Here is an example list of the various ways a person can subscribe to your site’s posts.

• Email Subscription: Readers sign up for an email notification when new content is published on the website.
• Follow: There are many times of follows, adding the site’s activity to your social media stream. WordPress.com offers Follows with the option to get email notifications as well as the site streamed in your Blog Follows stream.
• Feeds: Feeds are the syndicated and distributable version of your content. People use feed readers to keep up with the latest activity on their favorite sites.

A subscription is different from a share. Sharing is a one-time event. The shared article information is not an act of subscribing to or adding the site to your social web stream of information. A subscription is not just support but a choice by the reader to keep up with that site’s activities.

Subscribers are your site’s fan club.

This tutorial will focus on the three types of subscriptions, email, follow, and feeds, to help you promote these subscription options on your WordPress site.

As you add subscription options to your site, check out what your site looks like through email notifications, follows, and feeds. When you design a WordPress Theme, it is important to design for all the ways a site will be viewed and accessed.

For example, the image to the right in this article is a screenshot of a post article on Mashable, a popular online magazine featuring tech news. The designer has incorporated social media sharing, sharing stats, and encouragement of social sharing and subscriptions into the design of the site title area. The little worm-like line to the right of the sharing icons is a trending chart. It shows the popularity of the article based upon the social sharing, showing you the possible creative options.

As you go through this tutorial, examine the traditional examples used to promote sharing and subscription options, but consider how to creatively incorporate sharing and subscriptions into the design of the WordPress Theme. If you are designing for the public with a WordPress Theme, remember that users will customize menus and widgetized areas with their own ideas on where and how to place these icons and links. Give them options but have fun with these as well.

Let’s go through each to look at how they work and some suggestions on how to feature them. At the bottom of the article is a short tutorial on how to create a Subscription Page to bring home all the site’s subscription options into one place.

Email Subscriptions

An email subscription is not a newsletter subscription. In WordPress, it is a subscription for a notification to automatically be sent to all subscribers when you publish a new post. Posts not Pages trigger an email notification, and only when the post is published not edited or updated.

There are a variety of email subscription WordPress Plugins such as the email subscription featured in the JetPack WordPress Plugin. These add a subscription option to your site’s design, typically in the header, sidebar, or footer areas. You may also create a subscription Page in WordPress with the registration form.

I will cover the specifics of creating a Subscription Page further on in this tutorial, however you may create a Page in WordPress specifically for email subscription registration and sign-ups in addition to a Subscribe Page.

To create a Page for email subscription registration only:

1. Go to Add > New Page.
2. Title the Page appropriate such as Subscribe by Email or Email Subscriptions.
3. Write an introduction explaining the purpose of the form, that by subscribing the user will get an email notification every time the site is updated.
4. If you are using WordPress.com, add the Blog Subscription Form shortcode: [blog_subscription_form] in the Editor. If using a WordPress Plugin, following the Plugin instructions for adding the email subscription form to the Page.
5. Save or Publish the Page and Preview it. Edit it as needed.

This creates an email subscription Page you can use to link to when promoting your email subscription.

To add an email subscription to a Widget-enabled area of your WordPress Theme:

1. Go to Appearance > Widgets.
2. Look for Follow Blog via Email and drag it to the sidebar.
3. Customize the form according to your needs.
4. Save the form.
5. Preview the form in your site’s front end view.
6. Edit as necessary.

Note that there are three views for the WordPress Email Subscription Widget. There is the view of someone not logged into your site or WordPress.com, the view of a logged in member, and the view of the Widget when the visitor is logged in and subscribed to the site. Depending upon the WordPress Plugin features, these may look different or the same, and may or may not be customizable.

Please note that WordPress.com confuses things by mixing up Follow and Email Subscription. They call email subscriptions Follow Blog via Email and Follow as Follow, then mixes the two up with different features. I’ve asked them to clarify this and hopefully an upcoming release of WordPress will do so.

