP Page Navi. Adds new types of navigation.

Social Network

A site with profiles and allowing members to post messages or send messages to other members, Wordpress MU can also do so. On the account of each member are displayed their friends and followers and you have created your version of Twitter!
The services of the plugin:

• Profiles.
• Private messages.
• Friends.
• Wire, where messages are displayed as in Facebook.
• Activities. List your activities and those of your friends such as the updates of Twitter.
• Blogs. Each member has his blog.
• Forums. Members or groups maintain forums.

BuddyPress. Supported by the WordPress Foundation too, adds social features to your blog.

Video Gallery

Of a video gallery plugin is expected more than the display of videos, for that you just insert a reader from Youtube or other sharing site or a flash player for hosted videos. A manager and edit functions are provided by the plugins too.

• All in one video pack. Able to create thumbnails of videos. 150 formats as well (these two plugins compete one with other).

Image Gallery

A gallery plugin to download images and create thumbnails automatically. And various functions that facilitate access to images or special effects.

• NextGEN Gallery. The extension allows you display flash videos in gallery too.
• Featured content gallery. Creates a Cover Flow in the way of Apple. This plugin is out of date, I list it for those who would use it as a basis for development (GPL license) because it has interesting features.

Conclusion

Transforming Wordpress in a specialized CMS may have advantages. A quantity of available plugins that are not found with a specialized software. In some cases it is possible to add the specialized version to a portal site sharing the same database, the same services, and this is great too!