Professional WordPress Design and Development
WordPress is one of the most popular open source blogging systems available, with global and vibrant user, developer, and support communities. Though it can be compared to TypePad, Moveable Type, Google’s Blogger, and the Apache Roller project as a user-generated content workhorse, WordPress distinguishes itself with a broad array of hosting options, functional extensions (plugins), and aesthetic designs and elements (themes).WordPress started similarly to many other popular open source software packages: Some talented developers saw a need to create a powerful, simple tool based on an existing project licensed under the GPL. Michel Valdrighi’s b2/cafelog system provided the starting point, and WordPress was built as a fork of that base by developers Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. WordPress first appeared in 2003, also built on the MySQL open source database for persisting content and PHP as the development platform.
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Valdrighi remains a contributor to the project, which thrives and depends on a growing and interested community of users and developers.
As with other systems written in PHP, it is self-contained in the sense that installation, configuration, operation, and administration tasks are all contained in PHP modules. WordPress’s popularity has been driven in part by its simplicity, with the phrase ‘‘five minute installation’’ making appearances in nearly every description or book about WordPress. Beyond getting to a first post, WordPress was designed to be extended.
WordPress is the most popular self-hosted blogging
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software in use today. It is available as an open source project, licensed under the GPL, and is built largely on top of the MySQL database and PHP programming language. Any server environment that supports that simple combination can run WordPress, making it remarkably portable as well as simple to install and operate. You don’t need to be a systems administrator, developer, HTML expert, or design aesthete to use WordPress. On the other hand, because WordPress has been developed using a powerful set of Internet standard platforms, it can be extended and tailored for a wide variety of
applications. WordPress is the publishing mechanism underneath thousands of individual blog voices and the engine that powers high-volume, high-profile sites such as CNN’s blogs.
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It was designed for anyone comfortable navigating a browser, but is accessible to web designers as well. It was the dichotomy between the almost trivial effort required to create a WordPress-based blog and publish a ‘‘first post’’ to the world and the much more detailed, broad understanding required to effect mass customization that led us to write this book. Many books on the market provide guidance to beginning bloggers by walking you through the typical functions of creating, configuring, and caring for your WordPress site. Our goal was to bridge the gap between an expert PHP developer who is comfortable reading the WordPress Codex in lieu of a manual and the casual WordPress user creating a public persona integrated with social networking sites and advertising services, with a tailored look and feel.
In short, we hope to appeal to a range of developers, from the person looking to fine-tune a Word-Press theme to a more advanced developer with a plugin concept or who is using WordPress in a large enterprise integrated into a content management system. We do this by exploring WordPress from the inside out. Our goal for this book is to describe the basic operation of a function, and then offer guidance and examples that highlight how to take it apart and reassemble that function to fit a number of needs. WordPress users who are not hardened PHP developers may want to skim through the
developer-centric section, whereas coders looking for specific patterns to implement new WordPress functionality can start in the middle and work toward the end.
WHAT YOU NEED TO USE THIS BOOK
You’ll need at least a rudimentary understanding of HTML and some knowledge of cascading style sheets (CSS) to make use of the theme and user experience sections of the book. Experience in writing and debugging PHP code is a prerequisite for more advanced developer sections, although if you’re just going to make changes based on the samples in this book, you can use the code as a template and learn on the fly. A basic knowledge of databases, especially the syntax and semantics of MySQL, is in order to make the most out of the chapter on data management as well as develop plugins that need to save
data. It’s helpful to have an interactive development environment in which to view PHP code, or PHP code sprinkled through HTML pages. Choosing a set of developer tools often borders on religion and deep personal preference (and we know plenty of coders who believe that vi constitutes a development environment). Some of the more user-friendly tools will make walking through the WordPress code easier if you want to see how functions used in the examples appear in the core.
Most important, if you want to use the code samples and examples in this book, you’ll need a Word-Press blog in which to install them. Chapter 1 covers some basic WordPress hosting options as well as the simple mechanics of downloading the components, and installing WordPress on a desktop or test machine for debugging and closer inspection. Finally, some people might argue that to really take advantage of WordPress you need to be able to write, but that ignores the basic beauty of the WordPress platform: it takes the power of the printing press to an individual level. This book isn’t about what you say (or might say); it’s about how you’re going to get those ideas onto the Web and how the world will see them and interact with your blog.
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