WordPress All-in-One For Dummies

Introduction

WordPress is the most popular online content management software on the planet. Between the hosted service at WordPress.com and the self-hosted software available at WordPress.org, millions of bloggers use WordPress, and to date, WordPress powers over 45 percent of the Internet. That’s impressive! With WordPress, you can truly tailor a website to your own tastes and needs.

With no cost for using the benefits of the WordPress platform to publish content on the web, WordPress is as priceless as it is free. WordPress makes writing, editing, and publishing content on the Internet a delightful, fun, and relatively painless experience, whether you’re a publisher, a business owner, a designer, a developer, or a hobbyist blogger.

About This Book

The fact that WordPress is free and accessible to all, however, doesn’t make it inherently easy for everyone to use. For some people, the technologies, terminology, and coding practices are a little intimidating or downright daunting. That’s where this book comes in. WordPress All-in-One For Dummies, 5th Edition, eases any trepidation about using WordPress. With a little research, knowledge, and time, you’ll soon have a website that suits your needs and gives your readers an exciting experience that keeps them coming back for more.

WordPress All-in-One For Dummies is a complete guide to WordPress that covers the basics: installing and configuring the software, using the Dashboard, publishing content, utilizing the site and block editor, and using plugins. Additionally, this book provides advanced information about security, the WordPress tools, the Multisite features, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Foolish Assumptions

I make some inescapable assumptions about you and your knowledge, including the following:

You’re comfortable using a computer, mouse, and keyboard.

You have a good understanding of how to access the Internet, use email, and use a web browser to access webpages.

You have a basic understanding of what a website is; perhaps you already maintain your own.

You want to use WordPress for your online publishing, or you want to use the various WordPress features to improve your online publishing.

If you consider yourself an advanced user of WordPress, or if your friends refer to you as an all-knowing WordPress guru, chances are good that you’ll find some of the information in this book elementary. Although this book is aimed toward beginner users, intermediate and advanced users will also find useful information. There’s something here for everyone.

Icons Used in This Book

The little pictures in the margins of the book emphasize a point to remember, a danger to be aware of, or information that you may find helpful. This book uses the following icons:

Tip Tips are little bits of information that you may find useful — procedures that aren't necessarily obvious to a casual user or beginner.

Warning When your mother warned you, Don’t touch that pan; it’s hot! but you touched it anyway, you discovered the meaning of Ouch! I use this icon for situations like that one. You may very well touch the hot pan, but you can’t say that I didn’t warn you!

Technical stuff All geeky stuff goes here. I use this icon when talking about technical information. You can skip it, but I think that you’ll find some great nuggets of information next to these icons. You may even surprise yourself by enjoying them. Be careful — you may turn into a geek overnight!

Remember When you see this icon, brand the text next to it into your brain so that you remember whatever it was that I thought you should remember.

Beyond the Book

On the web, you can find some extra content that’s not in this book. Go online to find

The Cheat Sheet for this book is at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet. In the Search field, type WordPress All-in-One For Dummies Cheat Sheet to find the Cheat Sheet for this book.

Updates to this book, if any, are at www.dummies.com. Search for the book’s title to find the associated updates.

Where to Go from Here

From here, you can go anywhere you please! WordPress All-in-One For Dummies is designed so that you can read any or all of the minibooks between the front and back covers, depending on what topics interest you.

Book 1 is a great place to get a good introduction to the world of WordPress if you’ve never used it before and want to find out more.

Book 2 gives you insight into the programming techniques and terminology involved in running a WordPress website — information that’s extremely helpful when you move forward to the other minibooks.

Book 3 is a good place to jump in and start exploring the WordPress Dashboard, with all of the different settings available for you to start making your website unique and tailored to your needs.

Book 4 digs into using the block editor in order to create posts and pages, and gives you good information on working with media within your content (images, video, audio, and documents).

Book 5 takes you through some great information about using tracking tools, such as Google Analytics, to understand how visitors are using your website, as well as some important SEO information and tools you can use to improve your search engine presence.