Until then, when you Follow a WordPress.com site, that site will be listed on the Reader > Blogs I Follow web page within the global dashboard of WordPress.com. The latest updates from the blogs you follow come from their site feeds. If you would like email notification from these sites when they are updated, set your Manage Delivery Settings accordingly, turning your WordPress.com follows into email subscriptions.

Also note that currently WordPress.com members cannot change or remove subscribers to their sites. Their current policy is that if your site is public, email subscriptions and followers are free to register for notification when your site is updated. While WordPress.com takes step to prevent spammy subscriptions, they may still get in your list. For now, ignore them. There is nothing you can do to remove them and it does not hurt your site or SEO ranking.

If someone wishes to change their email notification settings and discontinue their subscription to your site, they will need to access their own Email Delivery Settings.

For more information on email subscription basics in WordPress.com, see:

• Email Subscriptions — Blog — WordPress.com
• Support — WordPress.com
• Following Blogs — Support — WordPress.com
• Follow Blog Widget — Support — WordPress.com
• WordPress.com Support – Manage Delivery Settings

Follow

There are many ways to Follow a site.

On Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking channels, a follow adds that user to your social stream so you may follow their updates and posts. You may add such follow opportunities on your own site. Remember, following is different from sharing. Sharing is a single action of helping to spread the word about a web page or topic. Following is a form of subscription, adding their publishing stream to yours to monitor.

Through the use of WordPress Plugins or the WordPress.com Publicize feature, when you publish a post on your site, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media sites are automatically notified with an excerpt announcement of your post with a link to it. Your followers on those services will see the announcement in their stream and hopefully share it with others, thus encouraging others to subscribe to your social stream.

If you have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, or other social media account, you may add links to those accounts to encourage people to subscribe to them. These may be text links or links wrapped around social media icons and graphics within the design and layout of your site. You may add these in a Text Widget in the sidebar, footer, or other widgetized area of your WordPress Theme.

WordPress.com members can add WordPress.com sites to their Reader > Blogs I Follow web page within the global dashboard of WordPress.com. The latest updates from the blogs you follow come from WordPress.com site feeds the member has followed.

To add a WordPress.com Follow feature to your WordPress site (see email subscription section of this article for a graphic of this Widget):

1. Go to Appearance > Widgets.
2. Add the Follow Blog (not via email) Widget to the sidebar or other area of your site.
3. Customize it.
4. Save it.
5. Preview the front end of your site to see the Follow Widget.
6. Edit if necessary.

The WordPress.com Follow feature has the option to add an email notification from these sites when they are updated. Set your Manage Delivery Settings accordingly, turning your WordPress.com follows into email subscriptions.

Feed Subscriptions

Feeds are the contextual or text-like version of your website content. Wikipedia defines feeds as “a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content” available by subscription. Feeds are often referred to as RSS or aggregation but RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is one of several types of feeds which include Atom and other XML code formats.

The best way to think of a feed is that it is syndicated or distributed versions of your content. Your content is not restricted to viewing only on your site from within a web browser. The feed allows it to be viewed in feed readers (aka news readers), aggregators, web apps, and mobile apps – anywhere the user wishes to consume your content in a format of their choosing.

Popular feed readers included Google Reader until Google officially announced it would be closing the Google Reader service as of July 1, 2013. Alternatives include Feedly, The Old Reader, Pulse, TinyTinyRSS, Reeder (Mac/iPhone), NetNewsWire, NetVibes, Flipboard (mobile), Google Currents (mobile), Zite (Mobile), Rolio, FeedReader, RSSOwl, GreatNews, Vienna, and Taptu (mobile). So far, Feedly is winning the race as most popular but Flipboard, Google Currents, Taptu, and other mobile-friendly, magazine style feed readers are gaining ground as we become more mobile in our information collection and monitoring.

Example of Feed Preview in web browser.

Example of site feed in Google Reader.

On WordPress, feeds are automatically generated. There is no need to promote them or add a third-party feed generator unless you have a specific reason and purpose. Fans may just add your basic site address to their feed reader and the feed will be automatically added.

If you wish to promote your site’s feeds, you may use the RSS Links Widget (not RSS Widget) and add it to your sidebar or other widgetized area on your site.

