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This book is based on the WordPress 4.1 major release, but really focuses on foundational WordPress tactics. Each successive release of WordPress has included improvements in the administration and control functions (Dashboard); backup, export, and import functions; and installation and upgrade features. Even if you start with a slightly down-rev version of WordPress, you will be able to bring it up to the current release and maintain the freshness of your install. Install and upgrade paths are touched on later in this chapter. But just how popular is WordPress?

Current State

Interest in WordPress and WordPress usage is booming. You’re holding in your hands a testament to that. Just four years ago, very few WordPress books were available. Now this third edition has been published. “Popular” is always a subjective metric, but statistics add some weight to those perceptions. According to Automattic, as of 2014, tens of thousands of new WordPress sites are created every day (http://en.wordpress.com/stats/) not including standalone self-hosted WordPress sites. That includes sites using WordPress for content management, blogging, and personal rants, and has to be discounted by those of you who have multiple WordPress installations to their names, but even with that estimate of the order of magnitude, WordPress is immensely popular. Automattic no longer discloses how many sites they host on WordPress.com, but in 2012 they reported nearly 74 million WordPress websites globally with about half of them hosted at WordPress.com, and in 2010 that number was at only 5 million sites. In 2008, the official WordPress plugin repository hosted over 6,300 plugins, double the number from 2007. In 2012, the second edition of this book cited 19,000 plugins in the repository, and at the time of this writing, the number of plugins is nearing 32,000 (http://wordpress.org/plugins/). Since the last publication of this book, the community has contributed over 1,000 unique themes to the official WordPress theme repository, which now has more than 2,500 listed. This does not include all the commercial theme vendors and independent developers creating their own custom themes.

The combinations of plugins and themes require scientific notation to represent in complexity, but at the same time, they are all equally simple to locate, integrate, and use. That’s the result of a solid architecture and an equally solid community using it. In short, the ecosystem surrounding WordPress is alive and thriving – even booming.

Today, WordPress powers many large media companies’ websites or portions thereof, including CNN’s blogs, the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D, Reuters, and Forbes. Fortune 500 companies such as GM, UPS, and Sony use WordPress. WordPress is a viable choice for a range of users, from international conglomerates to major recording artists to huge media publishing companies. Some need reassurance before choosing WordPress and focus on which big boys are using it; you can find a list online at the WordPress Notable Users showcase (http://en.wordpress.com/notable-users/).

But the simplicity, ease of use, and ultimately the power of the plugins and themes also makes WordPress suitable for your mom’s family information website, your local elementary school teacher’s classroom newsletter, and the hobbyist. These are truly some of the WordPress success stories of today and these widely accessible, more narrowly popular websites are what makes WordPress popular. WordPress is adaptable and will be as simple or complex as you need it to be. Empowering “lower tech” users to be web publishers and then spreading the word (pun intended) to their families and friends about how easy WordPress is to use have fueled this explosive growth and adoption.

Where do you get started? Wordpress.org is the home for the current released and in-development versions of the code. Click through to wordpress.org for a starting point in finding plugins, themes, and wish lists of ideas and features to be implemented.

Wordpress.com has both free and paid hosting services. Over at www.wordpress.org/hosting you will find a list of hosting providers that support WordPress and often include some additional first-time installation and configuration support in their packaging of the code for delivery as part of their hosting services. You will also find concentrated WordPress hosting providers that strictly host WordPress sites and offer additional specialization features and options.

Intersecting the Community

WordPress thrives and grows based on community contributions in addition to sheer usage. Like high school gym class, participation is the name of the game, and several semi-formal avenues along which to channel your efforts and energies are available.

WordCamp events are community-hosted and locally operated, and now happen in dozens of cities around the world. Official WordCamps are listed on wordcamp.org, but you will do just as well to search for a WordCamp event in a major city close to you. WordCamps occur nearly every weekend with bloggers, photographers, writers, editors, developers, and designers of all experience and skill levels counted among their attendees. WordCamps are a low-cost introduction to the local community and often a good opportunity to meet WordPress celebrities. Visit www.wordcamp.org to find the next WordCamp.

Less structured but more frequently convened than WordCamps are WordPress Meetups, comprising local users and developers in nearly 400 (up from the 200 mentioned in the second edition of this book, and 40 in the first) cities. You’ll need a meetup.com account, but once you’re registered, you can check on locations and timetables at www.wordpress.meetup.com to see when and where people are talking about content management.

A rich, multi-language documentation repository is hosted at www.codex.wordpress.org. The WordPress Codex, with all due respect to the term reserved for ancient handwritten manuscripts, represents the community-contributed tips and tricks for every facet of WordPress, from installation to debugging. If you feel the urge to contribute to the WordPress documentation, register and then write to your heart’s content in the WordPress Codex. We hope that you will find this book a cross between a companion and a travel guide to the Codex.

Finally, mailing lists (and their archives) exist for various WordPress contributors and communities. A current roster is available online at www.codex.wordpress.org/Mailing_Lists; of particular interest may be the wp-docs list for Codex contributors and the wp-hackers list for those who work on the WordPress core and steer its future directions.

WordPress and the GPL

WordPress is licensed under the Gnu Public License (GPL) version 2, contained in the license.txt file that you’ll find in the top-level code distribution. Most people do not read the license and simply understand that WordPress is an open source project; however, pockets of corporate legal departments still worry about the viral component of a GPL license and its implications for additional code or content that gets added to, used with, or layered on top of the original distribution. Much of this confusion stems from liberal use of the words “free” and “copyright” in contexts where they are inappropriately applied.

The authors of this book are not lawyers – nor do they play them on the Internet or on television – and if you really want to understand the nuances of copyright law and what constitutes a “conveyance” of code, pick up some of Lawrence Lessig’s or Cory Doctorow’s work in those areas. This section is included to minimize the concerns of IT departments who may be dissuaded from using WordPress as an enterprise content management system by overly zealous legal teams. Do not let this happen to you; again, if WordPress is acceptable to CNN and the Wall Street Journal, two companies that survive on the copyrights granted to their content, it probably fits within the legal strictures of most corporate users as well.

The core tenet of the GPL ensures that you can always get the source code for any distribution of GPL-licensed software. If a company modifies a GPL-licensed software package and then redistributes that newer version, it has to make the source code available as well. This is the “viral” nature of GPL at work; its goal is to make sure that access to the software and its derivatives is never reduced in scope. If you plan on modifying the WordPress core and then distributing that code, you will need to make sure your changes are covered by the GPL and that the code is available in source code form. Given that WordPress is written in PHP, an interpreted language, distributing the software and distributing the source code are effectively the same action.

Following are some common misperceptions and associated explanations about using WordPress in commercial situations.

● “Free software” means you cannot commercialize its use. You can charge people to use your installation of WordPress, or make money from advertisements running in your website, or use a WordPress content management platform as the foundation of an online store. That is how wordpress.com works; it also enables Google to charge advertisers for using their Linux-based services. You can find professional quality WordPress themes with non-trivial price tags, or you can pay a hosting provider hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year to run your MySQL, PHP, Apache, and WordPress software stack; both involve commercialization of WordPress.

● If you customize the code to handle your own {content types, security policies, or obscure navigational requirements} you will have to publish those changes. You are only required to make the source code available for software that you 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.