Book 6 gives you an understanding of finding and installing WordPress themes, as well as information about block themes, the site editor, and block patterns, and how you can use those tools to customize the look of your site.

Book 7 introduces you to WordPress plugins, and how to find and install them in order to extend and increase the features and functionality of WordPress.

Book 8 introduces you to the Multisite feature in WordPress, and how you can set it up and use it to run multiple websites with just one installation of the WordPress software.

Above all else, have fun with the information contained within these pages! Read the minibooks on topics you think you already know; you might just come across something new. Then dig into the minibooks on topics that you want to know more about.

Book 1

Understanding WordPress Basics

Contents at a Glance

Chapter 1: Exploring Basic WordPress Concepts

Discovering Blogging

Understanding WordPress Technologies

Using WordPress as a Content Management System

Chapter 2: Exploring the World of Open-Source Software

Defining Open-Source

Understanding WordPress Licensing

Applying WordPress Licensing to Your Projects

Chapter 3: Understanding Development and Release Cycles

Discovering WordPress Release Cycles

Keeping Track of WordPress Development

Downloading Nightly Builds

Chapter 4: Meeting the WordPress Community

Finding Other WordPress Users

Users Helping Users

Discovering Professional WordPress Consultants and Services

Contributing to WordPress

Participating in Live and Virtual WordPress Events

Chapter 5: Discovering Different Versions of WordPress

Comparing the Two Versions of WordPress

Hosting Multiple Sites with One WordPress Installation

Discovering WordPress VIP Services

Chapter 1

Exploring Basic WordPress Concepts

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Discovering content publishing

Bullet Publishing and archiving content

Bullet Interacting through comments

Bullet Using WordPress as a content management tool to create different types of sites

Blogging gives regular, nontechnical Internet users the ability to publish content on the World Wide Web quickly and easily. Consequently, blogging became extremely popular very quickly, to the point that it’s now considered to be mainstream. In some circles, blogging is even considered to be passé, as it has given way to publishing all types of content freely and easily with WordPress. Regular Internet users are blogging, and Fortune 500 businesses, news organizations, and educational institutions are using WordPress to publish content on the web. Today, more than 45 percent of all sites on the web have WordPress behind them.

Although you can choose among several software platforms for publishing web content, for many content publishers, WordPress has the best combination of options. WordPress is unique in that it offers a variety of ways to run your website. WordPress successfully emerged as a favored blogging platform and expanded to a full-featured content management system (CMS) that includes all the tools and features you need to publish an entire website on your own without a whole lot of technical expertise or understanding.

In this chapter, I introduce you to such content basics as publishing and archiving content, interacting with readers through comments, and providing ways for readers to access your content through social media sharing. This chapter also helps you sort out the differences between a blog and a website, and introduces how WordPress, as a CMS, can help you build an entire website. Finally, I show you some websites that you can build with the WordPress platform.

Discovering Blogging

A blog is a fabulous tool for publishing your diary of thoughts and ideas. A blog also serves as an excellent tool for business, editorial journalism, news, and entertainment. Here are some ways that people use blogs:

Personal: You’re considered to be a personal blogger if you use your blog mainly to discuss topics related to you or your life: your family, your cats, your children, or your interests (such as technology, books, music, politics, sports, art, or photography). I maintain my own personal blog at https://lisasabin-wilson.com.

Business: Blogs are very effective tools for promotion and marketing, and business blogs usually offer helpful information to readers and consumers, such as sales events and product reviews. Business blogs also let readers provide feedback and ideas, which can help a company improve its services. I run a global WordPress design and development agency called WebDevStudios, and we maintain an active business blog at https://webdevstudios.com/blog.

Media/journalism: Popular news outlets such as Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN are using blogs on their websites to provide information on current events, politics, and news on regional, national, and international levels. Variety magazine hosts its entire website on WordPress at https://variety.com.

