WordPress Publisher Blog

The team at Incsub has written-in to let us know about a very exciting launch of Nationen! blog.

Nationen! blog is a WordPress MU (WPMU) powered site developed by Incsub in collaboration with Søren Pedersen of Ekstra Bladet, the largest Danish site on the web with more than 1.5 MM unique visitors weekly!

The installation integrates single sign-ons (SSO) with existing Ekstra Bladet accounts, provides CMS features for the front page and has built into it a range of powerful community features including internal private messaging email features, friend features, comprehensive internal statistics integration and a fair bit more:

Global tag clouds are also created from across the site and the posts displayed on tag and category portals on the front page:

In order to integrate more fully with the newspaper the front page also includes listings of latest videos from the online site nationen.tv as well as full MSS integration, with latest photos taken and sent in by mobile phone being displayed on the front page alongside latest comments, posts and popular content which can also be seen here: http://q.nationenblog.dk/

While the site has only been launched in beta for a month - it already sports over 300 blogs and is a great example of how a major media organization can use WordPress MU to set up their own blog network while keeping a tight integration with their existing site.

You can read more about this project over on incsub.com/nationenblog.

[ Visit Nationen! blog and Incsub.com ]

The well known Webmonkey site, which is now part of CondeNet, has relaunched and selected WordPress for the monkey_bites blog:

It’s great to see such as fantastic blog , which is geared towards developers, on the WordPress platform.

As one of the commenters,  thepickledegg, remarked: “WordPress would be proud of the Webmonkey blog.”  We certainly agree !

[ Visit monkey_bites ]

A Way to Garden, a beautifully designed new WordPress powered blog has launched.

Focused on American gardens, it’s written by Margaret Roach who was previously garden editor at Newsday and most recently at Martha Stewart Living, first as its garden editor and then as editorial director for the company.

The new blog and Margaret’s story was covered in the New York Times recently.

[ Visit A Way to Garden ]

BlogTalkRadio, a social radio network, just announced a new round of funding.

Alan Levy, the CEO, posted on the company blog ( which is hosted on WordPress.com VIP ) explaining on how they got to this point and the power of bloggers and other individuals to create audio shows:

We launched BlogTalkRadio almost two years ago as an idea that we thought had some legs. As has been well-documented in the past, our theory was quite simple: Would bloggers, or in fact anyone, be interested in creating audio content using a phone? Would it be possible to create a new distribution platform and medium, where anyone with a phone and something to say could establish and build an audience? If this is such a good idea, why is no one else doing it? We had many more questions than answers.

Levy offers details on where BlogTalkRadio is today:

Fast forward from the fall of 2006 and we have broadcast close to 100,000 shows. We have had Academy Award winners, Presidential candidates, best-selling authors and many other notables. We have thousands of active hosts talking about the things that interest them and their audience. Our content is listened to more than 3 million times a month and as new content is created and added to the long tail, the number of listeners continues to grow rapidly.

[ Read more on the BlogTalkRadio blog & today's New York Times article ]

Lost At E Minor is a new site built entirely with WordPress — designed by Andrew Whitehead, developed by Christopher Jones and Cre8d Design , and experience/interaction design/strategy by Andy Howard ( previously profiled with The Roar ).

A visually impressive site, Lost At E Minor is an “online publication of trends and pop culture”:

Lots of interesting customizations are present in this site including:

A horizontal navigational carousel provides a deep dive to specific categories. … The right-hand column captures the pulse of the crowd… presenting the current giveaway and showcasing what the Lost At E Minor community is currently doing.

They’ve also allowed the readers to customize the look & feel:

The colour palette is customisable and the banners rotate to give readers a sense of ownership and to customise the site however they see fit. A footer designed to push readers into relevant archived content ensures the community can find constant inspiration, and a similar concept is employed on the single post page to discover related content.

[ Visit Lost At E Minor - and read more on Andy Howard's blog ]

Open Source Living is a new community-driven site focused on Open Source projects:

Through a simple, elegant and efficient presentation of resources and information, OS Living aims to highlight small and large OSS projects, to inform and raise awareness to OS ethics, and to reinforce the credibility of OSS as a viable alternative to corporate funded, closed source software.

The site uses a very clean layout and a smart use of tags and categories to organize the content in a very easy-to-use format.

In addition they deployed the WP-PageNavi plugin by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan to enhance the site’s navigation:

[ Visit Open Source Living ]

The Poker Players Alliance site recently launched a very impressive site powered by the latest release of WordPress MU:

The site was built by the talented Adam Tow, and has a very seamless PayPal integration for upgrading members to premium status.

In addition, plugins are used to to handle displaying premium content to paid members.

[ Visit Poker Players Alliance ]

The Times, a South African media brand from AVUSA Media recently relaunched a new and improved Times Multimedia portal, which is based on WordPress.

The slick looking design appears to be an extension of a theme from WPelements.

Hopefully all South African WordPress enthusiasts already have WordCamp South Africa marked on their calendars.

Kineda, which focuses on “Global Fusion of Fashion and Lifestyle”,  is a fabulous looking site that is part blog, part lookbook, and is running on WordPress and bbPress:

Terry from Kineda highlights the efforts:

The blog still offers our comprehensive fashion and lifestyle blog features, while the lookbook offers a rare glimpse at what our half a million readers are wearing right this moment.

New Kineda Features include:

* Single Sign-on to Blog and Lookbook
* Custom Profiles with Avatars
* Photo Upload with Automatic Cropping and Logo Watermark
* Ability to Rate Looks
* Custom Sorting of Looks by Most Viewed, Top Rated, etc.
* Share or Comment on any Look

The lookbook idea is really well executed and an innovative way to use bbPress:

[ Visit Kineda.com and the Kineda.com Lookbook ]

Yesterday, Health.com launched a complete site redesign, and I’m excited that WordPress.com VIP Hosting is part of it. Their main blog Poked and Prodded has been migrated from TypePad, and we are also hosting their two new blogs Healthy Living and Healthy Eating.

All of the old links to Poked and Prodded continue to work, and the newer articles now have the more readable and better search engine optimized WordPress style of permanent links.

One thing I really like about their themes is the use of avatars for each contributor both in the sidebar and on their individual author bios. It really personalizes the experience.

Health.com Editorial Director Scott Mowbray wrote in the article about the relaunch:

“… we do like to blog. We do like to present diverse voices talking about human issues”.

The the rest of the article continues to focus on their opportunity to use their expertise as journalists and editors to create a web site helping “make lives easier, healthier, and more interconnected”.

In my small role helping with the migration, and as a new parent, I found myself reading a lot of the articles and watching the videos. They are successful at “answering the questions you really want answered”.

The Health.com team chose WordPress.com VIP Hosting because WordPress provides the setting for people connecting, allowing Health.com to stay focused on their writing (using our intuitive interface), while we provide the flexible environment to integrate their blogs into the Health.com experience, and the performance, maintenance, and stability to give them the piece of mind that their audience and participants will always have a great experience.