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One of the realities of running a website today is choosing among the veritable feast of software platforms to find the one that performs the way you need. You want to be sure that the platform you choose has all the options you’re looking for. WordPress is unique in that it offers two versions of its software, each designed to meet various needs:

✔ The hosted version at WordPress.com: https://wordpress.com.

✔ The self-installed and self-hosted version available at WordPress.org. (This book focuses on this version.)

Every WordPress website setup has certain features available, whether you’re using the self-hosted software from WordPress.org or the hosted version at WordPress.com. These features include (but aren’t limited to)

✔ Quick and easy installation and setup

✔ Full-featured blogging capability, letting you publish content to the web through an easy-to-use web-based interface

✔ Topical archiving of your blog posts, using categories

✔ Monthly archiving of your posts, with the ability to provide a listing of those archives for easy navigation through your site

✔ Comment and trackback tools

✔ Automatic spam protection through Akismet

✔ Built-in gallery integration for photos and images

✔ Media Manager for video and audio files

✔ Great community support

✔ Unlimited number of static pages, letting you step out of the blog box and into the sphere of running a fully functional website

✔ RSS (Really Simple Syndication) capability with RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, and Atom support (see Chapter 2 for more information on RSS)

✔ Tools for importing content from different blogging systems (such as Blogger, Movable Type, and LiveJournal)

Table 1-1 compares the two WordPress versions.

Table 1-1 Exploring the Differences Between the Two Versions of WordPress

* CSS = Cascading Style Sheets

** Limited selection on WordPress.com

Choosing the hosted version from WordPress.com

WordPress.com is a free service. If downloading, installing, and using software on a web server sound like Greek to you – and like things you’d rather avoid – the WordPress folks provide a solution for you at WordPress.com.

WordPress.com is a hosted solution, which means it has no software requirement, no downloads, and no installation or server configurations. Everything’s done for you on the back end, behind the scenes. You don’t even have to worry about how the process happens; it happens quickly, and before you know it, you’re making your first blog post using a WordPress.com blog solution.

WordPress.com has some limitations, though. You cannot install plugins or custom themes, for example, and you cannot customize the base code files, nor are you able to sell advertising or monetize your blog at all on WordPress.com. Also, WordPress.com will display advertisements on your blog posts to users who are not logged into the WordPress.com network (https://en.support.wordpress.com/no-ads/). But even with its limitations, WordPress.com is an excellent starting point if you’re brand new to blogging and a little intimidated by the configuration requirements of the self-installed WordPress.org software.

If you don’t want or need to create a full website for your business or service and just want to create an online diary of sorts, you would typically use WordPress.com because it excels at allowing you to get a simple blog up and running quickly. As I mentioned previously, however, if you want to use the thousands of plugins and themes available for WordPress – or if you want to customize your own theme for your website, you are limited on the WordPress.com-hosted service.

The good news is this: If you ever outgrow your WordPress.com-hosted blog and want to make a move to the self-hosted WordPress.org software, you can. You can even take all the content from your WordPress.com-hosted blog with you and easily import it into your new setup with the WordPress.org software.

Self-hosting with WordPress.org

The self-installed version from WordPress.org that is covered in this book requires you to download the software from the WordPress website and install it on a web server. Unless you own your own web server, you need to lease one – or lease space on one.

Using a web server is typically referred to as web hosting, and unless you know someone who knows someone, hosting generally isn’t free. That being said, web hosting doesn’t cost a whole lot, either. You can usually obtain a good web-hosting service for anywhere from $5 to $20/month, depending on your needs (Chapter 3 gives you the important details you need to know about obtaining a web host.)

You need to make sure, however, that any web host you choose to work with has the required software installed on the web server. Currently, the minimum software requirements for WordPress include

✔ PHP version 5.2.4 or greater

✔ MySQL version 5.0 or greater

After you have WordPress installed on your web server (see the installation instructions in Chapter 3), you can start using it to blog to your heart’s content. With the WordPress software, you can install several plugins that extend the functionality of the blogging system, as I describe in Chapter 7.

You also have full control of the core files and code that WordPress is built on. So if you have a knack for PHP and knowledge of MySQL, you can work within the code to create your own themes and plugins that you think would be good for you and your website. Find information about PHP and MySQL in Chapter 2.

You don’t need design ability to make your website look great. Members of the WordPress community have created more than 3,000 WordPress themes, and you can download them for free and install them on your WordPress blog. (See Chapter 8.) Additionally, if you’re creatively inclined, like to create designs on your own, and know CSS, you’ll be glad to know that you have full access to the template system within WordPress and can create your own custom themes. (See Part IV.)

The self-hosted WordPress.org software lets you run an unlimited number of blogs on one installation of its software platform, on one domain. When you configure the Network options within WordPress to enable a multisite interface, you become administrator of a network of blogs. All the options remain the same, but with the Network options configured, you can have additional websites and domains and allow registered users of your website to host their own website within your network, as well. You can find out more about the WordPress Multisite feature in Chapter 13.

Sites that use the Network options within WordPress include the following:

✔ Best Buy (http://stores.bestbuy.com/577): Blog networks can have more than 150 blogs. The popular electronics retail store, Best Buy, uses WordPress to power 1,050 local store blogs.

✔ The New York Times (www.nytimes.com/interactive/blogs/directory.html): Newspapers, magazines, and universities use WordPress to manage the blog sections of their websites. Another example is the Harvard Law School blog at http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/.

✔ Microsoft Windows (http://blogs.windows.com): Niche-specific blog networks use WordPress to manage the content they publish through various channels on their website about the Windows software – in multiple languages.