Government: Governments use blogs to post news and updates to the web quickly and to integrate social media tools as a means of interacting with their citizens and representatives. In the United States, the White House is using WordPress to power its official website at https://whitehouse.gov, where the executive branch of the government provides policy statements and updates on the economy, national security, the budget, immigration, and other topics. (See Figure 1-1.)

Citizen journalism: Citizens are using blogs with the intention of keeping the media and politicians in check by fact-checking news stories and exposing inconsistencies. Major cable news programs interview many of these bloggers because the mainstream media recognize the importance of the citizen voice that has emerged via blogs. An example of citizen journalism is The Lincoln Project at https://lincolnproject.us/latest-news/.

Professional: Professional blogs typically generate revenue and provide a source of monetary income for the owner through avenues such as advertising or paid membership subscriptions. Check out Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger blog at https://problogger.com/blog/. Rowse is considered the grandfather of professional blogging.

FIGURE 1-1: The official White House website is powered by WordPress.

The websites and blogs I provide in this list run on the WordPress platform. A wide variety of organizations and individuals choose WordPress to run their blogs and websites because of its popularity, ease of use, and large and active development community.

Understanding WordPress Technologies

The WordPress software is a personal publishing system that uses a PHP-and-MySQL platform, which provides everything you need to create your blog and publish your content dynamically without having to program the pages yourself. In short, with this platform, all your content is stored in a MySQL database in your hosting account.

Technical stuff PHP (which stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) is a server-side scripting language for creating dynamic webpages. When a visitor opens a page built in PHP, the server processes the PHP commands and then sends the results to the visitor’s browser. MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) that uses Structured Query Language (SQL), the most popular language for adding, accessing, and processing data in a database. If all that sounds like Greek to you, think of MySQL as being a big filing cabinet where all the content on your website is stored.

Remember Keep in mind that PHP and MySQL are the technologies that the WordPress software is built on, but that doesn’t mean you need experience in these languages to use it. Anyone with any level of experience can easily use WordPress without knowing anything about PHP or MySQL.

Every time a visitor goes to your website to read your content, they make a request that’s sent to your server. The PHP programming language receives that request, obtains the requested information from the MySQL database, and then presents the requested information to your visitor through their web browser.

Tip Book 2, Chapter 1 gives you more in-depth information about the PHP and MySQL requirements you need to run WordPress.

Archiving your publishing history

Content, as it applies to the data that’s stored in the MySQL database, refers to your website’s posts, pages, comments, and options that you set up in the WordPress Dashboard or the control/administration panel of the WordPress software, where you manage your site settings and content. (See Book 3, Chapter 2.)

WordPress maintains chronological and categorized archives of your publishing history automatically. This archiving process happens with every post you publish to your blog. WordPress uses PHP and MySQL technology to organize what you publish so that you and your readers can access the information by date, category, author, tag, and so on. When you publish content on your WordPress site, you can file a post in any category you specify; a nifty archiving system allows you and your readers to find posts in specific categories. The archives page of my blog (https://lisasabin-wilson.com/archives), for example, contains a Category section, where you find a list of categories I created for my blog posts. Clicking the Music/Books link below the Categories heading takes you to a listing of posts on that topic. (See Figure 1-2.)

FIGURE 1-2: A page with posts in the Music/Books category.

WordPress lets you create as many categories as you want for filing your content. Some sites have just one category, and others have up to 1,800 categories. When it comes to organizing your content, WordPress is all about personal preference. On the other hand, using WordPress categories is your choice. You don’t have to use the category feature if you’d rather not.

Tip When you look for a hosting service, keep an eye out for hosts that provide daily backups of your site so that your content won’t be lost if a hard drive fails or someone makes a foolish mistake. Web hosting providers that offer daily backups as part of their services can save the day by restoring your site to a previous form.

Remember The theme (design) you choose for your site — whether it’s the default theme, one that you create, or one that you custom-design — isn’t part of the content. Those files are part of the file system and aren’t stored in the database. Therefore, it’s a good idea to create a backup of any theme files you’re using. See Book 6 for further information on WordPress theme management.

