This is my presentation from WordPress for Beginner's at WordCamp Birmingham 2012, #wpyall

1. WordPress for Beginners
Presented by Brian Krogsgard - @krogsgard - krogsgard.com - #wpyall
1.14.2012 - WordCamp Birmingham (Photo By Matt Mullenweg)

2. About brian
✤ Lead WordPress Developer
Infomedia.com
✤ WordPress fanatic since 2008ish
✤ Contributing Editor @WPCandy
✤ Great Dane owner, Auburn fan,
lucky husband

3. What is WordPress?
✤ Different things to different people
✤ A print shop
✤ A billboard
✤ Yours

4. Why should i use WordPress?
✤ It’s free and open source
✤ It’s easy to get started
✤ It’s flexible and powerful
enough for almost any website
✤ The user is always most
important.

5. WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
WordPress.com Benefits
• It’s free and much easy tosetup, auto upgrades, spam control, backups, security, etc.
• Your dashboard is secure (SSL) making it even safer to log in on shared networks
WordPress.com Cons
• Limited themes
• You can’t modify the code behind your blog
• You can’t upload plugins
WordPress (self-hosted) Benefits
• Complete control, ability to upload themes and plugins
• Great community
WordPress (self-hosted) Cons
• You need a host, which generally costs a minimum of $7-12 a month, or thousands of dollars per month for a high traffic site
• Requires more technical knowledge to set up and run
• You’re responsible for stopping spam, backups, updates, traffic spikes, etc.
PS: this is ripped off entirely from http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

6. What we’ll Cover
✤ What it’s made of
✤ Installation
✤ Configuration
✤ Themes
✤ Plugins
✤ Publishing
✤ Flexibility

7. What’s WordPress made Of?
Your content is stored in a database, and WordPress manipulates and handles it.

8. installing WordPress
✤ http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress
✤ http://codex.wordpress.org/Getting_Started_with_WordPress
✤ http://wpcandy.com/teaches/how-to-install-wordpress

9. Basic WordPress settings
✤ /wp-admin
✤ General / Writing / Reading /
Discussion / Media / Privacy /
Permalinks / Plugins Settings

10. WordPress themes
WordPress.org theme directory

11. What kind of themes?
✤ Parent Themes
✤ Child Themes
✤ Theme
Frameworks
Photo by Justin Tadlock
✤ http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/08/16/frameworks-parent-child-and-grandchild-themes

12. menus in WordPress
With WordPress 3.0 came really awesome drag and drop menus.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Appearance_Menus_Screen

13. widgets in WordPress
Widgets allow you to put all kinds of content into sidebars and other widget areas.
Date

14. WordPress plugins
✤ Plugins act on top of WordPress
and your theme.
✤ They do a variety of things
✤ SEO, Stats, Analytics,
backups, content handling,
caching, and thousands more
✤ Ryan will show you more : )
✤ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ Sidenote: I don’t really know what this picture has to do with plugins

15. free vs. paid Plugins & Themes
✤ What to keep in mind
✤ support
✤ quality
✤ sustainability
✤ Not all paid are good.
✤ Some of the best are free.

16. publishing with WordPress
Get to know the admin and available content types

17. Posts, Pages and more.
Archives vs. Singular Views, Hierarchal vs. Non-Hierarchal

18. media in WordPress
drag and drop introduced in WordPress 3.3

19. Custom Post Types & Taxonomies = What’s possible
Don’t worry, it’s not as scary as it sounds.
This picture is of the backend of Theme Force, a company that offers a hosted restaurant service off of WordPress, where customers can build custom html
menus with custom post types.

20. WordPress For more than blogs
✤ Ecommerce ✤ Job boards
✤ Newspapers ✤ Ticketing & Events
✤ Magazines ✤ Portfolios
✤ Communities ✤ Restaurants
✤ Intranets ✤ Daily Deals
✤ Marketing Campaigns ✤ SaaS
You’d be amazed at what WordPress can do. It’s no longer just a blog framework. It’s a full featured CMS, ready to take on the challenges we can throw at
it. It’s why more than half of all websites that use a CMS use WordPress and why more than 22 of every 100 new domains use WordPress.

21. Resources for Beginners
✤ The Codex
✤ WPCandy
✤ ALL THE OTHERS.

22. WordPress for Beginners
Presented by Brian Krogsgard - @krogsgard - krogsgard.com - #wpyall
1.14.2012 - WordCamp Birmingham (Photo By Matt Mullenweg)