WordPress 101

WordPress 101
WordPress for Beginners

Toothing Stones
Themes
Plugins
Widgets

Phillip Barron http://nicomachus.net
pbarron@nicomediadesigns.com
nicomedia, LLC 919.381.8062

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing WordPress is...
platform with a focus on aesthetics, web
standards, and usability. WordPress is both free
and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when
a blog engine
you want to work with your blogging software,
not ﬁght it. a content management system
— WordPress.org a publishing platform


What is WordPress?

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing WordPress is...
platform with a focus on aesthetics, web
standards, and usability. WordPress is both free
and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when
a blog engine
you want to work with your blogging software,
not ﬁght it. a content management system
— WordPress.org a publishing platform

WordPress is an Open Source project


Who uses WordPress?


Who reads WordPress sites?


Who reads WordPress sites?

26,307,540 unique
visitors per month


What does it mean to publish?


How does WordPress work?

http://yoursite.com/wp-admin


After clicking Publish...


Why use WordPress?


Why use WordPress?
At the National Humanities Given that the National Humanities Center is
Center's excellent On the currently concluding its three-year initiative on
Human Forum, Paul Rabinow “Autonomy, Singularity, and Creativity: The
has a new post describing his Humanities and the Human,” and have also
recent work on synthetic initiated a new, ongoing forum, “On the
biology... Human,” on current controversies in the
— Somatosphere.net studies of animals, and machines, the time is
propitious for collaborative cross-disciplinary
alliances …
…there is a nice little interchange (at the — In the Middle
National Humanities Center’s “On the
Human” prjoect) on the role of the new
direct to consumer genetic testing companies,
principally 23andMe and Knome...
— Savage Minds


WordPress jargon
Blog: The WordPress-based website

Post: For the most part, when you update your blog, you create a post. In typical computer
jargon fashion, this noun can also be used as a verb: You can post to your blog. Posts are also
sometimes called entries. Posts are the updates that you post to your site more frequently. Posts
are listed in reverse chronological order. It's typical of blogs that the main page of the website is
a list of Posts (but with WordPress, it's not necessary).
Page: A WordPress page is outside of the normal blog chronology. Pages are updated less
frequently; they are more static. Pages are usually used as for content that is "About Me" or
"About this site."


WordPress jargon
Categories and Tags:
Categories are ways of grouping posts. They won't change often, since the point of
categories is to ﬁnd themes among your posts.
Tags are keywords that help you, your readers, and search engines organize your posts.

Codex: The explains-it-all resource for everything WordPress. http://codex.wordpress.org/

Themes: A theme is a bundle of PHP ﬁles with CSS stylesheets. Themes control the overall
look and layout of each WordPress site.

Widgets: Widgets are the drag-n-drop objects that allow you to customize the layout of
your site. Widgets run within theme, and you interact with them (i.e. choose the ones you
want) in the Admin area.


WordPress jargon
Comments: The comments section of each post is where you invite the public (or
not) to share thoughts on what you have published. If you allow comments on your site,
the comments section is where the site begins to take on the feel of a conversation. Like
in forums, comments can be threaded so that if someone replies to a commenter, the
replies can be grouped together, facilitating making sense of the conversation. Lots of
options in the Admin section of your WordPress site.

Comment spam: Sad to say, spam is a problem on blogs just like in email. Comment
spam, as you would expect, is left in the comments of a blog. It usually includes a few
words and a link to another web site. The point for the spammer is to get as many links
as possible to the Web site, with the belief that doing so gives the newly linked website a
higher search engine rankings. While search engine formulas grow smarter at ignoring
comment spam, Akismet is the answer for your website.

Permalinks: Each post can be viewed on its own, as well as in the reverse
chronologically ordered list. The url for the webpage where each Page or Post stands on
its own is a permalink.


WordPress jargon
Plugins: Small pieces of software that you can add to your WordPress site to extend its
functionality. If you can think of something you want to do, chances are, someone has already
developed a plugin for it. Track incoming links? Batch convert categories to tags? Redirect old
pages/posts that you've taken down to the right new permalink? Google Analytics? The
Advanced users session going on right now is on plugin development.

RSS/Atom feeds: In the blogosphere, syndication is the new subscription. Syndication is
what allows readers to keep up with lots and lots of blogs; it what allows us to offer the public
the opportunity to subscribe to our websites. It's what's making newspapers cringe. Rather
than visiting 150 blogs every day, readers can subscribe to blogs using the RSS feeds.
WordPress automatically generates an RSS feed for your blog. RSS and Atom are two ﬂavors of
blog syndication.

Blogroll: Ever noticed those long lists of other blogs alongside the posts in a blog? That's a
blogroll, a list of the blogs read by the blogger whose site you are on. The best blogrolls,
however, are the ones that are not too long, but are focused and link to other sites worth
reading.


WordPress jargon

Trackbacks
Search Engine Optimization
Twitter feed
Pings
News aggregation
URL Redirection
Themes
Post scheduling


How do I get WordPress?

1. — WordPress.com
(your url will be http://something.wordpress.com)
2. — WordPress.org
(download WP, upload to your own server. Your url
can be whatever you want.)
3. — WordPress MU (most likely to encounter
this in a school environment, though growing in
other sectors)


What do I need to use WordPress?
Don’t need to know any html, css, or php (though it helps if you do)
A web browser and an internet connection
An idea of what you want to blog about
Codex
Supportive community


To run WordPress your website’s host just
needs a couple of things:

* PHP version 4.3 or greater
* MySQL version 4.0 or greater

http://wordpress.org/about/requirements/


Why WordPress?

Themes
Plugins
Widgets


Favorite Plugins
Akismet
Google Analytics for WordPress
All in one SEO
Viper’s Video Quicktags
Share This
Redirection
Smart 404
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/


Questions?


WordPress 101

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