Everything about Wordpress Ever!

Editor's Notes

• #2: <number>
• #3: <number>
• #4: Let’s get that out of the way.But it’s so much more.<number>
• #5: You may notice domains such as xyz.wordpress.com – if they end in wordpress.com, they’re a site hosted by wordpress.<number>
• #6: A miserable, text-heavy page with a little download link on the right – zip or tarball?<number>
• #7: wordpress.com provides hosted wordpress installations, providing a free SAAS hosted blog. You’re up and running instantly.wordpress.org gives you the software and leaves you on your own. You install it yourself, you secure it yourself, and you set up everything relating to it: possibly databases, mail systems, web servers, etc.6
• #8: Once you have that infrastructure in place – and it’s pretty commodity stuff these days – you end up with an effective publishing platform with social features, a huge community of plugins and themes behind it. It takes a huge chunk of work out of any online presence or content management project. It lets you get on with content rather than worry about how to work around limitations or reinventing wheels.7
• #9: Added value!Updated content says “we’re still here. Come inside” like nothing else.ImmediateYou are up and running out of the box. There’s no technical barrier between client and customer.StandardisedBasics of admin are the same everywhereGetting more than you pay forThere’s no software license. Upgrades are easy, and reliable. You’ll be finding neat features for weeks.Gives you easy dynamic contentFlexibleEncourages your content to networkOrganises by dates and categories – I think they call this a ‘blog’ or something7
• #10: A webserver – usually Apache, IIS lacks a few features that are optional but actually necessary, for self-respectThat would be mod_rewriteIt’s really a unix system, but will mostly run on win32PHP 4MySQLA means to upload files to your server7
• #12: No! It seems to want to set up a configuration for us!7
• #13: Pre-flight checklist. Thanks!7
• #14: Okay, this is the stuff my host sent me.7
• #16: So now we’re configuring the blog… it’s set up the configuration already at this point.7
• #17: Oh… finished! Five okay buttons and a few fields to copy out.7
• #18: So we log in with those same details…7
• #19: And we’re there! I feel such a fraud. 7
• #20: It’s pretty bare. And boring. And that 2001 cutting-edge semantic design is looking pretty naff these days.7
• #21: In the administration interface, you can turn on and off all kinds of extra features. It’ll still look rubbish though, no matter what you add.7
• #23: Which leaves you with a site where the front page shows the last 10 posts, in reverse chronological order. At the bottom, are controls to move through your history. In addition, a monthly ‘archives’ section will expand down the sidebar, showing all the posts from a particular month.‘Posts’ are Wordpress’ currency – a post is a self-contained piece of content, as you’d expect. A post has a creation date, a title, copy (known as the ‘content), and a few other bits of ‘metadata’. Each post has a ‘permalink’ which uniquely identifies it online. So we’ve done this, as a by-product!7
• #24: This is very similar to the first model, except we’re going to separate our posts into one of two types – one may be ‘cooking’ and another ‘eating out’. We want the user to be able to filter out which category they’re looking at, without adding much to our management complexity.7
• #25: We add the categories, in the easy text boxes there.7
• #26: Wordpress takes care of everything else for us.7
• #27: Magic HappensWe’ll jump ahead and put some dummy content in here – categories without posts don’t show up. The new front page looks like this:Note down the right hand side, the new categories have appeared!A few things happened here. Even though we categorised each post differently, they all remain in the same ‘pool’, and the front page is usually drawn from this pool.7
• #28: We get the category page!We can look at a category page, which looks a bit different from the front page, out of the box.Everything says we’re looking at a category archive. Let’s click the title of the post7
• #29: Now we’re looking at an individual post page. There’s a few extra things that appear:A stack of metadata – dates, categories, trackback and RSS urls. We can click the category link to see the category page for “Cooking”.A comment form – this is optional, and can be disabled site-wide or on individual postsNext and previous buttons – notice they only use chronological information, and bypass categories. These buttons make you step through each post in turn.7
• #30: Site OverviewOur site is very simple, structurally. We have four main classes of pages, there may be multiple posts, category and date archives. It doesn’t matter how many you have; wordpress works out what you need and constructs them dynamically.You may have many virtual archive pages, many virtual category archive pages, and almost certainly many ‘post’ pages.7
• #31: PodcastsPodcasting is insanely simple with Wordpress. A podcast is just what’s known as an ‘enclosure’ in an RSS feed, and wordpress generates them automatically. Did I mention Wordpress generates RSS and Atom feeds automatically?7
