What are the features that empower Wordpress ?

Wordpress is the best content management system. You can do practically whatever you want. The power of wordpress stand in themes and plugins.

Themes can be installed with one click from the administration panel. You can select a theme from the wordpress theme directory or you can buy one from somewhere else. The installation is simple, just copy the theme files into the themes directory and then activate it from the administration panel.

Lately, more advanced themes was build. Those were meant to enhance the wordpress functionality adding advanced features directly to the themes.

What are functionalities that can be added trough theme coding ? Almost everything. For example: changing custom text on the template, changing site colors, changing the layout directly from the administration panel.

These advanced themes are called “Theme Frameworks”. Some well known theme frameworks are: Headway, Thesis and Genesis.

The plugins in wordpress are meant to add new functionalities to your wordpress site or blog. For example: related raticles, guestbook, forums, and many other. Practically the possibilities are infinite, and you can install anything with one click from your admin panel.

Not all plugins are very good, but you have just to experiment some to select the ones that fits you best. The good is that they can’t cause too much damage to your wordpress installation.

All plugins from the wordpress plugin directory are verified by wordpress stuff so they can’t send private info or other details from your blog. If you install plugins from other sources it would be better to install only from trusted sources.

Akismet is a spam protector plugin for wordpress blogs. It will analyze every comment posted to your blog and will filter out all spam comments. Altough it is silent, it’s functionality is awesome. I receive a total of 1000 spam comments every day to my few blogs I manage.

Another very good plugin that can extend your CMS functionality is tinyMCE advanced. By default, when you write a new post, you will use a lite version of well known tinyMCE rich text editor. By simply installing a plugin you can extend it’s functionality so you will have the option to add tables or change the font-family for a portion of your text.

A good plugin that most blogs use is the related articles plugin. At the end of every post it will show a list with other related articles, so your visitors will read more from your blog before they consider leaving.

If you want to build a community around your blog you willmost likely want to add an “about the author box” at the end of your every arcitle. This can also be done with a single plugin, install activate and change your info.

All this stuff created around wordpress makes it so powerfull. More and more webmasters will want to switch to wordpress due to simple of use and the ability to add new features by simply installing a plugin.

The fact is that there is no point in re-inventing the weel. Why to build a custom CMS to handle your websites when you can use a Top one  and change here and there if you want. Why to build new features when others already build. Focus you time and money in customizing it and making it unique.