Nationenblog was commissioned by the team at Ekstra Bladet, the leading Danish newspaper and online publication and is a fantastic hybrid of editorial, news and blogs as a major component of an online media suite.

The core of the frontpage is built around editorially selected articles shown in a dynamic, javascript driven slider alongside which sits custom blog rankings tool that can be configured to track the most popular blogs on the site over the last hour, day, week or month.

Further down the page there’s a live listing of every post across the site, complete with the avatar of the poster.

And as if that wasn’t enough information, alongside you can see all the latest comments too!

On the far right you can see current users online (which ties in nicely with the built in mailing and ‘friends’ system below, next to that are listed the newest bloggers (hence the default avatars) and on the far left there’s integration with nationen.tv.

And all the good stuff isn’t kept for the front page. As you can see above, we’ve integrated a comprehensive statistics package based on open source analytics software Piwik, a fully functionaly ‘Friends’ component and also a completely integrated internal messaging system that will notify users when they receive a message.

Edublogs is not only one of the largest WPMU sites on the web with hundreds of thousands of blogs and users, but it’s also one of the oldest… pre-dating even WordPress.com by around three weeks.

But we’re not the sorts for resting on our laurels and are constantly looking for innovative new ways to serve our teacher and student bloggers with tools like ‘blog and user creators’, integrated forums and premium upgrades… and that’s just for starters!

As you can see, the top of our frontpage combines the latest site news, login area (with integrated user avatars) and a pretty nice sales pitch.

The interesting thing about Edublogs is that it’s as much a service to individual teachers and their students as it is a community - so we really try to press home those elements, as well as our Premium schools product, Edublogs Campus, which already services almost a hundred educational institutions around the world.

Down the page you can see three key aspects of the site, in the top right a random listing of 20 of our ‘Supporters’ (users who have paid up to $25 a year for extra features or just because they love us so much), underneath that there’s a global tag cloud which allows you to browse through some of the great work on teh site and on the left you can catch up with the latest at the forums or from our in-house blogging ‘how-to’ genius, Sue Waters.

Finally, once you’re in the back-end you are actually able to customize the colours to your liking from a range of options and, as featured above, buy credits through paypal and subscribe to different upgrades. It’s about as seamless an upgrade system as you can get and was entirely custom developed by Incsub.

Consumer Brigade is a project sponsored by the great folk at Shopzilla and it’s a fantastic integration of a commercial platform (Shopzilla and Bizrate) with a first class blogging engine (WordPress) and a twist or two of integration between the two. Voila… shopping blogs!

The frontpage is clear, simple and tells new users exactly what they can expect from the site… namely lots of great shopping news, information and opinion… want to know what’s hot in shoes, look no further.

As well as the integrated login form, automated listing of blog by category and featured articles from across the site (all of this, incidentally, could be managed by a ten year old the CMS is so simple) if you take the time to scroll down the front page you’ll see random listings of featured bloggers, latest posts from across the site and latest posts by tag/category via our fantastic custom global tag cloud creator.

One of the main things about this project was the integration between the site and the Shopzilla Publisher Program. To do this we integrated multiple ‘blog categories’ reflecting the different publisher channels and available at sign up (or editable - as above) as well as allowing users to easily sign up for the program and have their own ads automatically inserted for them.

You could almost describe it as seamless

The last thing we’ll make not of on this project is the theme work. Shopzilla - quite rightly, wanted to just have the one theme which they could test on for ad CTR / performance and so on.. but of course their users want to feel like they can customize their theme in a very unique way.

Hence, as you can see, the default theme options are out of this world… there’s the option to ruin with a left sidebar, right sidebar or both, to make them large or small, to edit the text size, upload (and crop) your own custom header and even change the font of the color scheme of the whole blog.