License and Platform
WordPress is licensed under the GPL.
Managing and Administering the Weblog
Locally Installed WordPress is designed to be installed on your own web server, or shared hosting account, which gives you complete control over the weblog. Unlike third-party hosted services, you can be sure of being able to access and modify everything related to your weblog, in case you need to. This also means that you can install WordPress on your desktop or home computer, or even on an Intranet.
Portable Core You can choose to have the tree of wordpress related files, which form the back-end of your publicly displayed weblog, be in the same directory as the weblog or in a different directory. For example, if you want your weblog at http://example.com (public_html - the public "root" of your webserver or hosting account) and you want to store the wordpress related files and directory tree in http://example.com/wordpress (public_html/wordpress), you can!
UTC friendly WordPress allows you to define your time as an offset from Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), so that all the time-related elements stored in the database are stored as GMT values, which is a universal standard. Among other things, this helps you display the correct time on your weblog, even if your host server is located in a different time zone.
User management WordPress uses user-levels to control user-access to different features, so you can restrict the ability of individual users to create or modify content in your weblog, by changing their user-level.
User profiles Each user on your weblog can define a profile, with details such as their email address, instant messaging aliases etc, if they want to. Users can also control the way in which their details are displayed on the weblog.
Easy installation and upgrade WordPress' famous 5 minute install can't be beaten for simplicity and ease of use. Upgrading your weblog to the latest version of WordPress is easy, too, and it should take less time than the installation!
Dynamic page generation No rebuilding of all your pages each time you update your weblog, or any aspect of it. All pages are generated using the database and the templates each time a page from your weblog is requested by a viewer. This means that updating your weblog, or its design is as fast as possible, and required server storage space usage is minimal.
Internationalization and Localization You can now create a weblog that is localized to your choice, and delivered in a language of your choice. The gettext method is used to translate and localize WordPress to the fullest extent.
Publicizing Your Work
Feeds The RSS 1.0 (aka RDF), RSS 2.0 and ATOM specifications are fully supported by WordPress, and what's more, just about any page on your weblog has an associated feed that your readers can subscribe to - there's a feed for the latest posts, for categories, comments, well, like we said earlier, for anything you want. The more options your readers have to keep track of different sections of your weblog, the easier it is for you to spread the word around the world. WordPress also fully supports RSS 2.0 with enclosures, so adding mp3 files (such as podcasts) to your RSS feeds is a snap.
Cruft-free Permalinks The URLs for all the pages in your weblog can be made to conform to a standard, cruft-free system, and all the links are structured, sensible, and understandable to human and machines, and that includes search engines. Clean URLs are essential for search engine optimization and an improved user experience.
Inter-blog Communication In an increasingly connected world, WordPress comes ready for PingBack and TrackBack, two very useful ways of connecting to other weblogs, and to enable them to do the same.
Customizing the Design
Template Driven Design WordPress uses templates to generate the pages dynamically. You can control the presentation of content by editing the templates using the Template Editor tool and the Template Tags
Template and File Editor Every installation of WordPress comes with a file editor you can use to edit your templates and other WordPress related files, right in your browser without having to worry about downloading and uploading the files in order to edit them.
Template Tags Template tags make it easier to design the content and information displayed on your weblog. You don't need to be a PHP whiz to design your weblog.
Themes You can skin your weblog using readily available themes, or styles. You can also create and share your own themes.
Plugins Plugins extend the core functionality of your weblog. A large number of user-developed plugins are already available and can be used to do virtually anything you want to, with your blog.
Creating Content
Password protection So you want to share something with some people, but not everyone? Easy, protect the article in question with a password.
Post Slug If you are using clean PermaLinks on your website, you can define the link to an individual post by using a post-slug.
Post to the future You can write a post today and have it appear on the weblog at a future date, automatically.
Multi paged posts If your post is too long, cut it up into pages, so your readers don't have to scroll to the end of the world.
File/picture uploading You can upload pictures or files, and link to them or display them in your articles. You have the option of creating thumbnails of pictures when you upload them.
Categories Organize your posts into categories, and sub-categories, and sub-sub categories...
Emoticons WordPress is smart enough to convert character smileys, like ":)" into the graphical image counterparts.
Save Drafts Save your unfinished articles, improve them later, publish when you're done.
Previewing Posts Before you press the "Publish" button, you can look at the preview for the article you just wrote to check if everything is the way you want it. In fact, you can do that at any time, since the preview is "live".
Desktop Tools You don't have to use a browser to update your weblog, you can use any desktop blogging tool that supports the MetaWeblog or Blogger API.
Blog by email You can send your posts as an email and have them appear on the weblog.
Bookmarklets Add the "Press It!" bookmarklet provided by WordPress to your browser and you have a shortcut to create an article with a link to the page currently displayed on your browser!
Sidebar If you don't like a bookmarklet, use our friendly browser sidebar, which can be used in a similar fashion.
Formatting Think of WordPress as something that makes your words smoother, and your pages more appealing. WordPress ships with text-formatting plugins that clean up your content and add typographic goodness to your articles.
Archives and Search
Archiving After you've been blogging for an extended period of time, what matters is how well your posts are organized, and for that, WordPress provides you with several ready made options to display the archives of your blog, containing all the old posts. You can choose from yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, category-wise or author-wise archives, and easily link to the archive pages from the main page (or any other page) of your blog, using a template tag to generate the links to these archive pages. Since WordPress generates pages dynamically, all these archive pages come at no additional space-cost to your server.
Searching WordPress has a functional built-in search tool, which allows visitors to your blog to search for terms they are interested in, and the search-hilite plugin that ships with WordPress can highlight their search terms, so it is even easier for them to find what they were searching for. In addition to this, the plugin also does the same for someone who arrives at your blog by clicking at a search result in a search engine, such as google. All in all, searching is fun, with WordPress.
Discussion and Comments
Community Building WP is not the YMCA, but it does help build communities around weblogs, through the use of comments, trackbacks and pingbacks, helping you keep in touch with the audience and fostering friendship Allowed html tags Not everyone is evil, but keep those who are in check by limiting which html tags are kosher on your weblog. The default html tags allowed by WordPress are a sane choice to let people use html in their comments, without compromising the safety of your data or server. Moderation For the control freak in all of us, WordPress provides an array of moderation options. You can moderate
- all comments before they appear on the blog
- comments with specific words in them
- comments posted from specific IP addresses
- comments containing more than some specified number of links.
All these moderation options keep spammers and vandals in check. Notification WordPress can keep you in the loop by sending you an email each time there is a new comment or a comment awaiting moderation.
Creating and Managing a Blogroll
Blogroll The blogroll is where you link to the blogs you read frequently - a friendly way of acknowledging the good blogs out there. WordPress' built-in Links Manager allows you to add and manage links effortlessly Bookmarklet The effortlessness begins with a neat bookmarklet that you can add to the bookmarks or favourites in your browser. Adding a link to an interesting blog or website is as simple as clicking on the bookmark or favourite when you visit the blog or website the next time! Categorizing The links in your blogroll can be categorized and neatly organized Importing If you already have a list o' links as an OPML file, you can import it to your WordPress blog. For those coming from other blogging tools, this means that you can import your blogroll from Blogrolling.com and never use a third-party service to manage your blogroll, again. Exporting Did we say you can also export an OPML file with your list o' links? Displaying As with everything else, you get some neat template tags that enable you to display your blogroll the way you like - in alphabetical order, ranking order, the order in which they were updated - you get the idea
