WordPress 3.7 Complete: Third Edition - Fourth Edition

There are generally two popular types of websites for which WordPress is meant to be used:

However, as experience shows, these days WordPress is successfully used to run a wide variety of other sites as well, such as

For those of you unfamiliar with blog websites and blogging terminology, let's take a look at the basics.

Starting your journey, what is a blog? A blog is a website that usually contains regular entries such as a kind of log. These entries can be of various types, such as commentary, descriptions of events, photos, videos, personal remarks, tutorials, case studies, long opinion pieces, or political ideas. They are usually displayed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent additions on the top. These entries can be organized in a variety of ways—by date, by topic, by subject, and so on.

One of the main characteristics of a blog is that it's meant to be updated regularly. Unlike a site where the content is static, a blog behaves more like an online diary, wherein the blogger posts regular updates. Hence, blogs are dynamic with ever-changing content. A blog can be updated with new content and the old content can be changed or deleted at any time (although deleting content is not a common practice).

Most blogs focus their content on a particular subject—for example, current events, hobbies, niche topics, technical expertise—or else they are more like personal online diaries.

Originally, a blog was short for weblog. According to Wikipedia, the term weblog was first used in 1997, and people started using blogs globally in 1999. The terms weblog, weblogging, and weblogger were added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2003, though these days most people leave off the "we" part.

Each entry in the blog is called a post. Every post usually has a number of different parts. Of course, the two most obvious parts are title and content. The content is text, images, links, and so on. Posts can even contain multimedia (for example, videos and audio files). Every post also has a publication timestamp, and most also have one or more categories, tags, comments, and so on. It is these posts, or entries, that are displayed in reverse chronological order on the main page of the blog. By default, the latest post is displayed first, in order to give the viewer the latest news on the subject.

Categories and tags are ways to organize and find posts within a blog and even across blogs. Categories are like topics, whereas tags are more like keywords. For example, for a blog about food and cooking, there might be a category called recipes , but every post in that category would have different tags (for example, soup, baked, vegetarian, dairy-free, and so on).

The purpose and correct usage of tags and categories is one of the more discussed topics among bloggers. Although there are basic guidelines, as the ones presented previously, every blogger develops his or her own approach after a while, and there are no "written in stone" rules.

Most blogs allow visitors to post comments about the posts. This gives readers the opportunity to interact with the author of the blog, thus making the whole enterprise interactive. Often, the author of the blog will respond to comments by posting additional comments with the single click of a reply button, which makes for a continuous public online conversation or dialog.

Comments are said to be one of the most important assets for a blog. The presence of a big number of comments shows how popular and authoritative the blog is.

The theme for a blog is the design and layout that you choose. In most blogs, the content (for example, posts) is separate from the visual layout. This means you can change the visual layout of your blog at any time without having to worry about the content being affected. One of the best things about themes is that it takes only seconds to install and start using a new one. Moreover, there are a number of free or low-cost themes available online. However, you need to be careful when working with free themes from uncertain developers. Often, they contain encrypted parts and code that can hurt your site and its presence in Google. Always look for user reviews before choosing a theme.

WordPress plugins are relatively small pieces of web software that can be installed on a WordPress site. They extend the native functionality to do almost anything that the technology of today allows. Just as with WordPress itself, the code within plugins is open source, which means that anyone can build a new plugin if they only have the required skillset. Every WordPress website or blog can work with an unlimited number of plugins (although it is not a recommended approach). The most popular functionalities introduced through plugins include spam protection, search engine optimization possibilities, caching, social media integration, interactive contact forms, backups, and more.

In short, widgets are a simplified version of plugins. Furthermore, they display a direct, visible result on your blog by using small content boxes (depending on the exact widget you're using, this content can be very diverse). The most common usage of widgets is to have them showcased within the sidebars on your site. Typically, your current theme will provide you with a number of widget areas where you can display widgets (as mentioned, many of these are located in the sidebar). Some of the common usages for widgets are to display content such as categories and tags, recent posts, popular posts, recent comments, links to archived posts, pages, links, search fields, or standard non-formatted text.

We need to talk some history to explain what the meaning of menus in WordPress is. Back in the day, WordPress didn't allow much customization in terms of tweaking navigation menus and hand-picking the links we wanted to display. This all changed in Version 3.0, when the new Custom Menus feature was introduced. In plain English, what it does is allow us to create completely custom menus (featuring any links of our choice) and then display them in specific areas on our sites (supported by the current theme). To be honest, this feature, even though it sounds basic, is one of the main ones that has turned WordPress into a fully-fledged web publishing platform and not just a blogging tool. I promise this will all sound much clearer in the upcoming chapters.

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication, and Chapter 8, Feeds, Podcasting, and Offline Blogging, addresses the topic of feeds in detail. For now, understand that RSS and feeds are a way to syndicate the content of your blog, so that people can subscribe to it. This means people do not actually have to visit your blog regularly to see what you've added. Instead, they can subscribe and have new content delivered to them via e-mail or through a feed reader such as Feedly.

It's important to understand the difference between a page and a post. Unlike posts, pages do not depend on having timestamps and are not displayed in chronological order. They also do not have categories or tags. A page is a piece of content with only a title and content (an example would be About Me or Contact Us —the two most popular pages on almost any blog). It is likely that the number of pages on your blog remains relatively static, whereas new posts can be added every day or so.

As mentioned in one of the paragraphs above, WordPress is now a complete web publishing platform. One of its characteristics is that it is capable of working with multiple user accounts, not just a single account belonging to the owner (main author) of the site. There are different types of user accounts available, and they all have different credentials and access rights. WordPress is clearly trying to resemble a traditional-world publishing house where there are authors, editors, and other contributors all working together. Even though the possibility to create an unlimited number of user accounts won't be that impressive for anyone planning to manage a site on his or her own, it can surely be a more than essential feature for big, magazine-like websites.

In web years, WordPress has been around for quite a while and was in development the whole time, getting better constantly. WordPress' very first release, Version 0.70, was released in May 2003. Since then, it has had 18 major releases, with a number of minor ones in between. Each release came with more features and better security.

Each major release comes with a codename honoring a great Jazz musician, and this has become a tradition in the WordPress world. For instance, the latest big version (Version 3.7) is codenamed Basie.

WordPress is a constantly evolving application. It's never left alone to stagnate. The developers are working continually to keep it ahead of spammers and hackers, and also to evolve the application based on the evolving needs of its users.

WordPress is not being developed by a lonely programmer in a dark basement room. On the contrary, there is a large community of people working on it collaboratively by developing, troubleshooting, making suggestions, and testing the application. With such a large group of people involved, the application is likely to continue to evolve and improve without pause.

In addition to having an extremely strong core, WordPress is also quite extendable. This means that once you get started with it, the possibilities are nearly limitless. Any additional functionality that you can dream of can be added by means of a plugin that you or your programmer friends can write.

If you'd like to see detailed lists of all new features added since WordPress version 3.0, take a look at these links:

Also, you can read a fully explained feature list at http://wordpress.org/about/features/.