You may also wish to create your own feed logo or icon, designing it to fit into the site’s design. Many professionally designed sites feature customized graphics representing the various feed and subscription options. The HTML with the images and links around them may be added easily to the Text Widget and placed in the sidebar or footer area, or even added to the navigation menu.

WordPress Feeds

By default, WordPress includes feeds. Rarely is a third-party feed package necessary, though some use them to more accurate monitor subscriptions and feed access stats.

The default WordPress feeds (for WordPress.com and the self-hosted or managed version of WordPress) are:

• Posts (site wide) http://example.wordpress.com/feed/
• Comments (site wide) http://example.wordpress.com/comments/feed/
• Per Post Comments http://example.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/post-title/feed/
• Category http://example.wordpress.com/category/category-name/feed/
• Tag http://example.wordpress.com/tag/tag-name/feed/
• Author http://example.wordpress.com/author/author-username/feed/ such as http://example.wordpress.com/author/lorelle/feed/

The pattern of the link followed by /feed/ at the end of the link is fairly obvious and consistent throughout all default WordPress feeds.

Site Wide Post Feeds are the most commonly used, updating a feed reader with the latest posts (not Pages) on your site.

Site Wide Comments are rarely used as they generate a feed for all the comments on all the posts (not Pages) on your site. Some people like to monitor all the activity on their site through their feed reader, a form of one-stop information monitoring, thus add this to their reader. I’ve heard from some government agency representatives that they use this to monitor a site’s overall activity when it is under suspicion of illegal or suspicious activity.

Per Post Comments are popular with feed reader fans as they can follow the activity on a post they are interested in or waiting for an answer to their question.

Category and tag feeds allow a user to follow a specific topic of interest on a site. The New York Times is a good example of this as they offer a full feed for a specific area of interest (think category) as well as feed from specific areas of interest within that category (think subcategories) to help readers keep up with the information they need and not everything else going on within the site.

Author feeds are a great way for fans of a specific author on a multiple-contributor site to keep up with the latest updates from them.

Using Feeds Within Your WordPress Site

Feeds may also be incorporated into your WordPress site in a variety of ways.

Feeds in the sidebar or footer areas of a site can be used to feature your other sites or related or favorite and recommended sites, giving your readers the chance to explore related content beyond your site.

Your site’s category feeds may be included in a Widget to promote the most recent articles within each category or a specific category you wish to promote, acting like a mini table of contents to your latest posts by category in the sidebar.

Incoming feeds may be added via the RSS Widget on WordPress.com and all WordPress sites. To do so:

• Go to Appearance > Widgets.
• Add the RSS Widget (not RSS Links) to the sidebar or other widgetized area.
• Customize it by setting the color of the RSS logo and other customization options.
• You may choose from all posts and all comments. If you choose both, chose the option to show text and images or text only as images only does not distinguish between the two feed types visually.
• Save the Widget.
• View the front end of your site to check placement. Edit if necessary.

Feeds can be embedded into posts and Pages with third-party programs only on self-hosted or managed versions of WordPress. While there some ways to incorporate feeds into WordPress.com posts and Pages, it is the official policy of WordPress.com and their WordPress.com Terms of Service that feed streams are not permitted on posts and Pages due to the tendency for abuse. They are restricted only to WordPress Widgets.

With Google Reader ending their reign on feed readers, and many feed readers using their API to maintain their own third-party news feed readers, it will be interesting to see the future of feeds, so stay tuned.

For more information on WordPress and feeds, see:

• Understanding, Using, and Customizing WordPress Blog Feeds
• WordPress Feeds « WordPress Codex
• Feeds — Support — WordPress.com
• What is My WordPress Feed URL? – Perishable Press
• WordPress Plugins for Feeds « Lorelle on WordPress
• Do You Need Permission to Use Feeds
• Don’t You Know What a Feed Is Yet? Get To Know Your Feeds!
• Blog Exercises: Feed Readers « Lorelle on WordPress
• Benefits and Uses of Website Feeds
• Adding RSS Feeds to WordPress
• Playing with WordPress.com New Sidebar Widgets
• One Year Anniversary Review: What are Feeds?

