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Picking up from where Matt left off last week, WordPress does flex its muscles in terms of themes, plugins and apps for the mobile devices.
Navigating to the free themes directory as WordPress.org, there are currently 1321 themes available for download. If you are looking for a theme to record a recent trip and travel adventure, the Adventure Journal might just be for you. If you want “add a touch of colour to life”, the Nanoplex Theme may tickle your fancy. There are many themes to choose from, and the best part about this is that it can be easily modified to match your specific needs. These themes are all build with HTML, CSS and PHP – this makes them easily editable by anyone who chooses. If you can’t find a theme you like, you even have the ability to create your own (perhaps a future blog entry).
Plugins provide you with the ability to extend WordPress in almost any way that you can imagine. Currently, WordPress.org has over 13000 listed in their plugin directory. Plugins vary from statistics generation, twitter extensions to caching and comment blog blocking. One of the most popular plugins is Akismet.
Akismet is a comment spam blocking plugin that does a good job – we use it on the CoreSolutions website and it performs well. As with the themes above, these plugins can also be extended and enhanced by adjusting the PHP associated with the plugins. We have some experience with doing this; if you need a hand, let us know.
While not really extending WordPress itself, the mobile apps gives you the flexibility of using your WordPress blog directly from your phone. Currently, there are apps for Windows Phone 7, Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Nokia and the iPhone.
This provides you with a glimpse of how WordPress can be extended, stretched, flexed and shrunk. If there is a specific plugin or theme you would like me to comment on, please let us know.
Hope this helps.
