Beginning WordPress 3
A complete beginner's guide to WordPress that shows you how to create a customized website for yourself, your business, or your social network.
This book is for people who want to use WordPress. It’s for web designers who’d like to get to know WordPress a little better - or a lot better. It’s for writ ers who have been asked to contribute content to a WordPress site, but haven’t been shown how to use the software. It’s for server administrators who’d like to know more about this little CMS that users are always asking them to install. It’s for Drupal developers who suddenly need to write a WordPress plugin for a client this week.
If you’re familiar with PHP or MySQL, or if you’ve used another open source content management system in the past, great! This book will take you from novice to professional. By the end, you’ll know not only how to manage and customize your own site, but how to contribute your innovations back to the community by submitting plugins and themes to the central repository at wordpress.org.
Why WordPress?
WordPress is one of many PHP/MySQL content management systems that allow content editors to use a web interface to maintain their sites instead of editing and uploading HTML files to a server. Some systems, like Movable Type and Text pattern, have reputations as good blogging platforms. Others such as Joomla, Drupal, and Expression Engine are more commonly associated with commercial or community sites.
WordPress began as a blogging tool, but early on the developers added pages as a separate content type. This opened the door for people who didn’t want a blog, but did want an easy, web-based interface to create and manage web content. (And if they later decided they needed a blog after all, the world’s best was just one menu click away!) Since then, the page features have evolved. Whether WordPress acts a blogging tool or a true content management system, then, depends on which content you choose to emphasize in your site.
Despite its flexibility as a simple content management system, and despite winning the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award at the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards, WordPress is still widely considered to be a blogging tool. So why would you choose WordPress over a more traditional CMS?
Easy to Set-up
WordPress is famous for its five-minute installation. In fact, if you have your database connection details in hand before you begin, it might not even take you that long! The system requirements for WordPress (discussed in more detail in the next chapter) are modest, allowing it to run on most commercial shared hosting plans that include PHP and MySQL.
WordPress comes with everything you need to set up a basic website. The core system includes:
- Posts and pages - In the most traditional use of WordPress, a blog (composed of posts) will feature a few "static" (but still database-driven) pages, such as "About." However, as you’ll see throughout this book, you can use these two primary content types in a number of other ways.
- Media files - The post and page editing screens allow you to upload images, audio, video, Office documents, PDFs, and more.
- Links - WordPress includes a link directory, often referred to as the blogroll.
- Categories and tags - WordPress includes both hierarchical and free-form taxonomies for posts. There is a separate set of categories for links.
- User roles and profiles - WordPress users have five possible roles with escalating capabilities (Subscriber, Contributor, Author, Editor, and Administrator) and a very basic workflow for editorial approval. User profiles include a description, avatar, and several forms of contact information.
- RSS, Atom, and OPML feeds - There are RSS and Atom feeds available for just about everything in WordPress. The main feeds include recent posts and comments, but there are also feeds for individual categories, tags, authors, and comment threads. An OPML feed for links is also built in.
- Clean URLs - With the included .htaccess file, WordPress supports search enginefriendly URLs (or permalinks) on both Apache and IIS servers, with a system of tags that allow you to customize the link structure and several built-in configurations.
- Spam protection - The WordPress download package includes the Akismet plugin, which provides industrial-strength filtering of spam comments. Because it uses a central web service, it constantly learns and improves.
- Automatic upgrades - WordPress displays an alert when a new version is available for the core system as well as any themes or plugins you have installed. You can update any of these with the click of a button (although it’s always a good idea to back up your database first).
As of version 3.0, you can easily expand your WordPress installation into a network of connected sites. The setup process is just a little more involved than the basic installation, and your host has to meet a few additional requirements.
