Wordpress For the Win!

RD's faves: http://actionpress.radicaldesigns.org/wholesome-wordpress-plugin-goodness/ ...and a few more: http://actionpress.radicaldesigns.org/wordpress-plugins-ftw/

East Bay Wordpress Metup! http://eastbaywp.com/

Wordpress is awesome for simple websites! "Simple" is a moving target

Plugin Shoutouts (and Beatdowns): - BlogInBlog - use a shortcode to put a category feed of posts into pages - FeedGeek - use feeds to pull in content and then push it back out again - Craigslist Foundation uses wordpress for the whole site - FeedPress to wpTwitter: slurp in feeds and push them out again via social media. Needs better social media. Wishes Wordpress had Drupal-level documentation. - Wordpress.com: custom css, buy own domain thru worpress.com, use gmail for email - Move from Joomla to Wordpress - Redirection, biggest struggle is custom data displays (e.g. podsy) - Google XML Sitemap - Event Manager - better at mapping than calendaring - RoleScoper - set better permissions for users - ThemeMyLogin - replace the Wordpress logo with your website's - ThemeMyProfile - doesn't work very well, AuthorPages is better - CForms - amazing, but you can accidentally hose your data if you aren't careful - MemberAccess - login-protected pages. - wp-stats - really nice analytics (requires a Wordpress.com developer key) - radslide - Radical Designs own plugin, can be used as an informational slideshow.

Plugin Needs

-Table management plugin
- PageTree management - better admin for hierarchical nested pages

How to identify a plugin you want to choose:

- check compatibility
- has it been updated in the last 6 months?
- has the publisher documented it on their website?
- can't trust the downloads count (are usually cyclical as people try then uninstall)

Useful Widgets:

- Rich Text Widget - WYSIWYG editor for text widgets (better than the default text widget)
- Image Widget - enables users who aren't comfortable with HTML
 

Other Stuff:

- Wordpress Multi-user: better, still not great. Breaks existing blog's permalinks.

Weird Tips and Tricks
 - Porting other websites to Wordpress: Store the original URL as a custom field on the article. Then run a script that creates the redirects.