Beginning WordPress-Sites Built with WordPress

These are just a few examples of WordPress sites. For more, visit the Showcase at www.wordpress.org.

Personal Blogs

Many of the web’s most famous designers have adopted WordPress: Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria, Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, and Aarron Walter are a few. Famous geeks Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, and Leo Laporte use WordPress, too. Celebrities using WordPress for their personal sites include Felicia Day, Kevin Smith, Stephen Fry, Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse, and Andy Roddick.

Blog Networks

The New York Times, Edublogs, and wordpress.com are large sites with anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands of individual blogs. These sites use the Network feature in WordPress 3.0, formerly a separate product known as WordPress MU (Multi-User).

Blog Networks

Social Networks

Using the BuddyPress suite of plugins, a WordPress site can be turned into a complete social network in just a few minutes. Niche networks built on BuddyPress include Vivanista, Nourish Networks, Hello Eco Living, Gameserfs, and Huckjive.

Social Networks

Colleges and Universities

Bates College, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Texas Tech University, and Queens College at the University of Melbourne all use WordPress to maintain their schools’ websites. A number of schools use WordPress for individual departments, such as the Yale School of Drama, Vanderbilt University Alumni Relations, University of Virginia Department of Environmental Sciences, Cornell Department of Music, Duke University, and Texas A&M University—just to name a few.

Colleges and Universities

Universities using WordPress MU to create a unified presence for their main sites and departments include the University of Maine, Southern Arkansas University, Wesleyan University, Wheaton College, and Missouri State University. Many universities also use MU to provide blog networks for students and/or faculty. WordPress is also a popular choice among teachers, both in secondary and higher education, for providing students with blogs for their classroom writing projects.

Small Businesses

Wandering Goat Coffee and IconDock are among the many small businesses using WordPress to run their main business sites.

Small Businesses

WordPress Tour

When you install WordPress for the first time (see Chapter 2), you’ll have a simple site dressed in the lovely new 2010 default theme. (If this theme is not your cup of tea, don’t worry. In Chapter 2, I’ll show you how to install other themes, and in Chapters 6 and 7, I’ll show you how to create your own.)

WordPress Tour

Let’s break down this page and see how WordPress put it together. At the top of the page, above the image, you’ll see the site title you chose when you installed WordPress. Off to the right is the tagline (“Just another WordPress blog”), which you can specify on the General Settings page .

The black area just under the image is a navigation menu. You can specify which links appear in your menu, and you can create additional menus to use elsewhere on your site, but this example shows a simple list of the pages that have been written in this WordPress site. Below the header and the menu, there are two columns: the content area and the sidebar. This content area shows the most recent blog posts.

In later chapters, I’ll discuss a number of ways you can change what appears here. This site’s sidebar contains four widgets: search, calendar, blogroll, and meta. You can add and remove widgets by dragging them into the sidebars on the Widgets administration screen in the Appearances section. These four widgets are part of WordPress’s built-in set. Some of the themes and plugins you install will come with additional widgets; in Chapter 8, I’ll show you how to create your own.

Anatomy of a post

Take another look at the content area, and compare it to the post editing screen:

Anatomy of a post

Here you can see how each post is built behind the scenes. Theme files are made up of standard HTML interspersed with WordPress template tags corresponding to the post’s component parts: the_title(), the_content(), the_author(), and so forth. On this site, the post’s categories were shown (“Filed under…”) but the post tags were not. If you wanted to change this, you’d locate the appropriate theme file and add the_tags() where you wanted the tags to appear. Template tags are formatted exactly like PHP functions—in fact, they are PHP functions—so if you’re familiar with PHP syntax, you’ll have no trouble learning to modify WordPress themes. Even if you’ve never used PHP before, you can begin modifying your site by copying template tags from the Codex or a tutorial. As you grow more comfortable with the language, you’ll find yourself making bigger changes with confidence. Now that you’ve seen how easy it is to put together a basic WordPress site, let’s get started with yours!

Summary

In this chapter, I’ve introduced you to WordPress. I’ve shown you how WordPress is easy for to install, easy to customize, and easy for you (and your content authors) to use. I’ve discussed the accolades WordPress has won, and I’ve shown you just a few examples of the wide variety of sites that can be built with WordPress. I’ve gone over the components of a basic WordPress site and explained some of the terminology (like template tags, sidebars, and widgets) you’ll see often throughout this book. In the next chapter, I’ll show you the famous five-minute installation process. I’ll look at the extra configuration steps needed to expand your WordPress installation into a network of sites. I’ll show you how to upgrade your site when new versions of WordPress are released, and how to install and upgrade themes and plugins. Finally, I’ll go over some common installation problems and troubleshooting tips.