Bonsai Ireland

This site was built using one of the best ‘Open Source’ blog publishing applications on the planet, Wordpress. (v2.8) In the US alone over 62 million sites use Wordpress and worldwide this is reported at 202 million¹.

Being an ‘Open Source’ application it is completely free, although you can use professional add-on applications at a low cost.  This site uses a theme which is based on Wp_Magazine by WP Them. It has been customised to display content as categories using a plugin called Vibe CMS.

The feature image display on the front page is using a VSlider. VSlider enables you to rotate images in a slide show. This can be set against standalone images or a post (article). If the post has an image attached it will be displayed with the first few lines of the post.

Other plugins are:

Askimet - Spam prevention. You will need an API key from Wordpress.com for this.

All in One SEO – SEO Management

Apture – makes it easy to add contextual images, videos, reference guides, links, maps, music, news, documents and books to your blog to create a connected media experience that keeps readers engaged on your site.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

Topsy Retweet – Provides a Twitter retweet button powered by Topsy

Comment Rating – Allows visitors to rate comments in a Like vs. Dislike fashion with clickable images. Poorly-rated & highly-rated comments can be displayed differently.

Aweber – Email subscription service

Shorten2ping – Sends status updates to Ping.fm or Twitter everytime you publish a post, using your own domain, Bit.ly, Tr.im, and others for shortened permalinks.

If you are interested in knowing more about Wordpress, please visit Wordpress.org or if you need help in building a blog or web site please leave a comment or use the contact form.

Reference:

1. Number of sites using Wordpress