Whether you are building a website or a blog you will need a content management system (CMS). The WordPress CMS is only one of many to choose from. The WordPress CMS is most popular with people creating blogs. Keep reading to see if the WordPress CMS is a good option for you.
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that is often used for blogging, but may be adapted to build other types of websites including ecommerce sites. The coding development began in 2003, and it is now on version 3.12, with 3.2 in beta, as of May, 2011. The project is free and open source and can be used by anyone without a license fee. Examples of organizations using WordPress include The New York Times, People Magazine, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the USC School of Social Work.
It is highly flexible and extensible by means of many free and paid plug-ins and themes. The free plug-ins and themes can be found on the WordPress.org site; some commercial themes are found on the site, but paid plug-ins are best found by a regular browser search.
WordPress is available in three ways:
- A hosted version of the software is available through WordPress.com. Accounts are free, but have some features that can be altered through a paid upgrade that requires a yearly fee. The free version has 3 GB storage doesn’t allow custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and “occasional” Google text ads, and has a 35-user limit. Increases in storage to 5, 15, or 25 GB, an ad-free blog, the use of custom CSS and unlimited users are all available through the upgrade. You are provided with a subdomain on the WordPress.com site with the free blog, but you can have it redirected to a domain of your choice, if you have a registered domain name.
- A self-hosted version of WordPress is available through WordPress.org and host it either on your own server or throug a web hosting account if the web hosting provider meets the WordPress hosting requirements.
- After you sign up for webhosting through a web host provider who supplies accounts with Simple Scripts or Fantastico De Luxe, use the one-click service to download WordPress into the appropriate folder on your site. If you take this approach, you will be able to use the same service to update your blog when new versions of WordPress come out.
For the second two options, you need to know that WordPress requires three elements:
- that PHP4.3 or greater be installed
- that MySQL 4.1.2 or greater be installed
- that the mod_rewrite Apache module be available
The WordPress.org ‘Requirements’ page also indicates that your WordPress hosting is made more secure if it run through your account’s username rather than through the server’s default shared username. It is common to do this through suPHP, and you can check with a potential host to see if this, or a similar system, is available.
WordPress offers four recommendations of web hosts: BlueHost, DreamHost, MediaTemple, and Laughing Squid and has a link to the WordPress User Forum mentions of each of the four to help you review them.
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