Chapter 1: Exploring Basic WordPress Concepts
- Introducing blogging
- Publishing and archiving content
- Interaction through comments
- Syndication through RSS
- Using WordPress as a content management tool
- Creating different types of sites with WordPress
By providing regular, nontechnical Internet users the ability to publish content on the World Wide Web quickly and easily, blogging has taken the world by storm. These days, blogging is considered mainstream. Regular Internet users are blogging, but so are major corporations, news organizations, and educational institutions. Over the past decade, the question went from “What the heck is a blog?” to “What do you mean you don't have a blog?” Blogs have become a part of everyday life.
Nowadays, you can choose from several software platforms. For many bloggers, WordPress has the best combination of options. WordPress is unique in that it offers a variety of ways to run your Web site — WordPress is not only a blogging platform, but also a full-featured content management system (CMS) that includes all the tools and features you need to publish a blog or a complete Web site on your own, without a whole lot of technical expertise or understanding.
In this chapter, we introduce you to such blogging basics as publishing and archiving content, interacting with readers through comments, and providing ways for readers to have access to your content through syndication, or RSS technologies. This chapter also helps you sort the differences between a blog and a Web site, and introduces how WordPress, as a CMS, can help you build an entire Web site. Finally, we show you some Web sites that you can build with the WordPress platform.