WordPress is a content management system, which is a system that allows people to manage the content of a website without needing to know much about websites and organize it in a convenient internally consistent way.

To manage a WordPress site navigate to it the url of your site and append "/wp-login.php" to it then log in to reach a page known as the dashboard.

The two major kinds of content that WordPress help manage are Pages and Posts. Pages are static documents that typically don't change dramatically and are usually accessible from a navigation menu on each page of the site such as a "contact us" page or an "image gallery" page on an artist's website. Posts are quite similar to pages (WordPress manages them similarly internally) and they even have the same interface for creating and editing them as pages. The difference is that post are intended to be a part of a blog and WordPress comes ready with a plethora of features that make blogging easy such as automatically displaying many posts on a page in a variety of customizable ways.

There are three other main ways to manage content on a WordPress site. Themes, Plugins, and Widgets. Widgets are small, often somewhat interactive boxes on a site which add features like search boxes. They are often found in sidebars which may appear on many or all pages of a site. Themes define the overall appearance and layout of a site. They are where all of the html, css, and JavaScript live and they also determine where widgets things like can go on your site. Plugins are add-ons that can be installed into WordPress to change something about how WordPress works.

Pages and Posts can be managed through their respective tabs in the dashboard and can be give categories and hierarchies which a theme can in tern use to change the way they are displayed.

Widgets are a sort of catch-all for parts of a site other than the main post/page content that need to be manageable from the dashboard.

Themes can be installed and switched between using the themes tab in the dashboard. Many free ones exist already built and, as usual Google is your friend. WordPress.org provides a has useful documentation for creating themes which can be found here.

Plugins are can do anything providing a nicer interface with-which to re-order pages, to filtering blog comments for spam, to organizing images into a JavaScript powered slideshow/image gallery, to add gravitars to comments. The WordPress site has a guide for building your own here. One of the few gripes I have with the WordPress system is that their general philosophy is to only build the core WordPress system for the needs of the limited set of use-cases they tend to think of. There are many features that would be incredible useful to an only slightly different audience (such as a drag-and-drop interface for rearranging pages) that they tend to answer with "let a plug-in do that". The result of this is that most of the time if there's a feature you want, there's a plugin for it. Plug-in that are a part of WordPress repository can be searched for and installed without leaving the dashboard.

http://cs.marlboro.edu/ courses/ spring2012/internet/ wiki/ wordpress_sam
last modified Wednesday March 28 2012 11:40 pm EDT