#mybabyourbaby

Alternative Uses for WordPress

WordPress, the most widely used blogging platform in the world, is built in a relatively content-agnostic way that means it’s suitable for all sorts of things, all it takes is a little bit of creativity and some theme/plugin hacking. I’ve decided to compile a list of alternative/slightly different uses for WordPress that I either see around the place, or that I come up with myself.

I’m not going to go into great detail on how to actually implement all of these ideas, I’m just putting them out there.

Read on for some different applications for WordPress

MyBabyOurBaby Clone Request

Apparently we’re doing something right, because there are already people who want to copy our site! I found this listing on ScriptLance by doing a search for us to see if we were showing up in Google. What really surprises me is how low some of the bids are — trust me, it took a lot longer than 14 days to make!

I suppose imitation is the greatest form of flattery right? So we should take this as a compliment?

MyBabyOurBaby is officially live!

As you may know, I’ve been working on a project for a while now, which has finally gone live, with open registrations. That project is My Baby Our Baby.

The idea of the site is to give parents and families a secure place online where they can compile a journal of memories for their children. We’re focusing primarily on photos right now, but hope to include video and audio as we progress. Here’s a couple of the things that I think make MyBaby unique or worth a look:

  • Unlimited uploads (backed by Amazon S3)
  • You choose to have your book open to the public (for reading), or completely invite-only.
  • Once they join your book via invitation, other people can add their own photos and stories to your book as well
  • We have some really beautiful book themes (and more coming) care of Ray Hernandez/Stoodio
  • We’ve created a forum on the site as well to allow people to interact across books (anyone who’s a member can post) and ask each other questions etc.
  • You can try it out for free!

Right now, people get 3 weeks to try it out for free, after that, if they like it, it’s $8 a month to continue using the service. This covers you for as much as you (and all the members of your book) want to upload. You can pay for more than a month at a time and get a discount as well. We’re trying out a slightly different method of payment where subscriptions aren’t actually available in a traditional set-your-details-and-forget way. What we’re doing is allowing anyone who’s a member of the book to contribute by paying for as much (or as little) as they like. We’re hoping that rather than the parent having to pay every month, other people in the family will chip in and cover the cost of keeping the book running if they see value in it.

Ray and I are really excited now that it’s live, and very nervous to see where it goes. We’ve spent a lot of time working on this and refining things, so it’s great to finally have some other people using it.

Now for the real work — keeping it up and running and constantly improving it for our new users!