Interacting with your readers through comments

An exciting aspect of publishing content with WordPress is receiving feedback from your readers after you publish to your site. Receiving feedback, or comments, is akin to having a guestbook on your site. People can leave notes for you that publish to your site, and you can respond and engage your readers in conversation. (See Figure 1-3.) These notes can expand the thoughts and ideas you present in your content by giving your readers the opportunity to add their two cents’ worth.

FIGURE 1-3: Blog comments and responses.

Remember The WordPress Dashboard gives you full administrative control over who can leave comments. Additionally, if someone leaves a comment with questionable content, you can edit the comment or delete it. You’re also free to not allow comments on your site. (See Book 3, Chapter 4 for more information.)

Feeding your readers

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is a standard feature that blog readers have come to expect. So what is RSS, really?

RSS is written to the web server in XML (Extensible Markup Language) as a small, compact file that can be read by RSS readers (as I outline in Table 1-1). Think of an RSS feed as a syndicated, or distributable, auto-updating what’s new list for your website.

TABLE 1-1 Popular RSS Feed Readers

Technical stuff Facebook is now called Meta, and as of this writing, Twitter is being rebranded as X. More name changes may be in the works. But because most readers will recognize Facebook and Twitter by those names, I’ve used them throughout this book.

Tools such as feed readers and email newsletter services can use the RSS feed from your website to consume the data and aggregate it into a syndicated list of content published on your website. Website owners allow RSS to be published to allow these tools to consume and then distribute the data in an effort to expand the reach of their publications.

Table 1-1 lists some popular tools that use RSS feeds to distribute content from websites.

For your readers to stay up to date with the latest and greatest content you post, they can subscribe to your RSS feed. WordPress RSS feeds are autodiscovered by the various feed readers. The reader need only enter your site’s URL, and the program automatically finds your RSS feed.

WordPress has RSS feeds in several formats. Because the feeds are built into the software platform, you don’t need to do anything to provide your readers an RSS feed of your content.

Tracking back

The best way to understand trackbacks is to think of them as comments, except for one thing: Trackbacks are comments left on your site by other sites, not by people. Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it? After all, why wouldn’t inanimate objects want to participate in your discussion?

Actually, maybe it’s not so crazy after all. A trackback happens when you make a post on your site, and within the content of that post, you provide a link to a post made by another author on a different site. When you publish that post, your site sends a sort of electronic memo to the site you linked to. That site receives the memo and posts an acknowledgment of receipt in the form of a comment to the post that you linked to on the site. The information contained within the trackback includes a link back to the post on your site that contains the link to the other site — along with the date and time, as well as a short excerpt of your post. Trackbacks are displayed within the comments section of the individual posts.

The memo is sent via a network ping (a tool used to test, or verify, whether a link is reachable across the Internet) from your site to the site you link to. This process works as long as both sites support trackback protocol. Almost all major CMSes support the trackback protocol.

Remember Sending a trackback to a site is a nice way of telling the author that you like the information they presented in their post. Most authors appreciate trackbacks to their posts from other content publishers.

Dealing with comment and trackback spam

The absolute bane of publishing content on the Internet is comment and trackback spam. Ugh. When blogging became the it thing on the Internet, spammers saw an opportunity. If you’ve ever received spam in your email program, you know what I mean. For content publishers, the concept is similar and just as frustrating.

Spammers fill content with open comments with their links but not with any relevant conversation or interaction in the comments. The reason is simple: Websites receive higher rankings in the major search engines if they have multiple links coming in from other sites, like trackbacks. Enter software like WordPress, with comment and trackback technologies, and these sites become prime breeding grounds for millions of spammers.

Because comments and trackbacks are published to your site publicly — and usually with a link to the commenter’s website — spammers get their site links posted on millions of sites. They do this by creating programs that automatically seek websites with open commenting systems and then hammering those systems with tons of comments that contain links back to their sites.