How to Create a Subscription Page

We’ve explored all the different ways to subscribe to your WordPress site. Many of these involve cluttering up your sidebar with subscription links and images. In addition or replacing these, you may wish to create a Subscribe Page for yourself or a client.

A Subscribe Page features all the various ways people can subscribe and follow your site, keeping updated with the latest posts. The Subscribe Page may be featured in your main navigation and in a “button” on the sidebar, a call to action to motivate people to click through and explore the site’s subscription options.

To create the Subscribe Page:

1. Go to Pages > Add New.
2. Title the Page “Subscribe” or “Subscriptions” if you have enough space within your menu.

Add links or forms to your follow and email subscription options.

If you have a separate newsletter you send out regular to announce activities, products, sales, news, and updates to your site, consider adding the sign-up form here as well.

Find your feeds and add them in a list to help readers subscribe to the feed option of their choice.

To find your various feeds, go through this article to help you find all the various subscription options and make a list of them in a text editor.

For example, the standard format for a category link is http://example.wordpress.com/category/category-name/feed/. Change the domain name to your site and set the category name to match your categories. Category names with more than one word have a hyphen (dash) between the words such as web-publishing-tips.

Put these in a list. Consider grouping the various options with headings and text to explain them such as your entire site feed in one section, all your category feeds in another, and your most popular site tag feeds in another list.

If you would like to put the orange RSS logo next to your feed links, create one or find one from the many RSS/Feed images on the web. Ensure the image you are using is not copyrighted and is available for public use. The orange rounded-corner square has been accepted as the standard image representing most feeds. You may use that or be more creative by changing the color or shape while still maintaining the look and feel of the intention of the graphic.

There are many feed icon image packs you can download and experiment with for free. Here are some common and standard example images that are royalty free for usage on your site.

To create a text link to the feed, use the following example.

<a href="http://example.com/category/wordpress-tips/feed/" 
title="Link to WordPress Tips Category Feed">
WordPress Tips Category Feed</a>

To include an image with the text such as in a list of links featuring your various feeds:

<a href="http://example.com/category/wordpress-tips/feed/" 
title="Link to WordPress Tips Category Feed">
<img src="http://example.com/uploads/2013/03/feed.gif" 
title="Feed Image" class="alignnone wp-smiley" />
WordPress Tips Category Feed</a>

To feature a feed graphic alone linking to your feeds, use the following code example:

<a href="http://example.com/category/wordpress-tips/feed/" 
title="Link to WordPress Tips Category Feed">
<img src="http://example.com/uploads/2013/03/feed.gif" 
title="Feed Image" class="alignnone wp-smiley" /></a>

If you copy the above code, please remove the line breaks so the code is all on one line.

Note that many WordPress Themes feature a border or margins around images which can distort images within text. To set the margins to zero with no border, use the wp-smiley CSS class which should be included in all WordPress Themes by default to allow smilies or emoticons to be used within the text and not distort the text. The Theme designer may have used something else so create a smiley in a post and preview it, checking the source code of the web page for the class used to style the smiley.

Experiment with the look and feel of your Subscribe Page. Add images and graphics to spice it up beyond just feed icons. Keep the look and feel clean and easy for the user to find the subscription option they prefer to access your site.

If you are participating in any of my WordPress and web publishing courses, this article will be added to the required reading list on security.

The meeting consists of introductions (if the number of attendees and time permits), announcements of WordPress events and activities in the area, and attendees calling out jobs specializing in WordPress expertise and those looking for work with WordPress. The educational part of the evening consists of 20-90 minutes learning about the topic. If time permits, the group breaks up into two or more sections with experts to answer specific questions such as help for beginners, WordPress Plugins, and WordPress Themes.
Portland has one of the largest counts for Automattic employees in the world. Many Happiness Engineers, coders, developers, and testers are found here, so it is a fantastic place to find WordPress help and expertise.

