WordPress® 24-Hour Trainer, Second Edition

INTRODUCTION

ALTHOUGH WORDPRESS is currently the world's number-one blogging software, this is not a book about blogging. In WordPress 24-Hour Trainer, you learn how to use this open-source software to build and maintain a website, whether it's a blog, has a blogging section, or has nothing at all to do with blogging. WordPress is a content management system — a system you can customize in a number of ways to make it do exactly what you need.

Whether you're building a website for yourself or for someone else, you want it to be:

• Easy to set up
• Easy to maintain
• Easy to grow and adapt

This book shows you how WordPress fulfills all these needs.

This last quality — ease of growing and adapting — is particularly important on the Web, where technological change is fast and furious. WordPress is nimble for reasons I'll go into later, and that makes it well suited to fast-paced change. For example, when Facebook introduced “like” buttons, a number of WordPress plugins were released by members of the community almost immediately, making it simple for site owners to use this new feature right away.

Since I began building websites exclusively with WordPress, I've noticed an important change in my clients: they look forward to updating and expanding their sites. When changing some text, let alone adding a new page, is like pulling teeth, you're less likely to do it. With WordPress, not only are my clients making their own changes, but they're excited about it and that's also made them more ...