No one likes spam. Therefore, developers of CMSes such as WordPress spend untold hours trying to stop these spammers in their tracks, and for the most part, they’ve been successful. Occasionally, however, spammers sneak through. Many spammers are offensive, and all of them are frustrating because they don’t contribute to the conversations that occur on the websites where they publish their spam comments.

Tip All WordPress systems have one important thing in common: Akismet, which kills spam dead. Akismet is a WordPress plugin brought to you by Automattic, the creator of the WordPress.com service. I cover the Akismet plugin, and comment spam in general, in Book 3, Chapter 4.

Using WordPress as a Content Management System

A content management system (CMS) is a platform that lets you run a full website on your domain. This means that WordPress enables you to create and publish all kinds of content on your site, including pages, blog posts, e-commerce pages for selling products, videos, audio files, events, and more.

A blog is a chronological display of content — most often, written by the blog author. The posts are published and, usually, categorized into topics and archived by date. Blog posts can have comments activated so that readers can leave their feedback and the author can respond, creating a dialogue about the blog post.

A website is a collection of published pages with different sections that offer the visitor different experiences. A website can incorporate a blog but usually contains other sections and features. These other features include

Photo galleries: Albums of photos uploaded and collected in a specific area so that visitors can browse through and comment on them

E-commerce stores: Fully integrated shopping area into which you can upload products for sale and from which your visitors can purchase them

Discussion forums: Where visitors can join, create discussion threads, and respond to one another in specific threads of conversation

Social communities: Where visitors can become members, create profiles, become friends with other members, create groups, and aggregate community activity

Portfolios: Sections where photographers, artists, or web designers display their work

Feedback forms: Contact forms that your visitors fill out with information that then gets emailed to you directly

Static pages (such as Bio, FAQ, or Services): Pages that don’t change as often as blog pages, which change each time you publish a new post

Courses: Where people can come to watch videos or read information to learn about a subject — sometimes this is behind a paywall to require someone to purchase access

This list isn’t exhaustive; it’s just a listing of some of the most common website sections.

Figure 1-4 shows what the front page of my business blog looked like at the time of this writing. Visit https://webdevstudios.com/blog to see how the site displays the most recent blog posts. Although my blog doesn’t publish the dates of each blog post, I can personally attest that it is a chronological listing of our most recent posts.

My business website at https://webdevstudios.com also uses WordPress. This full site includes a static front page of information that acts as a portal to the rest of the site, on which you can find a blog; a portfolio of work; a contact form; and various landing pages, including service pages that outline information about the different services we offer (https://webdevstudios.com/services). Check out Figure 1-5 for a look at this website; it’s quite different from the blog section of the site.

Using WordPress as a CMS means that you’re creating more than just a blog; you’re creating an entire website full of sections and features that offer different experiences for your visitors.

FIGURE 1-4: Visit my business blog at https://webdevstudios.com/blog to see an example of a chronological listing of blog posts.

FIGURE 1-5: My business website uses WordPress as a CMS.

Chapter 2

Exploring the World of Open-Source Software

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Exploring open-source concepts

Bullet Discovering examples of open-source projects

Bullet Understanding WordPress licensing

Bullet Applying WordPress licensing

Open-source software is a movement that started in the software industry in the 1980s. Its origins are up for debate, but most people believe that the concept came about in 1983, when a company called Netscape released its Navigator web browser source code to the public, making it freely available to anyone who wanted to dig through it, modify it, or redistribute it.

WordPress software users need a basic understanding of the open-source concept and the licensing upon which WordPress is built because WordPress’s open-source policies affect you as a user — and greatly affect you if you plan to develop plugins or themes for the WordPress platforms. A basic understanding helps you conduct your practices in accordance with the license at the heart of the WordPress platform.

This chapter introduces you to open-source; the Open Source Initiative (OSI); and the GNU General Public License (GPL), which is the specific license that WordPress is built upon (GPLv2, to be exact). You also discover how the GPL license applies to any projects you may release (if you’re a developer of plugins or themes) that depend on the WordPress software and how you can avoid potential problems by abiding by the GPL as it applies to WordPress.