The April 29th meeting of the WordPress Meetup Group in downtown Portland will feature “What’s Coming in WordPress 3.6” as the topic.

The Twenty Thirteen WordPress Theme will be included in the next release of WordPress and showcased at the meeting along with a walk through of the new post format interface and changes to the Custom Menus interface along with other improvements and changes.

This social event is not required but highly recommended to help you keep abreast of the latest developments in WordPress.

The Monday evening events are free and start at 6:30PM in the Pine Room, Lincoln Building, across from the US Bancorp (Pink) tower in downtown Portland. You may RSVP on the Portland WordPress Meetup Group page on Meetup.com.

Hack With Me on WordPress Special Event

The Hack With Me: Unit and Behavioral Tests is a special event for WordPress fans and the WordPress Meetup Group. On Saturday, April 27 from 1-5PM, we will be exploring unit tests in WordPress, understanding why they are valuable and how to write unit tests. The group will spend the time also writing a WordPress Plugin or code in a quick hack-a-thon style and test it.

This is a special event and requires WordPress and coding skills and expertise, though you can come along and absorb the information as well. You will require PHPUnit and other programs installed on your laptop to create a development environment. Check the Portland WordPress Meetup site for more information and details.

WordCamps

WordCamp Seattle 2013 has been announced for June 8, 2013, at the University of Washington.

They are seeking speakers and volunteers (a great way to attend for free, though the event is very cheap for a full day conference with meals) so the information is limited. Get this on your schedule and stay tuned for news from myself and the WordPress Meetup group in Portland about carpools and plans to attend as a group.

WordCamp PDX should be announced soon, usually held in the fall.

WordCamp San Francisco 2013 is considered the “father” (or mother) of all WordCamps. It is the home of the world’s first WordCamp and WordPress Events and WordPress fans from around the world flock to the city every year for this comprehensive event.

Plans are still underway for this multiple day event July 26-28. The inexpensive price includes food and features a diverse collection of WordPress and web publishing experts covering everything WordPress from content to code. Typically, the event is under $100 for the main 2 day conference, with Sunday, July 28th, a free coders event which often turns into a bug squashing and hack-a-thon day where anything goes.

This is the 10th Anniversary of WordPress and the 8th WordCamp in San Francisco, so expect it to be a huge celebration and special event with some surprises.

It’s an exciting chance to learn more about WordPress and meet others in the WordPress Community from around the world. I highly recommend it.

The Portland WordPress Meetup Group will sometimes put together a group deal for those wishing to travel or room together, so stay tuned for additional news.

Footnotes have been replaced by links, but there may be times when you wish to link to a footnote in a blog post.

Here is a list of the pros and cons of using footnotes from the article.

Links cover one or more words thus are easier to see and easier to click over a larger area. Footnote links are tiny, hard to see, and hard to click, especially if you have mobility issues.

Footnotes are familiar to academics, scientists, and researchers. If you are publishing such papers or writing for that audience, it would be natural to include traditional footnotes.

There are also times when you may need to cite a source that isn’t online. How would you site a paper or reference that is not online? A footnote serves to cite the source while not interrupting the natural flow of the content with explanations in parentheses.

Three techniques are described in the article.

You may use WordPress Plugins that make adding footnotes to posts easier, or you can create them manually.

The process of adding footnotes manually to WordPress involves using jump or page links with the footnote numbers within the content to “jump” down to the footnote list at the bottom of the post.

I’ve included an example of how to create footnote jump links to take the reader to the footnote list and not a specific item in the list, and how to create a footnote jump link to a specific footnote in the list if there are many footnotes in the article.

This resource list will help you learn more about using WordPress, the self-hosted version of WordPress, and WordPress.com, the hosted verion of WordPress, as well as how to publish multimedia, gedcom files, and share the stories and tales of your family’s history. It also includes information on privacy and other legal policies as relates to family history research and blogging.

Family History Blogging Articles by Lorelle VanFossen

The following links are to articles I’ve written on family history blogging, including an ongoing series on genealogy blogging.

