Easy to Extend in Font

Creator USS Code 39 in Font Easy to Extend

WordPress offers a robust template system as well as an extensive API. Anyone with experience in PHP can change a site s appearance or even modify WordPress s behavior. At www.wordpress.org/extend, you can download thousands of themes and plugins to do just this. Themes determine how content is displayed. Theme files are simply HTML documents containing some WordPress-specific PHP functions. A theme can be as simple as a single index.php file, or it might contain separate templates for posts, pages, archives, search results, and so on, with a number of included images and JavaScript files. Widgets are drag-and-drop components that can be added to your site s sidebars. For example, there are widgets to display polls, Flickr photos, and Twitter streams. You can use widgets to list pages, posts, and links; provide a search box; add arbitrary HTML; or display an RSS feed. Some themes come with their own widgets; other widgets can be installed as separate plugins. Plugins can add functions, template tags, or widgets; modify existing functions; and filter content. A plugin could add administration screens, or it might just provide a new tag you can insert into your theme files.

Advanced users can even extend the basic types of content in WordPress. Posts and pages include custom fields in addition to the basic title, content, and excerpt. The custom field user interface is not ideal for novice users, but a number of plugins exist to improve and expand it. The More Fields, Flutter, and Pods plugins all make custom fields easier to use. WordPress also supports custom content types and taxonomies. The core system does not yet include a user interface for these features, but they are available for developers to use in custom theme functions and plugins. If the built-in category and tag system for posts isn t flexible enough for you, you can create custom taxonomies for posts, pages, or media files. In version 3.0, you can go even further and create whole new content types. I ll go over custom taxonomies and content types in 14. To see just how far you can go using themes and plugins, visit www.buddypress.org. BuddyPress is a set of themes and plugins for WordPress that turns a basic site into a complete social network with member profiles, friends, private messages, forums, and activity streams. The transformation is amazing!

Because WordPress has built-in support for clean URLs, canonical URLs, microformats, categories and tags, and standards-based themes, it does a stellar job of optimizing sites for search engines. At the 2009 WordCamp in San Francisco, Google s Matt Cutts explained to the audience that WordPress is the best blogging platform for search engine optimization purposes, and that choosing WordPress would be a good first step for any small business seeking to build an online presence.

These are just a few examples of WordPress sites. For more, visit the Showcase at www.wordpress.org.

Many of the web s most famous designers have adopted WordPress: Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria, Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, and Aarron Walter are a few. Famous geeks Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, and Leo Laporte use WordPress, too. Celebrities using WordPress for their personal sites include Felicia Day, Kevin Smith, Stephen Fry, Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse, and Andy Roddick.

The New York Times, Edublogs, and wordpress.com are large sites with anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands of individual blogs. These sites use the Network feature in WordPress 3.0, formerly a separate product known as WordPress MU (Multi-User).

Using the BuddyPress suite of plugins, a WordPress site can be turned into a complete social network in just a few minutes. Niche networks built on BuddyPress include Vivanista, Nourish Networks, Hello Eco Living, Gameserfs, and Huckjive.