I love Wordpress. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Wordpress is a Content Management System (CMS) that was built for blogs. “Blog”, derived from weblog, refers to any website that has dated entries. The nature of a blog is inherently appropriate for newspaper and magazine sites, journal and review sites, portfolio and showcase sites, and even mixed-media portals. Wordpress can be used to create these types of sites dynamically. Better yet, Wordpress can be used to build any other type of website you can imagine.

So wait, why don’t I just build websites with Front Row, or Dreamweaver. What’s so speacial about CMS’s?

Why Wordpress?

In the first part of this series, I will explain the difference between dynamic and static websites, while comparing the process of making both.

While there are many ways to make a website, most modern websites are built one of two ways: statically or dynamically. Static websites are usually made in an HTML editor like Taco HTML Edit, or robust web-development software like Dreamweaver. The inherit problem of a static website is that they are require a webmaster to update content.

Dynamic websites are usually built on Content Management Systems (like Wordpress, Drupal, or Zen Cart). These “programs” are powered by a collection of PHP scripts that store and retrieve data from SQL databases. CMS’s have a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and “API” calls that allow a developer to create powerful, rich and dynamic sites while making it easy to update for non-developers .

Huh?

When building a static website, one would normally draft an HTML/CSS template, and then begin to fill in the content on the appropriate pages. Using this method, content is directly entered and processed through individual HTML pages. A browsers loads the page, and content from one file. With dynamic websites, instead of entering the content directly into an HTML page, one would use server-side scripts (PHP) to enter the content into a database (SQL) and then call on that data when necessary. In doing this, the content of the website becomes separate from the structure, allowing the developer to “call” that information whenever necessary. Therefore, if the same data appears on two or more pages in a site, it would only need to be entered once. It can be called as many times as needed, and updating the data requires only one edit.

This all sounds too complicated. Why does my site need a database? What are the practical advantages of using PHP and SQL?

Do you see the little yellow “Never in Beta” box on the top of my sidebar? You may notice that the text in that box is the same for every page on my site. You could call it an “About Me” teaser. So, let’s say I want the change what it says in that box.

If my site was built statically, I would need to edit every single page that contains this text. Given the nature of my site, that would take hours. This is because the text in the About Me teaser would actually be written in every individual HTML page in my site.

With a dynamic site, you need only edit 1 file. With a system like Wordpress, the About Me teaser would actually be stored in a SQL database, making it “callable” from any page of the website. This way, I would edit the 1 file containing the teaser content, and all pages calling that content would be automatically updated.

Like most modern websites, the content on my site is organized by “Category”. So when I write a new post, I decide what category it belongs in (eg: Articles or Portfolio).

So lets say I want to publish Part 2 of the “Why Wordpress?” series.

If my site was built statically, I would need to manually enter the HTML for this post on my main index, the article’s own page, the archive pages, the “Articles” category page, and so on. This is too much work already, but lets say I finish entering the post into all of the appropriate pages, and then I find a typo. If the site was built statically, I would need to edit every page that the post appears in.

Now, since my site is built on Wordpress, when I want to publish Part 2 of “Why Wordpress?”, I simply log into the friendly Wordpress Admin, and within one step I can publish the post and put it in the category “Articles” (as well as many other things that I will discuss later). After publishing, the post will automatically show up on all of the appropriate pages (main index, the article’s own page, the archive pages, the “Articles” category page, etc). If I find a typo, I simply log back into the Admin, and edit the post. All of the pages are updated automatically.

Say I want to write another post, but this one is a tutorial. With Wordpress, I would follow the same process as I did with an “Article” post, except this time, I will be adding a new category, “Tutorials”. Wordpress’ publishing system makes adding new categories very easy by including it in the posting process.

So when I add the new category, everything will be “automatically updated” (the sidebar, category lists, category pages, etc). I don’t have to go into every page to update the sidebar, and a “Tutorials” category page is automatically created. From within the Admin, I can edit these categories, add descriptions and even add subcategories.

Okay, so Wordpress makes it a lot easier for a developer to publish, update and arrange content. I still don’t see how this makes it easier for me?

The beauty about CMS’s is that they usually have an administrative graphical interface that makes publishing and editing content easy for everyone. This allows the owner of the site to easily add content and update the site without paying a web designer.

Think about it this way: Building websites with Dreamweaver is like using DOS, while building a site with a Content Management System is like using Windows.

In Part 2 of “Why Wordpress?” I will show how the Wordpress Admin interface makes website publishing easily organized and approachable by anyone. Stay tuned.