I’m excited to offer this Wordpress User Manual to my clients, to help them edit, add, and maintain content on their pages. It is geared towards the User role of “Editor” and not Admin, so is scaled down from what it takes to create a site–it is more geared towards helping customers keep up the content of the site.
Plugins are a big reason why Wordpress has gotten as powerful and as popular as it has, for they extend the functionality of Wordpress in many different ways, including adding shopping carts, boosting SEO ratings, adding widgets and calculators to make conversions, etc.
When you look at a webpage, you see it as one page, with various elements (masthead, footer, content area, sidebar, etc.), and in straight html, you code it as one page, with the DOCTYPE declaration at the top, opening and closing tags for various parts of the page. With themes, though, these parts are divvied up and each one becomes their own page, functioning under a model similar to the Model View Controller.
This blog article looks at server-side install for three different content management systems: Wordpress, Drupal, and Concrete-5. The process for each CMS was the same, starting out. Create a database (this can be set up through Cpanel with MySQL databases or through PHP MyAdmin, depending on how your Cpanel is set up, security-wise). Create a user-admin for that database. Make a note of the user and password you used to create the database, and store that somewhere–you will be using it later! Download the CMS from whatever web page hosting it (i.e. drupal.org, wordpress.org.) and uncompress the zip file.
The term “blog” comes from “web log,” which, similar to the “Captain’s Log” made famous by Star Trek, is merely a series of articles or posts or entries chronicling something ongoing, similar to a diary, but out in the public eye, for everyone to see. Content is not limited to merely personal journals, but pretty much any subject you can imagine (including a Technical blog!). Essentially, it’s self-publishing, for the web.
The rise of content management systems, or “CMS” (as I will hereafter refer to it), has enabled many people to start webpages, particularly blogs, by themselves, without having to learn any technical knowledge or programming languages, or even design. All they have to do is provide content, and BINGO! instant gratification new website created–in many cases without even needing to set up a hosting account. It has never been so easy for a novice to set up a web page, and have it look fairly decent (thanks to templates). Why? All because of Content Management Systems.