Professional WordPress. Design and Development. Brad Williams

distribute. If you choose to make those changes inside your company, you do not have to redistribute them. On the other hand, if you’ve made some improvements to the WordPress core, the entire community would benefit from them. Getting more staid employers to understand the value of community contribution and relax copyright and employee contribution rules is sometimes a bit challenging, but the fact that you had a solid starting point is proof that other employers made precisely that set of choices on behalf of the greater WordPress community.

      ● The GPL will “infect” content that you put into WordPress. Content – including graphic elements of themes, posts, and pages managed by WordPress – is separated out from the WordPress core. It is managed by the software, but not a derivative of or part of the software. Themes, however, are a derivative of the WordPress code and therefore also fall under the GPL, requiring you to make the source code for the theme available. Note that you can still charge for the theme if you want to make it commercially available. Again, the key point here is that you make the source code available to anyone who uses the software. If you are going to charge for the use of a theme, you need to make the source code available under the GPL as well, but as pointed out previously, users installing the theme effectively get the source code.

      More important than a WordPress history lesson and licensing examination are the issues of what you can do with WordPress and why you would want to enjoy its robustness. The next section looks at WordPress as a full-fledged content management system, rather than simply a blog editing tool.

      CONTENT AND CONVERSATION

      Multiple linear feet of shelves in bookstores are filled with volumes that will improve your writing voice, literary style, blogging techniques, and other aspects of your content creation abilities. One of the goals of this book is to define the visual, stylistic, and context management mechanisms you can build with WordPress to shape vibrant user communities around your content. That context stimulates conversation with your readers. Publishing is not just about the words in each post, or even if you are an interesting writer. How will people find you? How will you stand out in the crowd? How do you put your own imprint on your site, and personalize it for whatever purpose: personal, enterprise, community, or commercial?

WordPress as a Content Management System

      Blogging systems have their roots in simple content management operations: Create a post, persist it in stable storage such as a filesystem or database, and display the formatted output based on some set of temporal or keyword criteria. As the richness and types of content presented in blog pages expanded, and the requirements for sorting, searching, selecting, and presenting content grew to include metadata and content taxonomies, the line between vanilla, single-user-targeted blogging software and enterprise-grade content management systems blurred.

      Content management systems (CMS) handle the creation, storage, retrieval, description or annotation, and publication or display of a variety of content types. CMS also covers workflow tasks, typically from an editorial or publishing perspective, and includes actions such as approval and marking content for additional editing or review. The WordPress Dashboard provides those elements of workflow management and editorial control. WordPress is not the only open source content management system in widespread use today; the Drupal and Joomla projects are equally popular choices. Drupal and Joomla start from the perspective of managing content repositories; they handle a variety of content types, multiple authors in multiple roles, and delivering the content to a consumer that requests it. WordPress is at its heart a publishing system, and the end focus is on displaying content to a reader. Although areas of functional overlap exist, you can integrate WordPress with other content management systems, a process covered in detail in Chapter 15.

      WordPress has established itself as a bona fide content management system through its design for extensibility and the separation of content persistence from content display. Taking some liberties with the Model-View-Controller design pattern, WordPress separates the MySQL persistence layer as a data model, the theme-driven user interface and display functions, and the plugin architecture that interposes functionality into the data to presentation flow. Most important, WordPress stores content in raw form, as input by the user or an application posting through the WordPress APIs. Content is not formatted, run through templates, or laid out until the page is rendered, yielding immense power to the functions that generate the actual HTML. At the same time, the data model used by WordPress uses a rich set of tables to manage categories (taxonomies), content tags (folksonomies), author information, comments, and other pieces of cross-reference value. The WordPress database schema that makes this possible is explored in Chapter 6.

      Although that design gives WordPress incredible power and flexibility as a content management system, it also requires knowledge of how those data persistence and control flows are related. (It was a search for such a dissection of WordPress in functional terms that got us together to write this book.)

Creating Conversation

      Conversation is king; content is just something to talk about.

– Cory Doctorow

      A robust CMS is measured by the utility of its content. Even the richest content types and most well-managed processes are of low return if nobody actually consumes the outputs. It is not sufficient to install blogging software, write a few posts, and hope the world shows up on your virtual doorstep; you need to create what Tim O’Reilly calls an “architecture of participation.” Social networking, advertising, feeds, and taking steps to ensure your site shows up in search engine results will drive readers to your site; the design, branding, and graphic elements coupled with the quality of your content will encourage them to take the steps toward active participation.

      Look at the problem from the perspective of a reader: In a world of tens of millions of websites (many of which have a “first post” and not much else), how will you be found, heard, and echoed? Your Twitter followers should want to read your site, and your WordPress site can update your Twitter feed. Conversely, your Twitter updates may appear in your WordPress sidebar, marrying the ultra-short content timeline to the more thoughtful one. If you are active on Facebook, you can import entries into a public figure page and Facebook readership will drive traffic back to your website. If you cover specific, detailed, or arcane areas in your writing, Google searches for those terms should direct readers to you, where they will join the conversation. Chapter 12 looks at how your WordPress content can be more broadly distributed.

      GETTING STARTED

      Before any serious work on presentation, style, or content begins, you need a home for your website (despite the previous discussion about WordPress and content management systems, we will refer to your website and the actual WordPress installation that implements it interchangeably, mostly for convenience and brevity). Factors affecting your choice include:

      ● Cost– Free hosting services limit your options as a developer and frequently preclude you from generating money from advertising services. More expensive offerings may include better support, higher storage or bandwidth limits, or multiple database instances for additional applications.

      ● Control– What tools are provided for you to manage your MySQL database, files comprising the WordPress installation, and other content types? If you want to be able to muck around at the SQL level, or manage MySQL through a command-line interface, you should ensure your hosting provider supports those interfaces.

      ● Complexity– You can install the Apache or nginx web server with a PHP interpreter, MySQL, and the WordPress distribution yourself, but most hosting providers have wrapped up the installation process so that some of the rough edges are hidden from view. If you expect to need technical support on the underlying operating system platform, find a provider (including your own IT department) that provides that support in a reasonable time frame.

      This section takes a quick look at some hosting options, walks you through the basics of a do-it-yourself installation, and concludes with an overview of the ways in which WordPress and MySQL choose to ignore each other when installation goes into the weeds.

Hosting Options

      Three broad categories of WordPress hosting exist, each with trade-offs between administrative complexity and depth of control. The easiest and most