WordPress is an open-source personal publishing platform that is easy to use, flexible, and highly customizable. Although used primarily for publishing blogs, WordPress can easily be used to create and maintain complete Web sites.
Taking the average blogger further than blogspot can, WordPress allows bloggers to create more complicated sites with their open-source technology, rather than blogger which is limited by HTML changes to their templates.
Since the release of v2.5 many things have changed for WordPress users. While SEO still has some basic rules, optimizing a WordPress blog is getting easier as new plugins are added and upgraded.
The most important change in WordPress v2.5 (and above) is the new improved dashboard. As with all change this revision triggered much controversy, pros, cons and confusion. Those users familiar with the previous versions of WordPress found it hard to adapt to the new interface, and many beginners found the navigation less intuitive than they expected.
Wordpress is a simple and powerful way to start blogging. If you're not an IT expert but want to use a state of the art blogging system to give your blog the best chance of success, while giving you the time to focus on content and your readers, WordPress is the right system for you, and this book is the right place to start. It will give you a rapid and straightforward introduction to the rich and powerful features of WordPress and get you up and running with a state of the art blog as quickly and painlessly as possible.
This book walks through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom theme for the WordPress open-source blog engine. The author provides design tips and suggestions and covers setting up your WordPress sandbox, and reviews the best practices from setting up your theme's template structure, through coding markup, testing, and debugging, to taking it live.
Building an online community can be a daunting task. Countless different applications are available for you to use as the foundation of your community. When I first envisioned this book, I saw that online communities were primarily based on three different types of applications: content management systems, bulletin boards, and blogs. I then found three open-source applications that fit into these categories that I believe are at the top of their class. Let's take a closer look at each of the categories and the selected application.
