Wordpress Setup

Why Wordpress

Wordpress is a popular and versatile CMS - Content Management System.

It is great for a website that has a single author and straight forward navigation. This is the second CMS I recommend to people setting up websites. I waver between suggesting Wordpress or Drupal. Needless to say, I think either are great choices and you can do a lot worse. Take me on my word for that.

I first came across Wordpress aeons ago when a workmate was looking for a blogging tool. He set up Wordpress, it worked, and it was probably it's first release. It wasn't flexible at all, but it did the basic things he wanted and so forth. Not impressive at that time anyway. Since then there have been many releases and it's become quite good. Many of the basic features you would want are built in, like images, and can add extensions for all sorts of things.

Wordpress Strengths

There are a ton of templates that work with Wordpress. This is handy since you can get something that is close to what you want right away, and fix it to be custom, or whatever.

The other thing that makes me smile is the export/import of Wordpress data. It is really nice to prepare a website on a test machine export the data and import it on a live server. This is not everything, though, as the images, files, video, or what have you, are not transferred... but that can be done manually enough.

Wordpress Weaknesses

More to come here, but the things that come to mind right away are:
1) having multiple roles with access to different features, etc. is a bit difficult.
2) installation is a bit simple, though you can customize it, it can be a double edged sword when you need something a little unusual.
3) export/import of website data - well - it is also a strength, but it doesn't transfer everything, after all, causing some headaches.

Wordpress Installation

It is way simple. A few steps and it is running. Unzip the current Wordpress download, and go to your website, and answer the questions. You will have to have a MySQL database ready, to get it going, but who doesn't expect that? I would really like to see PostgreSQL supported with Wordpress as well.

Once it's there, you should install a smattering of Extensions. These are the ones I almost always install, just because it makes my life easier:

1) NextGen Gallery - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/

Some additional ones are:
1) Lightbox 2 - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightbox-2-wordpress-plugin/