Chapter 1. The WordPress Landscape
Since you picked up this book, it’s likely that you already know at least a bit about WordPress. You probably realize that it’s a great tool for creating a huge variety of websites, from gossipy blogs to serious business sites. However, you might be a bit fuzzy on the rest of the equation—how WordPress actually works its magic, and how you can use WordPress to achieve your own vision.
In this chapter, you’ll get acquainted with life the WordPress way. First, you’ll take a peek at the inner machinery that makes WordPress tick. If you’re not already clear on why WordPress is so wonderful—and how it’s going to save you days of work, years of programming experience, and a headful of gray hairs—this discussion will fill you in.
Next, you’ll take a quick look at the types of sites you can build with WordPress. As you’ll see, WordPress began life as a blogging system, but has since mutated into a flexible, easy-to-use tool for creating virtually any sort of site.
How WordPress Works
You probably already realize that WordPress isn’t just a tool to build web pages. After all, anybody can create a web page—you just need to know a bit about HTML (the language that web pages are written in) and a bit about CSS (the language that formats web pages so they look beautiful). It also helps to have a good web page editor at your fingertips. Meet these requirements, and you’ll be able to build a static website—one that looks nice enough, but doesn’t actually do anything (Figure 1-1).
Figure 1-1. In an old-fashioned website, a web designer creates a bunch of HTML files and drops them into a folder on a web server. When you visit one of those pages, the web server sends the HTML to your browser. WordPress works a little differently—it builds its pages on the fly, as you’ll see next.
With WordPress, you strike up a different sort of partnership. Instead of creating a web page, you give WordPress your raw content—that’s the text and pictures you want published as an article, a product listing, a blog post, or something else. Then, when a visitor goes to your site, WordPress assembles that content into a perfectly tailored page.
This system lets WordPress provide some useful features. For example, when visitors arrive at a WordPress blog, they can browse through the content in different ways. They can see the posts from a certain month, or on a certain topic, or tagged with a certain keyword. Although this seems simple enough, it requires a live program that runs on a web server and puts the content together. If, for instance, a visitor searches a blog for the words “tripe soup,” WordPress needs to find all the appropriate posts, stitch them together into a web page, and then send the result back to your visitor’s browser.
Note
Just in case your webmaster skills are a bit rusty, remember that a web server is the high-powered computer that runs your website (and, usually, hundreds of other people’s websites, too).
WordPress Behind the Scenes
In a very real sense, WordPress is the brain behind your website. When someone visits a WordPress-powered site, the WordPress software gets busy, and—in the blink of an eye—it delivers a hot-off-the-server, fresh new page to your visitor.
Two crucial ingredients allow WordPress to work the way it does:
- A database
- This is an industrial-strength storage system that sits on a web server. Think of it as a giant electronic filing cabinet where you can search and retrieve bits of content. In a WordPress website, the database stores all the content for its pages, along with category and tag labels for those pages, and all the comments that people have left. WordPress uses the MySQL database engine, because it’s a high-quality, free, open-source product, much like WordPress itself.
- Programming code
- When someone requests a page on a WordPress site, the web server loads up a template and runs some code. It’s the code that does all the real work—fetching information from different parts of the database, assembling it into a cohesive page, and so on. The code WordPress uses is written in a language called PHP.
Figure 1-2 shows how these two pieces come together.
Figure 1-2. When a browser sends a request to a dynamic website, that request kicks off some programming code that runs on the site’s server. In the case of WordPress, that code is known as PHP, and it spends most of its time pulling information out of a database (for example, retrieving product info that a visitor wants to see). The PHP then inserts the information into a regular-seeming HTML page, which it sends back to the browser.
WordPress Themes
There’s one more guiding principle that shapes WordPress—its built-in flexibility. WordPress wants to adapt itself to whatever design you have in mind, and it achieves that through a feature called themes.
Basically, themes let WordPress separate your content (which it stores in a database) from the layout and formatting details of your site (which it stores in a theme). Thanks to this system, you can tweak the theme’s settings—or even swap in a whole new theme—without disturbing any of your content. Figure 1-3 shows how this works.
Figure 1-3. Figure 1-3. When you visit a page from a WordPress site, WordPress combines the content (which it stores in a database) with formatting instructions (which are stored in the theme’s template files). The end result is a complete web page you see in your browser.