• #32: So, to add a podcast, just link to a file in the editor. It’s easy to upload media, files or link to other online media from Wordpress’ friendly editor. Look, I did it here!7
• #33: I know it’s not ‘cool’, okay?There it is, in IE’s RSS reader – see the headphones?7
• #34: Feeddemon sees it too, and pulls it down automatically. Do people still say ‘podcatching?’ did they ever say it in the first place?7
• #36: Make it easy to change contentWordpress has a nice ‘visual editor’ for managing content. We’ve seen it a few times. But it has a few other features.Versions (at the bottom)More recently, Wordpress is much more understanding of browser crashes and human failure. It automatically keeps versions of file edits, in case you leave a half-edited tab open before the browser, computer or user goes down. It’s also useful if, say, you’re the web content manager for Ryanair.7
• #37: Wordpress lets you lock down posts so they’re only visible to other registered users and editors – the privacy setting.In addition, you can change a post from being ‘draft’ (invisible to site visitors) to ‘published’, and back again.7
• #38: There’s a nice interface for uploading content and inserting it into your posts. We already did this with an MP3 (behind the scenes), but you can do it with images too. Out of the box, it lets you Align themAdd a neat captionHandle any thumbnailing requirements you (or your site manager) may have.There’s also a media library feature, allowing you to pick existing images, sounds or general files from earlier posts.7
• #39: Wordpress is easy to turn from a generic ‘wordpress blog’ into a custom platform. Treating it as a back-end message store and categorisation system, it’s possible to shape, squeeze and rework it to fulfil any needs you may have.7
• #40: Plugins extend the core functionality in Wordpress, adding features to the editor, automating and refining existing features.More recent plugins are capable of automatically updating, making admin a breeze!Wordpress here telling me I have a few plugins I can upgrade, on the left, and showing these plugins on the right.But plugins are going into depth later…7
• #41: Themes can simply be uploaded to your installation, and they become available in your admin interface. When you switch a theme on, the whole site instantly changes to reflect the new theme – this is the power of separating content from presentation.They can be freely downloaded from wordpress.org or literally billions of other sites around the net.7
• #42: Code and templatesTemplates are enormously powerful in Wordpress. By loosening up our approach to multi-tier architecture, we can get wordpress to do all kinds of things.7
• #43: You wouldn’t be able to recognise some of the super-customised themes. But this is the approach to maximise a return on wordpress – treat it as a foundation for storing and managing content, then adding features on top through themes and plugins.Here’s an online store we’re developing. It’s all managed and administered through the standard wordpress admin interface.7
• #45: Get others involvedThese conventions were established by MovableType . They allow posts from different sites to notify each other that they are linked.7
• #46: Trackbacks are usually created when a new post is written. The blog ‘engine’ will notify any sites mentioned in your post that you’ve written about them, if they are capable of being notified of this. Typically, this is blog-post to blog-post communication. Wordpress shows trackbacks as though they are comments.In fact, here we see 3 types of communication:Top – a comment left on the site.Second, a trackback left by a post elsewhere linking to this site.Third, a pingback left by a post referencing this site.Pingbacks are essentially the same thing, with slightly more rigorous anti-spam controls. Slightly.They are also used to notify centralised blog monitoring sites that you’ve posted new content or updated them. This happens invisibly; it’s a little free googlejuice, which you only really need to worry about if you’re trying to be stealthy.7
• #47: Trackbacks and pingbacks are ripe for abuse, and I’m astounded they’ve not been exploited more. People have instead been spamming though…Comment systemComments are blogging hell-on-earth. Akismet Wordpress, thankfully, implements a plugin called ‘Akismet’ which centralises spam reporting and moves them into a queue for review if suspected of being spam.The permission to comment is optional, of course. Wordpress offers a few approaches to comments:7
• #48: Do commenters have to provide contact details?Alternately – do they have to register and login to comment?Do comments go straight-to-air?Do posters or comments have to be pre-approved?Recent wordpress versions have implemented threading in comments, plus existing features such as auto-closing older posts from new comments.
• #49: Multiple editors
• #50: Wordpress organises registered users into sets of roles. They may be admins, editors, authors, contributor or subscriber.49
• #51: Another Blogger / Dave Winer legacy, the ability to publish through an API.This means you can create desktop applications to post with, such as the excellent Windows Live Writer (free!)It also means you can allow third party tools, such as delicious, flicker, etc publish to your site automatically.49