• Article Series: What to Publish on Your Family History Blog
• Starting With a Purpose and a Plan
• What’s the Difference Between a Genealogy Blog and a Normal Blog?
• Who, What, Where, and How Questions for the Plan
• Determining What Features I Want in My Blog
• The Blog Budget – How Much Does a Blog Cost?
• Genealogy Blog: Choosing a Blog Title and Domain Name and URL
• Genealogy Blog: The Fast Method of Setting Up a Blog
• Genealogy Blog: Blog Contributors – Wanted Dead or Alive
• Collaborative Genealogy: Programs to Help Families Work on Websites Together
• Does Your Library Have a Genealogy Department? Do They Have a Genealogy Blog?
• Family History Research: One Thing Leads to Another
• Move Your Genealogy Blog Into the 21st Century With Site Feeds
• Random Genealogy: Online Genealogy Collaboration
• Shame: Comment Spam Spotted from World Vital Records
• The Battle of the Unwanted Family Member Comment
• What Do You Put Into Your Family History Blog?
• Why a Genealogical Society Should Blog
• WordPress Customization Highlights Letters From the War Front
• How to Manage Multiple Bloggers on WordPress

Resources on Blogging Your Family History

The following are articles and tutorials on how to blogging your family history.

• A Genealogy Blog Primer – Everything You Wished You Knew About Genealogy Blogging But Were Afraid to Ask – GeneaBloggers
• Family Oral History Using Digital Tools
• 5 Ways to Get People to Share Their Genealogy – Making Genealogical Connections
• Blogging Your Family History Search – Creating a Genealogy Blog
• Publishing Your Family Tree Online – Creating a Genealogy Web Site
• Mother. Write. (Repeat.): Getting Started on Your Family History
• Blogging Software – 6 Questions Bloggers Should Ask Themselves When Choosing a Blogging Software
• Blogging Your Family History | Thomas MacEntee
• Personal Publishing: Blog Your Family History
• Getting Started with a Genealogy Blog – FamlySearch

Legal Issues for Family History Bloggers and Publishing on the Web

There are many legal issues that arise for family history bloggers including proper citation, copyright, and privacy. The following are articles and references on some of the legal issues that need to be considered when blogging your family’s history.

• Copyright: How to Quote and Cite Sources
• Genealogy.com – World Family Tree: Your Rights as a Contributor to the World Family Tree
• Documenting Your Genealogy Research – Guide to Citing Sources
• Copyright and Genealogy – Rules of Copyright for Genealogy
• Guidelines for Publishing Web Pages on the Internet (slightly out of date but valuable tips)
• Genealogy.com: Do You Own What You Upload?
• Genealogy.com: Who Owns Genealogy? Cousins and Copyright
• National Genealogical Society | Standards for Sharing Information with Others
• Standards for Use of Technology in Genealogical Research – National Genealogical Society (PDF)
• Guidelines for Publishing Web Pages on the Internet – National Genealogical Society (PDF)
• Copyright Fundamentals for Genealogy
• Copyright Table for Understanding Various Genealogy Copyrights | ProGenealogists
• Genealogy.com: Who Owns Genealogy? Cousins and Copyright
• Cemetery photos: permission required? | The Legal Genealogist
• The Legal Genealogist
• Ancestoring’s Ask A Genealogist: Citing Your Sources Resources
  • Genealogical Proof Standard–Intro
  • Ancestoring’s Ask A Genealogist: Genealogical Proof Standard–Step 1–A Reasonably Exhaustive Search
  • Ancestoring’s Ask A Genealogist: Genealogical Proof Standard–Step 2–Complete and Accurate Source Citations
  • Ancestoring’s Ask A Genealogist: Genealogical Proof Standard–Step 3–Analysis and Correlation of the Collected Information
  • Ancestoring’s Ask A Genealogist: Genealogical Proof Standard–Step 4–Resolution of Any Conflicting Evidence

Writing Your Family History

• Getting Creative: Using Genealogy to Teach Writing Skills | Stephanie Pitcher Fishman
• Create Your Life Story : Helping You Record a Lifetime of Stories — How to Record, Edit and Publish Life Stories
• Adventures in Family History Writing
• Family History Writing Challenge
• Writing Your Family History Blogs | GeneaBloggers
• Writing Your Way to the Past
• The We Tree Genealogy Blog: How to Write a “Cousin Bait” Genealogy Blog Post
• Six More Ways to Find Your Family History Muse | Lisa Alzo
• Trace Your Family History (resources) | Faces of America | PBS
• Family History Writers Group
• The Armchair Genealogist: The Family History Blog to Book Project

Tips for WordPress

The following are tips, techniques, and resources associated with WordPress and WordPress.com.

