Yet more introductions…

Now we’re going to get into a particular PHP application: WordPress. But what is WordPress, exactly?

WordPress was originally crafted as an engine for blogging—the journal-like writing that’s become so ubiquitous nowadays. As time has gone on, and the community surrounding the open source software has grown, its abilities have expanded dramatically. As of this writing, it stands at version 3.0 and has grown into a quite powerful CMS. Beyond the basic blogging system of reverse chronologically ordered posts, it offers hierarchical pages, categorizing and tagging of posts, automatically-generated archives of posts based on date, tag, category, and author, custom post and page types, built-in media upload, insertion, and management, and a host of other features. And it’s quite endlessly expandable via plugins.

WordPress comes in two flavors: the original, self-hosted version you download from wordpress.org and their free, hosted version at wordpress.com.

As for some examples, you could take a look at this writer’s site, [ berkleebassist ], or at the site of Halftone Productions, and of course, you’re reading this from within a WordPress blog, as Artisan runs its blog on the WordPress engine.

As you can see even from just those three sites, you can do some very different things with WordPress. If you want to get started with WordPress before diving in with your own self-hosted version, you should go ahead and create an account at wordpress.com, and get a feel for the basic version of the software.

Tags: Wordpress

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Design Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.