Remember IANAL — I Am Not a Lawyer — is an acronym that you often find in articles about WordPress and the GPL. I use it here because I’m not a lawyer, and the information in this chapter shouldn’t be construed as legal advice. Rather, you should consider the chapter to be an introduction to the concepts of open-source and the GPL. The information presented here is meant to inform you about and introduce you to the concepts as they relate to the WordPress platform.

Defining Open-Source

A simple, watered-down definition of open-source software is software whose source code is freely available to the public and that can be modified and redistributed by anyone without restraint or consequence. An official organization called the Open Source Initiative (OSI; https://opensource.org), founded in 1998 to organize the open-source software movement in an official capacity, has provided a very clear and easy-to-understand definition of open-source. During the course of writing this book, I obtained permission from the OSI board to include it here.

Open-source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:

Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

Source Code

The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost; preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.

Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

Integrity of the Author’s Source Code

The license may restrict source code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of patch files with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

Distribution of License

The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

License Must Not Be Specific to a Product

The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program’s being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program’s license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.

License Must Not Restrict Other Software

The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.

License Must Be Technology-Neutral

No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.

The preceding items comprise the definition of open-source as provided by the OSI. You can find this definition (see Figure 2-1) at https://opensource.org/osd.

Open-source software source code must be freely available, and any licensing of the open-source software must abide by this definition. Based on the OSI definition, WordPress is an open-source software project. Its source code is accessible and publicly available for anyone to view, build on, and distribute at no cost anywhere, at any time, or for any reason.

FIGURE 2-1: Definition of open-source from the OSI.

Several examples of high-profile software enterprises, such as the ones in the following list, are also open-source. You’ll recognize some of these names:

Mozilla (https://www.mozilla.org): Community whose projects include the popular Firefox Internet browser and Thunderbird, a popular email client. All projects are open-source and considered to be public resources.

PHP (http://php.net): An HTML-embedded scripting language that stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is popular software that runs on most web servers today; its presence is required on your web server for you to run the WordPress platform successfully on your site.

MySQL (https://www.mysql.com): The world’s most popular open-source database. Your web server uses MySQL to store all the data from your WordPress installation, including your posts, pages, comments, links, plugin options, theme option, and widgets.

Linux (https://www.linux.org): An open-source operating system used by web hosting providers, among other organizations.

As open-source software, WordPress is in some fine company. Open-source itself isn’t a license; I cover licenses in the next section. Rather, open-source is a movement — some people consider it to be a philosophy — created and promoted to provide software as a public resource open to community collaboration and peer review. WordPress development is clearly community-driven and focused. You can read about the WordPress community in Book 1, Chapter 4.

Understanding WordPress Licensing

Most software projects are licensed, meaning that they have legal terms governing the use or distribution of the software. Different kinds of software licenses are in use, ranging from very restrictive to least restrictive. WordPress is licensed by the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), one of the least restrictive software licenses available.

If you’re bored, read the GPL text at www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html. Licensing language on any topic can be a difficult thing to navigate and understand. It’s sufficient to have a basic understanding of the concept of GPL and let the lawyers sort out the rest, if necessary.

Tip A complete copy of the GPL is included in every copy of the WordPress download package, in the license.txt file. The directory listing of the WordPress software files shown in Figure 2-2 lists the license.txt file.

FIGURE 2-2: The GPL text is included in every copy of WordPress.

Simply put, any iteration of a piece of software developed and released under the GPL must be released under the very same license in the future. Check out the nearby sidebar "The origins of WordPress," which tells the story of how the WordPress platform came into existence. Essentially, the software was forked — meaning that the original software (in this case, a blogging platform called b2 — https://cafelog.com) was abandoned by its original developer and adopted by the founders of WordPress, who took the b2 platform, called it WordPress, and began a new project with a new plan, outlook, and group of developers.

