Over the years, WordPress has consistently proven to be the most popular blogging system out there. Millions upon millions of blogs run on WordPress, and that’s not counting those that are hosted on WordPress.com, Automattic’s free, hosted blogging service.
But it’s not just a blogging platform; as many have discovered, it works really well as a fully-fledged content management system — it really comes down to how the theme is written, and often the plugins that are used.
Let’s take a look at some of the oddest uses people have come up with for a mere blogging platform.
WordPress, the Social Network
BuddyPress turns your vanilla WordPress MU installation into a basic social network — complete with private messaging, friends, groups, personal blogs and status updates.
WordPress, the Email Newsletter Manager
Some have gone as far as using WordPress to manage email newsletters—forget using it for building a website! The process is outlined here, but in short, you create a newsletter category, use some theme coding trickery to hide the category on the site, create an