WordPress Help

The following are resources for basic WordPress help and advice.

• Lorelle on WordPress
• Lorelle Teaches
• Using the Support Forums – WordPress Codex
• WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users
• Learn WordPress (official guide)
• WordPress.tv
• WordPress Support Forums (for self-hosted)
• WordPress.com Forums (Support for WordPress.com)

Learning WordPress

The following are basic tips and tutorials for learning about WordPress.

• How to Register for a WordPress.com Blog
• Finding WordPress Help « WordPress Codex
• The History of WordPress
• First Steps With WordPress
• New To WordPress – Where to Start
• What is WordPress?
• Why Choose WordPress?
• How to Get Help with WordPress
• Using the Support Forums
• WordPress Features
• WordPress Semantics
• Differences Between WordPress Versions: WordPress.org, WordPress.com, and WordPress MS
• What can you do with WordPress.com – Lorelle on WordPress
• A Guide to the WordPress Codex, The Online Manual for WordPress Users
• What is the Difference Between a Website and a Blog
• WordPress Tips | Learning from Lorelle
• WordPress Tips and Techniques from Lorelle Teaches WordPress and Blogging
• WordPress Tips from Lorelle on WordPress

Publishing with WordPress

• Linking Posts, Pages, and Categories
• Understanding Pages in WordPress
• Creating and Using Posts
• How To Write Your First WordPress Post
• Adding Authors and Contributors
• Pages verses Posts
• Your User Profile in WordPress
• Writing and Formatting Poetry
• Understanding Categories and Tags
• How to Write an About Page
• The Basics You Must Know About a WordPress Theme
• What You Must Know About Writing on the Web
• How to Set and Manage Excerpts in WordPress
• How to Add HTML in a WordPress Blog Post
• What is a Properly Formed Link?
• How to Add Images in Your Post Content
• The 10 HTML Tags You Must Know to Blog
• Example of a Gallery Post in WordPress
• Copyright: How to Quote and Cite Sources
• Links and the Anchor HTML Tag
• How to Log Into Your WordPress Site
• The Basic Structure of a Blog Post
• Public Domain, Free Photography, and Images for Your Blog
• The Basics You Must Know About a WordPress Theme

Genealogy Blogs

The following list includes family history and genealogy blogs, and directories and resources for them, which may serve as examples of how others are blogging and sharing their family history online.

• Genealogy Blog Finder
• The Ancestry Insider
• British & Irish Genealogy
• DearMYRTLE’s Genealogy Blog
• Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter
• Boston 1775
• Creative Gene
• Elyse’s Genealogy Blog
• Geneabloggers
• Genealogy Blogs – Family History News & Web Logs on the Internet
• Genealogy Blog – GeneaNet
• The Knowles Collection
• Olive Tree Genealogy Blog
• Practical Archivist Organize Photos, Preserve Heirlooms, Share Stories
• RootDig.com
• BloggingGenealogy.com – Blog
• Cyndi’s List – Blogs for Genealogy
• 40 Top Genealogy Blogs for International Research – Family Tree Magazine
• Family Tree Magazine – Genealogy Blogs
• The Genealogue
• GenealogyBlog
• Blog – The Genealogy Center – Allen County Public Library
• Genealogy Reviews Online
• Genea-Musings
• Susans Genealogy Blog
• The Genetic Genealogist | Adding DNA to the Genealogist’s Toolbox
• ThinkGenealogy | genealogy, software, ideas, and innovation
• How to Find Great Genealogy Blogs

This article addresses the techniques used by WordPress for aligning images and image sizing and links in published content. Check your publishing platform for their methods.