THE ORIGINS OF WORDPRESS

Once upon a time, there was a simple PHP-based blogging platform called b2. This software, developed in 2001, slowly gained a bit of popularity among geek types as a way to publish content on the Internet. Its developer, Michel Valdrighi, kept development active until early 2003, when users of the software noticed that Valdrighi seemed to have disappeared. They became a little concerned about b2’s future.

Somewhere deep in the heart of Texas, one young man in particular was very concerned, because b2 was his software of choice for publishing his own content on the World Wide Web. He didn’t want to see his favorite publishing tool become obsolete. You can view the original post to his own blog in which he wondered what to do (https://ma.tt/2003/01/the-blogging-software-dilemma).

In that post, he talked briefly about some of the other software that was available at the time, and he tossed around the idea of using the b2 software to to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around.

Create a fork he did. In the absence of b2’s developer, this young man developed from the original b2 code base a new blogging application called WordPress.

That blog post was made on January 24, 2003, and the young man’s name was (and is) Matt Mullenweg. On December 26, 2003, with the assistance of a few other developers, Mullenweg announced the arrival of the first official version of the WordPress software. The rest, as they say, is history. The history of this particular piece of software surely is one for the books, as it’s the most popular content management system available on the web today.

Because the b2 platform was originally developed and released under the GPL, by law the WordPress software (all current and future iterations of the platform) must also abide by the GPL. Because of the nature of the GPL, you, your next-door neighbor, or I could do the very same thing with the WordPress platform. Nothing is stopping you, or anyone else, from taking WordPress, giving it a different name, and rereleasing it as a completely different project. Typically, open-source projects are forked when the original project development stalls or is abandoned (as was the case with b2), or (in rare cases) when the majority of the development community is at odds with the leadership of the open-source project. I’m not suggesting that you do that, though, because WordPress has one of the most active development communities of any open-source project I’ve come across.

Applying WordPress Licensing to Your Projects

Regular users of WordPress software need never concern themselves with the GPL of the WordPress project at all. You don’t have to do anything special to abide by the GPL. You don’t have to pay to use the WordPress software, and you aren’t required to acknowledge that you’re using the WordPress software on your site. (That said, providing on your site at least one link back to the WordPress website is common courtesy and a great way of saying thanks for the really great, and free, software!)

Most people aren’t even aware of the software licensing because it doesn’t affect the day-to-day business of publishing with the platform. It’s not a bad idea to educate yourself on the basics of the GPL, however. When you try to be certain that any plugins and themes you use with your WordPress installation abide by the GPL, you have peace of mind that all applications and software you’re using are in compliance.

Your knowledge of the GPL must increase dramatically, though, if you develop plugins or themes for the WordPress platform. (I cover WordPress themes in Book 6 and WordPress plugins in Book 7.)

The public licensing that pertains to WordPress plugins and themes wasn’t decided in a court of law. The current opinion of the best (legal) practices is just that: opinion. The opinion of the WordPress core development team, as well as the opinion of the Software Freedom Law Center (https://www.softwarefreedom.org/services), is that WordPress plugins and themes are derivative works of WordPress and, therefore, must abide by the GPL by releasing the development works under the same license that WordPress has.

A derivative work, as it relates to WordPress, is a work that contains programming whose functionality depends on the core WordPress files. Because plugins and themes contain PHP programming that call WordPress core functions, they rely on the core WordPress framework to work properly and, therefore, are extensions of the software.

Technical stuff The text of the opinion by James Vasile from the Software Freedom Law Center is available at https://wordpress.org/news/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too.

To maintain compliance with the GPL, plugin or theme developers can’t release development work under any (restrictive) license other than the GPL. Nonetheless, many plugin and theme developers have tried to release material under other licenses, and some have been successful (from a moneymaking standpoint). The WordPress community, however, generally doesn’t support these developers or their plugins and themes. Additionally, the core WordPress development team considers such works to be noncompliant with the license and, therefore, with the law.

