What is Wordpress

• WordPress is a free, Web-based software program that anyone can use to build and maintain a website or blog. It was originally intended as an easy way to set up a blog. But, thanks to the efforts of a large “open source” community of WordPress programmers working to extend and improve its capabilities, WordPress has become much more than just a tool for bloggers.

• Today’s WordPress is really a “content management system” (CMS), which means that it can be used to run full-sized, social media-rich business websites.

Wordpress.org VS Wordpress.com

• If you’re entirely new to WordPress, the difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com and might be a bit confusing at first. The first site, wordpress.org, is the home of the free and open source WordPress software platform. If your intention is to develop custom themes and host the CMS on your own server, wordpress.org is the only option.

• WordPress.com, meanwhile, is a commercial entity operated by Automattic, which provides hosted blogging using the WordPress platform. It’s free to use, though there area number of premium features available for a fee

• Wordpress.org is the one relevant to us

Wordpress.org

Pro’s• access to thousands of

custom themes• use of custom widgets and

plugins• retention of 100% control

over the markup• access to the MySQL

database, should you need to make revisions or create new tables

Con’s• responsible for acquiring

your own hosting, at a cost• manual installation of

software required• download required of

necessary plugins to prevent spam (typically Automattic’s popular Akismet plugin)

Wordpress.com

Pros• hosted and managed by

Automattic for free• hosted on hundreds of

servers, resulting in virtually 99% uptime

• set up, comment spam, and database back ups performed automatically for free

Cons• limited access to themes

(around 100), and custom themes not permitted

• unable to modify underlying PHP code

• custom plugins can’t be implemented

• initial listing as a subdomain of wordpress.com, such as mysite.wordpress.com, though it’s possible to map your own domain address to this URL

Wordpress and Themes• Don’t confuse the content—the pages and posts—with the theme;

they’re unrelated. In fact, this separation is what makes WordPress and theming so powerful!

• WordPress is a framework that provides all of the functionality for RSS, commenting, searching, querying the database, displaying posts, creating pages, and the like. The theme, on the other hand, is the skin: how it looks, the layout of the design, the CSS, added functionality, and images. Because each theme hooks into WordPress’s core functions and filters in the same way, you can switch between themes with a click of a button. Any WordPress-powered site can instantly change theme and rock a whole new look.

• Each theme resides within a subdirectory of your WordPress installation called themes. If some new theme is called “blue,” it can be found within wp-content/themes/blue. This separation of the presentation from the system files is incredibly helpful; it makes future updates to the WordPress framework easy, since you can update the core WordPress files without changing the theme.

Lets look at some self hosted wordpress sites

• Obviously this one www.urshula.com/wordpress– This “site” has a very traditional bloggy look

• www.urshula.com/golfball– I don’t think this “site” looks like a blog at all

• www.stevenheremaia.com– Traditional website looking

• www.buyersagentsgoldcoast.com.au • www.smashingmagazine.com

More about themes

Themes are essentially divided into 3 “concepts”Presentation• A file called style.css contains all the style rules that will be applied to your

theme.Content• Template files describe what content should be output on each of

WordPress’s pages: lists of posts, single posts, search results, and so on.Logic• A file called functions.php contains any additional logic your theme needs

in order to, well, function. As we’ll see in later chapters, this is where you’d include plugin-like functionality in your theme: new custom widgets, or a theme-specific admin panel for customizing the color scheme and layout.

• WE WONT BE TOUCHING THE BOTTOM 2

Conclusion

• There’s a reason why over 20 million people have installed WordPress: it’s easy, free, extensible, themeable. As a web designer/developer , you already have many of the skills required to build your own WordPress themes but the most important one we need to master at the moment is CSS so we can modify a theme o create our own custom one.