Well, Matt at The Turning Gate has done it again. I really don’t know how he can make Lightroom do the things he can make it do. Anyway, he recently released his latest: TTG CE3 Theme for WordPress plug-in for Lightroom’s Web Module.

If you read my blog, and you are right now, this WordPress theme was made in Lightroom using Matt’s plug-in. If you’ve looked at this blog in the past, that theme was made with the earlier version of TTG Theme for WordPress, which was impressive on its own.

This new version goes a step or three beyond the old version. With the CE3 version you can realistically create your entire photo site with WordPress and a couple other TTG plug-ins, namely the Autoindex and the Gallery plug-in.

CE3 Theme for WordPress allows for the creation of additional pages within WordPress. This means you can create your About page or a Links page, or a Services page, or any page. Plus you can control your navigation menu from the WordPress Dashboard, including adding drop-down menus. Then there is the vast array of WordPress plug-ins to extend and customize your site.

For web galleries, you can use the built in WordPress gallery function or you can use TTG CE3 Gallery  and, optionally, TTG CE3 Publisher to create, full featured galleries that you can manage from Lightroom rather than having to manage them through the rather clunky WordPress Media interface. And for a gallery index page, use TTG CE3 Autoindex. This plug-in creates a table of contents for your galleries. You can look at my Galleries page to see it all in action.

But back to Theme for WordPress. From the product page:

TTG CE3 Theme for WordPress allows you to create custom WordPress themes from Lightroom’s Web module, built on The Turning Gate’s responsive CE3 framework. Themes are responsive, Retina-ready, photo-friendly, suitable for writers and photographers, bloggers and photobloggers, and anyone else wanting to manage a site or blog using WordPress. Designed to be awesome on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Themes are fully and independently functional, so can be used in a variety of ways: as standalone websites or blogs, in conjunction with CE3 image galleries and publisher, or as a supplemental blog to an existing CE3 website. Flexibility as usual, and the possibilities are practically endless.

You can get Theme for WordPress separately or you can get the CE3 Blog & Galleries Bundle and save 20%.

Right now I’m using Theme for WordPress for just my blog. But that may change. I can see the possibilities here for making entire mini-sites for my workshops. Those of you who’ve attended one of my workshops this year already know about the community sites I create for the participants. Those are made from the TTG Chado WordPress Theme. This has worked out very well for me but with the new CE3 Theme for WordPress I can do the same thing, only now I have much more control over the design. I’m even toying with the idea of using it to create an entire new site devoted to just the workshops.

At any rate, if you’ve been thinking of creating your own photography site that you can manage from Lightroom, but didn’t want the complexity that Pages offers, this could be your answer.

If you’ve been reading my newsletter or blog for any amount of time, you know I love these plug-ins and that they’ve made my life a lot easier (and more interesting too). I’ve got no affiliation with TTG other than being a very satisfied customer and a beta tester.