WordPress: Blog Powerhouse
In light of last week’s post, I decided to explore the blogging software I use in a little more depth for those of you thinking about starting up a blog of your own. Throughout my entire blogging life I’ve been using WordPress, the freely available software that can be downloaded from WordPress.org. The current version of the blog software is 2.7.1 as of this writing, and I’ve been using it since version 2.1. The changes have been extensive since the first version I used, but the quality has been consistent and the changes, in my experience, enhance the usability of the platform for the end-user.
How it Works
WordPress works by allowing you to create the “look” of your site using a Theme, which is applied to every page on the site, and then creating pages of content to which the theme is applied. You can extend the functionality of your site using a “Plugin”, which ties itself into WordPress’ back-end functionality and allows you to add more neat stuff to your site. It takes some technical know-how in order to set your site up appropriately, but once it’s up it’s a good way to manage the content on your site without having to go to a web design team every time, or edit a text file that’s full of HTML code that you might not understand easily.
WordPress Dress-Up: Themes
If you’re looking to give your WordPress site a unique look, look no further than the “Appearance” option of the software. From here, you can install and manually edit the themes that are available for your site. By default, the WordPress installation comes with 2, but there are a world of free and professionally designed themes out there that can really add some pop to your site. There are literally hundreds of free ones to choose from; click here to go to the WordPress Theme site and get a taste.
If you already have a theme for your existing site that you’re pretty happy with, there usually isn’t a load of work that would need to be done in order to incorporate your unique look into a custom WordPress theme, but you’ll have to be pretty familiar with PHP and CSS in order to do it. Hiring a firm may be a good option for you, and it may make sense to have them move any existing staic pages into WordPress so you can edit them later.
Pages vs. Posts
WordPress editor. Click for full size image.
WordPress introduces the user to a concept a “Pages” versus “Posts.” “Pages” equate to your existing static pages, while “Posts” follow a blog formula of creating chronologically-ordered pages that are organized and archived for you automatically both by date and by topic. Posts also give you the opportunity to attach tags and categorize the article set a specific publication date, and some other options that aren’t available when editing a standard “Page.” The big advantage is that you really don’t need to know any HTML in order to create these — as long as you’ve applied a theme as I mentioned above, you can simply worry about providing the text and WordPress will help you figure out how it should all look. WordPress gives you access to a standard set of word processing tools while you’re editing your posts, such as those that you might find in Microsoft Office, through use of a customized interface of a freely available (and well-built) tool called, “TinyMCE.” I’ve included an image here of this review as I was writing it so you can get a feel for what the content editor looks like.
Using the content editor, you can even add images or other media into your posts. Upon initial insertion, the image looks great, and you can even get text to wrap around your image, much like you can in a word processor. However, the click and drag feature can be a little buggy, and you may find that if you move an image in that way it may leave a caption behind…or may not move at all. Moving an object like that is probably best done by a delete and re-paste until this feature is truly fixed.
Accessorize using Plugins
If Themes are WordPress’ clothing, Plugins are its accessories. There are literally thousands of freely available plugins developed by the WordPress community that you can use to both improve your experience and your visitor’s experience, though some may ask for donations of some sort. I personally like the following:
- StatPress, by Daniele Lippi, allows you to gather statistics on who’s visiting your site, how often, and what pages are most popular. There’s a graphing system that allows you to readily see how your site’s doing, and a number of other options to help you see what’s popular and what’s not on your site. She asks for a small donation if you like and use her tool.
- WP-Polls, by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan, gives you the option of creating polls that your users can answer to give some insight into the content of your site, or really whatever you want to poll on!
- ShareThis, by ShareThis and CrowdFavorite, gives you a quick and easy way to link new articles and pages to Social Bookmarking sites for easy reference.
And these are just a few. If you have a specific need for your site, chances are there’s a plugin for it. And if there’s not, WordPress’ open architecture allows for development of whatever it is you need.
So…Should you Use It?
WordPress isn’t for every site, and it’s not for every user. Obviously, this is only a brief overview of what the software offers, and there’s plenty that I haven’t covered here. If you think that you need a blog, however, or just want some better control of your content now and in the future, WordPress may be something that you should consider. There are plenty of other Blog/CMS systems out there to evaluate, and we’ll try to take a look at them in more detail in future posts, such as Textpattern, MoveableType, and SquareSpace. In the meantime, before you can move forward with a blog, be sure to ask yourself, would a blog be good for me?
Do you use WordPress?
- Yes, and I love it! (100%, 1 Votes)
- Yes, but I'm not crazy about it. (0%, 0 Votes)
- No, I'm using another CMS. (0%, 0 Votes)
- No, I like static pages. (0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 1
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[...] – Yes, I’ve already written about blogging here and here, and you can be sure there will be more articles in the future, so I won’t summarize here. [...]