If you’re still not quite sure how WordPress helps you with themes, consider an example. Imagine Jan decides to create a website so he can show off his custom cake designs. He decides to do the work himself, so he not only has to supply the content (the pictures and descriptions of his cakes), but he also has to format each page the same way. Each page has two parts—a description of the cake and a picture of it—and he wants his pages to be consistent. But, as so often happens, a week after he releases his site, Jan realizes it could be better. He decides to revamp his web pages with a fresh, new color scheme and add a calorie-counting calculator in the sidebar.
Applying these changes to a non-WordPress website is no small amount of work. It involves changing the website’s style sheet (which is relatively easy) and modifying every single cake page, being careful to make exactly the same change on each (which is much more tedious). Even if Jan has a good HTML editing program, he’ll still need to rebuild his entire website and upload all the new web pages.
With WordPress, these problems disappear. To get new formatting, you tweak your theme’s style settings, using the WordPress control panel (called the dashboard). To add the calorie counter, for example, you simply drop it into your theme’s layout (and, yes, WordPress does have a calorie-counting plugin). And that’s it. You don’t need to rebuild or regenerate anything, go through dozens of pages by hand, or check each page to try to figure out which detail you missed.
What You Can Build with WordPress
There are many flavors of website, and many ways to create them. But if you want something reasonably sophisticated and you don’t have a crack team of web programmers to make that happen, WordPress is almost always a great choice.
That said, some types of WordPress websites require more work than others. For example, if you want to create an ecommerce site complete with a shopping cart and checkout process, you need to rely heavily on someone else’s WordPress plugins. That doesn’t necessarily make WordPress a poor choice for ecommerce sites, but it does present an extra challenge. (Chapter 14 has more information about ecommerce on WordPress.)
In the following sections, you’ll see some examples of WordPress in action. Along the way, you should get a feel for how WordPress suits your very own website-to-be.
Blogs
As you probably know, a blog is a type of website that consists of separate, dated entries called posts (see Figure 1-4). Good blogs reflect the author’s personality, and are often informal.
When you write a blog, you invite readers to see the world from your viewpoint, whether the subject is work, art, politics, technology, or your personal experience. Blogs are sometimes described as online journals, but most blogs are closer to old-school newspaper editorials or magazine commentary. That’s because a journal writer is usually talking to himself, while a half-decent blogger unabashedly addresses the reader.
Figure 1-4. Mr. Money Moustache writes a traditional (and wildly popular) blog about financial freedom, early retirement, and killing the habit of excessive consumerism. Scroll down the page (at http://www.mrmoneymustache.com) and you’ll see a list of his most recent posts. And like all the site examples shown in this chapter, Mr. Money Moustache uses WordPress.
Here are some common characteristics of blogs:
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A personal, conversational tone. Usually, you write blogs in the first person (“I bought an Hermès Birkin bag today” or “Readers emailed me to point out an error in yesterday’s post”). Even if you blog on a serious topic—you might be a high-powered executive promoting your company, for example—the style remains informal. This gives blogs an immediacy that readers love.
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Dated entries. Usually, blog posts appear in reverse-chronological order, so the most recent post takes center stage. Often, readers can browse archives of old posts by day, month, or year. This emphasis on dates makes blogs seem current and relevant, assuming you post regularly. But miss a few months, and your neglected blog will seem old, stale, and seriously out of touch—and even faithful readers will drift away.
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Interaction through comments. Blogs aren’t just written in a conversational way, they also “feel” like a conversation. Loyal readers add their feedback to your thoughts, usually in the form of comments appended to the end of your post (but sometimes through a ratings system or an online poll). Think of it this way: Your post gets people interested, but their comments get them invested, which makes them much more likely to come back and check out new posts.
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Blogging with WordPress is a slam-dunk. After all, WordPress was created as a blogging tool (in 2003), and has since exploded into the most popular blogging software on the planet. If you plan to create a blog, there’s really no good reason not to use WordPress. Although there are several other blogging platforms out there, and they all work reasonably well, none of them has the near-fanatical WordPress community behind it, which is responsible for thousands of themes and plugins, and might even help you solve hosting and configuration problems (just ask your questions in the forums at http://wordpress.org/support).
