Managing the WPBundle WordPress install is perhaps one of the most interesting, and fun things I get to do. It’s by far the most in-depth WordPress site I’ve managed, featuring a plethora of different pages, modules, and sections.

The main install is a single non-networked install of the latest nightly build. I know you’re not supposed to use nightly’s on a production site, but I like to live on the edge. It has a decent amount of Plugins installed that make the site tick:

• Akismet
• bbPress
• Contact Form 7
• DBC Backup
• JetPack
• Really Simple Captcha (For Contact Form 7)
• Secure WordPress
• Syntax Highlighter Evolved
• W3 Total Cache

Aksimet is pretty obvious. Used to help stop spam. Probably should have been proactive and installed it on our demo server as some of our demo installs currently have about 30,000 pending SPAM comments.

A topic marked as "Resolved"

The bbPress Plugin is used to manage our support forums. It’s running one of the very early releases, that has been stripped down quite a bit as it is. Considering bbPress still hasn’t even officially released an alpha version of the Plugin, you can imagine how basic it is. However, I like that about it, and it certainly gets the job done. I created my own little “Support Plugin” that allows topics to be marked as resolved when an answer has been given. It was one of the most popular plugins for the stand-alone version of bbPress, but wasn’t up to par with the Plugin version. Perhaps when a stable version is released, I’ll extract my code and see about releasing it

Contact Form 7 is used to accept showcase submissions, and general contact inquiries. Really Simple Captcha helps secure those and fend off some of the SPAM.

DBC Backup uses WP Cron to schedule daily backups of the site’s database. It makes it easier to not worry about upgrading to nightly builds when you have the past 30 days of database information safely backed up.

JetPack is one of my favorites. All of the modules it provides are great. It makes it super easy to track site stats, as well as brings things like easy post/page sharing.

Secure WordPress is just another precautionary Plugin used to block out people form trying to log in too many times.

Finally, W3 Total Cache helps the site run at optimal speed, all of the time. One of those Plugins that you just install and forget about, yet it makes a massive difference.

The actual theme that powers the main site is decently complex as well. It features two custom post types, and a few custom taxonomies that make it easy to manage the contents in the bundle, as well as the showcase.  When a new item is added, it is automatically filed away and displayed where it needs to be around the site.

Using the WordPress Media Gallery, we can upload screenshots that are displayed via a rotator when viewing a single item.

Purchases are managed through Quixly. When a new item is created, a custom meta box lets us simply paste the Quixly URL, which lets users purchase the item. When someone makes a purchase, a quick little snippet of code using wp_insert_user allows me to automatically register users, giving them access to the bbPress support forum.

The demo site is a little simpler. It’s a separate Network Install of WordPress that has about 60 separate sites. A separate install is used for each of one the parent and child themes. This is necessary because our child themes are not always simple variations, but can call for different types of content all together. By using separate installs, we are free to showcase this. At first I was worried about managing all of them as separate sites inside the network, but WordPress makes it easy. Network updating WordPress, as well as plugins makes managing 60 sites no different than 1. The only thing I would do differently, as I mentioned above, is take more precautions on the comments.

That’s about it. I’m sure it pales in comparison to some of the other WordPress powered sites out there, but I certainly feel like I’m utilizing a lot of WordPress’s potential through the site. If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear what you think.