1001 Templates: Guerilla WordPress

Guerilla WordPress installs out are sites which use WordPress in such an unconventional way that it's almost impossible to recognize them as WordPress sites.

Here's a few of Alex Walker's favorite incognito WordPress sites, courtesy of SitePoint Design View :

Spotify

WordPress as a cloud-based music service
Spotify is one of the largest streaming music in Europe, currently offering over 8 million tracks for play. Clearly this is a serious web application with some enterprise-level technology powering it.

Nevertheless, Spotify chose to skillfully weave all this beefy tech muscle back into a WordPress content management system.
Wheels are not for the reinventing.

Mashable

WordPress as a Daily Tech Newspaper
Mashable's rise has been even more amazing than that of WordPress. Originally conceived in 2005 as a showcase for Web 2.0 mashups, the site has evolved to overtake the likes of Gizmodo and Engadget in the hypercompetitive tech/gadgets/social media news arena.
Mashable's biggest problem has always been exposing its best content. As it publishes so frequently, often valuable, timely content can sink before it ever gets a chance to gain traction.

Mashable's latest theme tries to tackle this by using Facebook, Twitter and Digg to bubble its trending stories back to the surface. It seems to be working, as Mashable is currently second only to Huffington Post on Technorati's list.
Thankfully, Mashable has backed up its open-source credibility by releasing this most recent WordPress theme to the general public.

Icon Dock

WordPress as a graphics candy store
Icon Dock is a online store for purchasing web icons and UI elements.
As you might expect from a site trading in graphical goodies, the visuals are lush and lickable. It also has a rather sexy, ever-present, drag-and-drop shopping cart system.

It's fun, easy on the eye, and well executed.

DrippinginSunshine

WordPress as a portfolio site
DrippinginSunshine is Alister Lane's personal portfolio site.
As you might expect, there's a lot of competition in the "WordPress as a portfolio" category, but I like Alister Lane's unique take on the idea: natural, photorealistic textures and floating, unboxed content flowing behind a fixed footer.

I think this is a consciously untrendy but memorable design.

UGSMag

WordPress as an Undergroud Hiphop Glossy
Like the music it chronicles, UGSMag looks handmade, edgy, layered, and streetwise. The cover page design uses the rule of thirds to present each new article as a graphical card.

This is a very original, engaging, and non-WordPressy design.

TextureKing

WordPress as a resource library
Forgeting about its WordPress foundation, TextureKing is a really useful site in its own right, offering hundreds of free, high-resolution texture images carefully sorted into a dozen or so categories.