Why Use WordPress

Easy to Use WordPress

WordPress has an amazingly user-friendly administration interface. In 2008, the WordPress team
worked with designers at Happy Cog, a web design firm famous for its user-oriented approach, to

streamline the interface for WordPress 2.5. Later, for version 2.7, the WordPress team incorporated
suggestions from a large-scale user survey and worked with Happy Cog’s Liz Danzico to refine the
interface even further. The result is an intuitive system that even web novices can use with very little
training. Features include:

• Rich text editing. WordPress includes the popular TinyMCE editor that provides you with an interface similar to Microsoft Office products. TinyMCE is not perfect, but WordPress provides a basic HTML view as an alternative. The editor includes tools to import content and remove embedded styles from Office documents.

•  Media uploads and embeds. The content editing screens include a media up-loader. You’ll be prompted to provide titles, captions, or other metadata based on the file type, and you can easily link to the media files or insert them directly into the document. WordPress also includes a basic image editor that allows you to rotate or re-size the image. Furthermore, WordPress generates thumbnails automatically, and these can be used in place of the full-size image. Images can be aligned left, right, or center, and can include captions as well as alt text. It’s easy to embed audio and video files from other sites into your content: just paste the URL as you edit, and when your post or page is published, the address will be replaced with the appropriate media player.

• Menu Management. You can create navigation menus as easily as you create sidebars. You can choose items from your pages, categories, and link manager; you can also add links to external content

Easy to Extend WordPress

WordPress offers a robust template system as well as an extensive API. Anyone with experience in PHP can change a site’s appearance or even modify WordPress’s behavior. At www.wordpress.org/extend, you can download thousands of themes and plugins to do just this.

• Themes determine how content is displayed. Theme files are simply HTML documents containing some WordPress-specific PHP functions. A theme can be as simple as a single index.php file, or it might contain separate templates for posts, pages, archives, search results, and so on, with a number of included images and JavaScript files.

•  Widgets are drag-and-drop components that can be added to your site’s sidebars. For example, there are widgets to display polls, Flickr photos, and Twitter streams. You can use widgets to list pages, posts, and links; provide a search box; add arbitrary HTML; or display an RSS feed. Some themes come with their own widgets; other widgets can be installed as separate plugins.

•  Plugins can add functions, template tags, or widgets; modify existing functions; and filter content. A plugin could add administration screens, or it might just provide a new tag you can insert into your theme files.

Advanced users can even extend the basic types of content in WordPress. Posts and pages include

custom fields in addition to the basic title, content, and excerpt. The custom field user interface is not

ideal for novice users, but a number of plugins exist to improve and expand it. The More Fields, Flutter, and Pods plugins all make custom fields easier to use. WordPress also supports custom content types and taxonomies. The core system does not yet include a user interface for these features, but they are available for developers to use in custom theme functions and plugins.

   If the built-in category and tag system for posts isn't flexible enough for you, you can create custom

taxonomies for posts, pages, or media files. In version 3.0, you can go even further and create whole new content types. I’ll go over custom taxonomies and content types in Chapter 14.

   To see just how far you can go using themes and plugins, visit www.buddypress.org. BuddyPress is a set of themes and plugins for WordPress that turns a basic site into a complete social network with

member profiles, friends, private messages, forums, and activity streams. The transformation is

amazing!