have registered and become members of your site, or create a large corporate business site like the one you can see on the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com.
Using WordPress as a CMS – content management system – frees you from running only a blog on the platform. (See Chapter 12 for more about the technique of designing for WordPress as a CMS.)
Allow me to introduce you to the fiercely loyal folks who make up the user base, better known as the vast WordPress community. This band of merry ladies and gentlemen comes from all around the globe, from California to Cairo, Florida to Florence, and all points in between and beyond.
In March 2005, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress proudly proclaimed that the number of WordPress downloads had reached 900,000 – an amazing landmark in the history of the software. But the real excitement occurred in August 2006, when WordPress logged more than 1 million downloads, and in 2007, when the software had more than 3 million downloads. The number of WordPress downloads has broken the ceiling since 2007 (over 5 million downloads by the end of 2013), and the number of WordPress users has climbed to the tens of millions and is growing daily. WordPress is easily the most popular content management system available on the web today. It currently powers approximately 25 to 30 percent of all the websites you see on the Internet in 2015 – that’s roughly 1 in every 4 websites you encounter on the World Wide Web.
Don’t let the sheer volume of users fool you: WordPress also has bragging rights to the most helpful blogging community on the web. You can find users helping other users in the support forums at https://wordpress.org/support. You can also find users contributing to the very helpful WordPress Codex (a collection of how-to documents) at http://codex.wordpress.org. Finally, across the Internet, you can find multiple blogs about WordPress itself, with users sharing their experiences and war stories in the hope of helping the next person who comes along.
You can subscribe to various mailing lists, too. These lists offer you the opportunity to become involved in various aspects of the WordPress community as well as in the ongoing development of the software.
Joining the WordPress community is easy: Simply start your own website by using one of the two WordPress software options. If you’re already publishing on a different platform, such as Blogger or Movable Type, WordPress enables you to easily migrate your current data from that platform to a new WordPress setup. (See Chapter 14 for information about migrating your existing website to WordPress.)
Choosing a WordPress Platform
One of the realities of running a website today is choosing among the veritable feast of software platforms to find the one that performs the way you need. You want to be sure that the platform you choose has all the options you’re looking for. WordPress is unique in that it offers two versions of its software, each designed to meet various needs:
✔ The hosted version at WordPress.com: https://wordpress.com.
✔ The self-installed and self-hosted version available at WordPress.org. (This book focuses on this version.)
Every WordPress website setup has certain features available, whether you’re using the self-hosted software from WordPress.org or the hosted version at WordPress.com. These features include (but aren’t limited to)
✔ Quick and easy installation and setup
✔ Full-featured blogging capability, letting you publish content to the web through an easy-to-use web-based interface
✔ Topical archiving of your blog posts, using categories
✔ Monthly archiving of your posts, with the ability to provide a listing of those archives for easy navigation through your site
✔ Comment and trackback tools
✔ Automatic spam protection through Akismet
✔ Built-in gallery integration for photos and images
✔ Media Manager for video and audio files
✔ Great community support
✔ Unlimited number of static pages, letting you step out of the blog box and into the sphere of running a fully functional website
✔ RSS (Really Simple Syndication) capability with RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, and Atom support (see Chapter 2 for more information on RSS)
✔ Tools for importing content from different blogging systems (such as Blogger, Movable Type, and LiveJournal)
Table 1-1 compares the two WordPress versions.
Table 1-1 Exploring the Differences Between the Two Versions of WordPress
* CSS = Cascading Style Sheets
** Limited selection on WordPress.com
WordPress.com is a free service. If downloading, installing, and using software on a web server sound like Greek to you – and like things you’d rather avoid – the WordPress folks provide a solution for you at WordPress.com.
WordPress.com is a hosted solution, which means it has no software requirement, no downloads, and no installation or server configurations. Everything’s done for you on the back end, behind the scenes. You don’t even have to worry about how the process happens; it happens quickly, and before you know it, you’re making your first blog post using a WordPress.com blog solution.
WordPress.com has some limitations, though. You cannot install plugins or custom themes, for example, and you cannot customize the base code files, nor are you able to sell advertising or monetize your blog at all on WordPress.com. Also, WordPress.com will display advertisements on your blog posts to users who are not logged into the WordPress.com network (https://en.support.wordpress.com/no-ads/). But even with its limitations, WordPress.com is an excellent starting point if you’re brand new to blogging and a little intimidated by the configuration requirements of the self-installed WordPress.org software.
If you don’t want or need to create a full website for your business or service and just want to create an online diary of sorts, you would typically use WordPress.com because it excels at allowing you to get a simple blog up and running quickly. As I mentioned previously, however, if you want to use the thousands of plugins and themes available for WordPress – or if you want to customize your own theme for your website, you are limited on the WordPress.com-hosted service.
The good news is this: If you ever outgrow your WordPress.com-hosted blog and want to make a move to the self-hosted WordPress.org software, you can. You can even take all the content from your WordPress.com-hosted blog with you and easily import it into your new setup with the WordPress.org software.
The self-installed version from WordPress.org that is covered in this book requires you to download the software from the WordPress website and install it on a web server. Unless you own your own web server, you need to lease one – or lease