Other Types of WordPress Sites
Blogs are fantastic, exciting things, but they’re not for everyone, even if you have a streamlined tool like WordPress at your disposal. The good news is that WordPress lets you build other kinds of websites, too. In fact, as long as you’re willing to do a little theme customization, you can convert your WordPress pages into something that doesn’t look one whit like a traditional blog. The following sections show you some of the types of sites you can create.
Stories and Articles
WordPress makes a great home for personal, blog-style writing, but it’s an equally good way to showcase the more polished writing of a news site, web magazine, short-story collection, scholarly textbook, and so on. WordPress also allows multiple authors to work together, each adding content and managing the site (as you’ll discover in Chapter 10).
Consider, for example, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy shown in Figure 1-5 (and located at www.iep.utm.edu). It’s a sprawling catalog of philosophy topics amassed from about 300 authors and maintained by 25 editors, all with heavyweight academic credentials. Created in 1995, the site moved to WordPress in 2009 to make everyone’s life a whole lot easier.
Figure 1-5. Although WordPress powers this website, you’ll see few of the hallmarks of a traditional blog. The “posts” are actually long, subdivided articles, without dates or comments.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an interesting example for the sheer number and size of the articles it hosts. However, you’ll also find WordPress at work in massive news sites, including TechCrunch, TMZ, Salon, Boing Boing, ThinkProgress, and the CNN site Political Ticker.
Catalogs
WordPress is particularly well suited to websites stuffed full of organized content. For example, think of a website that has a huge archive of ready-to-make recipes (Figure 1-6). Or consider a site that collects classified ads, movie critiques, restaurant reviews, or custom products.
Note
The dividing line between blogs and catalogs can be a fine one. For example, you can find plenty of cooking-themed WordPress sites that sort recipes by category and by date in a blog-style listing. However, most catalog sites go beyond the blog in some way, and require the advanced theme customization skills you’ll develop in Part 4 of this book.
Because WordPress relies on a database, it’s a wizard at organizing massive amounts of content. In a properly designed catalog site, people can find a review, product, or whatever else they want in a number of ways, such as searching by keyword or browsing by category.
Business Sites
WordPress isn’t just a great tool for self-expression, it’s also an excellent way to do business. The only challenge is deciding exactly how you want to use WordPress to help you out.
The first, and simplest, option is to take your existing business website and augment it with WordPress. For example, the Ford Motor Co. uses WordPress for its news site http://social.ford.com, which invites customers to post feedback and share the hype about new vehicles on Facebook and Twitter. But if you head to Ford’s main site, www.ford.com, and you search for a local dealer or ask for a price quote, you’ll be entirely WordPress-free. These parts of Ford’s site rely on custom web applications, which Ford’s web developers created.
Other companies do use WordPress to take charge of their entire websites. Usually, they’re smaller sites, and often the goal is simply to promote a business and share its latest news. For example, you could use WordPress to advertise the key details about your new restaurant, including its location, menu, and recent reviews. Or imagine you need more detailed information for a tourist attraction, like the detailed website for Guggenheim Museum (Figure 1-7).
Figure 1-6. The Guggenheim website has it all—exhibit information, ticket sales, news, and career listings. It looks like the usual slick business site (and not at all like a blog), but every ingredientis 100% WordPress.
A greater challenge is when a business doesn’t just want to advertise or inform with its website, but it also wants to do business over the Web. For example, imagine you create a site for your family-run furniture store, like the one shown in Figure 1-8. You don’t just want to advertise the pieces you offer; you want to take orders for them, too, complete with all the trappings typical of an ecommerce website (such as a shopping cart, a checkout page, email confirmation, and so on). In this situation, you need to go beyond WordPress’s native features and add a plugin to handle the checkout process.
For some small businesses, an ecommerce plugin offers a practical solution. But for many others, this approach just isn’t flexible enough. Instead, most ecommerce sites need a custom-tailored transaction-processing system that integrates with other parts of their business (like their inventory records or their customer database). This functionality is beyond the scope of WordPress and its plugins.
Tip
To see more examples of what you can do with WordPress, including plenty of business sites, visit the WordPress showcase at http://wordpress.org/showcase.