WordPress has made it publicly clear that it won’t support or promote any theme or plugin that isn’t in 100 percent compliance with the GPL. If you’re not 100 percent compliant with the GPL, you can’t include your plugin or theme in the WordPress Plugin Directory hosted at https://wordpress.org/plugins. If you develop plugins and themes for WordPress, or if you’re considering dipping your toe into that pool, do it in accordance with the GPL so that your works are in compliance and your good standing in the WordPress community is protected.

Table 2-1 provides a brief review of what you can (and can’t) do as a WordPress plugin and theme developer.

TABLE 2-1 Development Practices Compliant with GPL License

The one and only way to make sure that your plugin or theme is 100 percent compliant with the GPL is to do the following before you release your development work to the world:

Include a statement in your work indicating that the work is released under the GPLv2 license in the license.txt file, which WordPress does. (Refer to Figure 2-2.) Alternatively, you can include this statement in the header of your plugin file:

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,

but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of

MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the

GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License

along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software

Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St., Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

*/

?>

Don’t restrict the use of your works by the number of users per download.

If you charge for your work, which is compliant with the GPL, the licensing doesn’t change, and users still have the freedom to modify your work and rerelease it under a different name.

Don’t split the license of other files included in your work, such as CSS or graphics. Although this practice complies with the GPL, it won’t be approved for inclusion in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Chapter 3

Understanding Development and Release Cycles

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Delving into WordPress release cycles

Bullet Exploring betas, release candidates, and final release versions

Bullet Navigating WordPress release archives

Bullet Tracking WordPress development

Bullet Using bleeding-edge builds

If you’re planning to dip your toe into the WordPress waters (or you’ve already dived in and gotten completely wet), the WordPress platform’s development cycle is really good to know about and understand, because it affects every WordPress user on a regular basis.

WordPress and its features form the foundation of your website. WordPress is a low-maintenance way to publish content on the web, and the software is free in terms of monetary cost. WordPress isn’t 100 percent maintenance-free, however, and part of maintenance is ensuring that your WordPress software is up to date to keep your website secure and safe.

This chapter explains the development cycle for the WordPress platform and shows you how you can stay up to date and informed about what’s going on. This chapter also gives you information on WordPress release cycles and shows you how you can track ongoing WordPress development on your own.

Discovering WordPress Release Cycles

Book 1, Chapter 2 introduces you to the concept of open-source software and discusses how the WordPress development community is primarily volunteer developers who donate their time and talents to the WordPress platform. The development of new WordPress releases is a collaborative effort, sometimes requiring contributions from more than 300 developers.

The public schedule for WordPress updates is a goal of roughly one new release every 4 months. This doesn’t include patches — smaller fixes for security or similar reasons. As a user, you can expect a new release of the WordPress software about three times per year. The WordPress development team sticks to that schedule closely, with exceptions only here and there. When the team makes exceptions to the 4-month rule, it usually makes a public announcement so that you know what to expect and when to expect it.

Mostly, interruptions in the 4-month schedule occur because the development of WordPress occurs primarily on a volunteer basis. A few developers — employees of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com — are paid to develop for WordPress, but most developers are volunteers. Therefore, the progress of WordPress development depends on the developers’ schedules.

Remember I’m confident in telling you that you can expect to update your WordPress installation at least three, if not four, times per year.

Upgrading your WordPress experience

Don’t be discouraged or frustrated by the number of times you’ll upgrade your WordPress installation. The WordPress development team is constantly striving to improve the user experience and to bring exciting, fun new features to the WordPress platform. Each upgrade improves security and adds new features to enhance your (and your visitors’) experience on your website. WordPress also makes the upgrades easy to perform, as I discuss in Book 2, Chapter 5.

The following list gives you some good reasons why you should upgrade your WordPress software each time a new version becomes available:

Security: When WordPress versions come and go, outdated versions are no longer supported and are vulnerable to malicious attacks and hacker attempts. Most WordPress security failures occur when you’re running an outdated version of WordPress on your website. To make sure that you’re running the