WordPress - The Best Blog-Publishing Platform

September 26, 2010

WordPress is a popular blog-publishing tool, and evolved into a more advanced content publishing system. And some of the things that make WordPress so attractive are that it’s 100% web-based, has a large and active support community, and of course it is 100% free.

WordPress has thousands of freely available design templates and plug-ins that allows a user to customize it. And changing site’s design or adding a new feature is generally as easy as clicking a few buttons.

But in order to use a WordPress platform, it requires website hosting to set it up, your own database and the ability to upload your own files.

Why to Choose?

Ultimately the choice of blogging software will always come down to a few fundamental questions: Are you looking for a hosted solution? Are you looking for a PHP or Perl-based product (or some other platform specifically, like ASP.NET)? What other features are looking for (comment spam protection, multiple authors, multiple blogs, photo gallery, etc)?

Wordpress is designed for those who are not looking for a hosted solution, who are looking for a PHP based solution and who want certain well architected, yet foundational features: standards compliance, dynamic templates, a fully fledged comment system (including anti-spam protection), ease of plug-in installation and more. If these are the types of things that are important to you, Wordpress may just be the perfect fit.

Features to Consider

Standards Oriented: The Wordpress developers are committed to standards in all their forms, from the W3C’s markup requirements to Trackback and Pingback. In addition, the Wordpress developers have chosen to develop common API’s and easy to use plug-in architecture to allow others to work closely with the software without having to jump through any needless hoops.

Dynamic templates: Dynamic templating system means that when you hit “save” on your blog post, it’s live. Also when you make a change to the core templates driving your blog, it’s live.

Integrated Blogrolls and Linklists: WordPress comes with a full Link Management system that creates multiple blogrolls or linklists quickly and easily.

Easy installation and upgrades: WordPress installation only needs 5 minutes of your time or more, only if connection speed is slow. But still, installation is faster and simpler.

Easy Importing: One of the biggest reasons for WordPress’s growth, besides WordPress itself, is that the development team has created importers for every major blogging platform, including MovableType, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, b2 and many others.

Multiple authors: WordPress is built around the concept of multiple authors while it does only allow one blog. It’s geared towards unlimited authors in unlimited categories.

Ease of publishing: WordPress includes both Blog by Email functionality as well as several bookmarklets for you to quickly make blog posts based on what you find interesting.

Archive Customization: Your archive URL’s or permalinks can be fully customized. Any combination of categories, authors, post ID’s and date parts (year, month, day, date, minute and second). For example, an Archive Format of: /archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ would give you a URL of /archives/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/.

Archive Rewrites: Once you have figured out how you want your archive URL’s look, WordPress gives you all of the .htaccess configuration information you will need (if your host supports it), so that your URL’s will appear to be real files, which means search engines will index them more quickly and effectively.

For more detailed information visit WordPress.org and to download WordPress Tutorials visit EasyWebTutorials.com.