Image Terminology in WordPress

There are several terms we need to develop to help you understand how images are used in WordPress. The most important terms describe the images within WordPress based upon how they are used and generated: original image, published image, media file, and attachment image.

The image uploaded to your site is called the original image or image file. When uploaded to WordPress, a minimum of three sizes are automatically created and stored in the wp-content/uploads/ directory on the server. The images are grouped by year then month by default.

The image sizes available for displaying in your content are thumbnail, medium, and full-size. Depending upon the image’s original size, large and x-large may be available. Full-size is the original uploaded image size.

When an image is used on a web page in WordPress, it is typically viewed within the content area of a post or Page. For the sake of this tutorial, we will called this the published image. WordPress makes available the three size options by default.

Image Sizes and Links

The WordPress Media Uploader redesigned in 2012 now features Attachment Display Settings options. They include setting the alignment of the image, the size of the published image, and the Link To feature.

An image may link to nothing, called None. Not itself or another site.

It may link to a Custom URL, a web page or site destination.

It may link to itself, the Media File option. When the image is clicked, the user would see the full width of the image on a blank white or black screen with no branding, design, or designation associated with your site. Using this method, we call the the end result the media file or file image.

The most popular option is Attachment Page. When the image is clicked, the user is taken to an Attachment post with the image displayed at the full width of the content area of the WordPress Theme. The Attachment Page (it is a post) features the image within your site’s WordPress Theme, the title of the image as the post title, and the comment form for discussions and comments. This is the attachment pageview or image attachment. One more click and the user goes to the Media File view of the image at its full width on a blank white or black screen with no WordPress Theme elements.

If you would like to learn more about the WordPress Media Uploader and image handling, read “Check Out the New Media Manager in WordPress” on Lorelle on WordPress.”

This article will focus upon editorial content images, not images on photoblogs or for commercial usage or incorporated into web design.

Now that we have the terminology of images in WordPress, let’s move to preparing your image for uploading and choosing an image size to display in your content.

Original Image Sizes and Attachments

Teaching about web images, I often run into confusion over the term image size. We need to consider the size of the image physically, how wide and tall the original image is when uploaded.

There is the dimension of the image and the size of the file to be uploaded. Depending upon the dimensions of the image, the resolution, quality, file type, and number of colors, the file size may be just about anything.

In general, the smaller the image width and height, the smaller the file size, but not always.

The general rule of thumb for uploading images to the web today in website content is an image not wider than 1024 pixels and a file size no larger than 300KB (1/3 megabyte).

Why?

It’s up to you to choose your own guidelines, but these are typical limits many bloggers put upon themselves to keep their web pages lean and fast loading.

When an image appears on your website, it is loaded into the web page. The size of the published image is set by the user and may not reflect the dimensions or file size of the original image. We’ll get to more on that in a moment. Just remember, the larger the file, be it by dimension or file size, the slower it loads on the site, and the slower the entire page loads. A good user experience on your site is one with little time wasted between the arrival and the consumption of the content.

The typical width of a web image should be no wider than the average monitor width for your audience, and a file size no larger than necessary to crate that original image size.

Let’s do a little math. In 2012, the average monitor width for most web users is a resolution higher than 1024×768, with many stretching as wide as 1920 pixels for the total monitor width. A web page is typically designed narrower, and the content column even narrower. Most content column widths range from 500-800 pixels wide. Therefore, an image wider than 1024 pixels is usually unnecessary.

Understand that this is an evolving estimate. As more people use mobile devices, average screen widths are actually shrinking. Consider your audience and the size of monitor they are using for your estimates for the max width of uploaded images.

If your content column width is 600 pixels wide, the width of the image when viewed on the page should be no wider than 600 pixels. If you allow for some margins and padding around the image for whitespace, the image might be set to 580 pixels width.

As for the file size, while large metropolitan areas offer residents high speed and wide bandwidth connections, the majority of the world is still connecting on slower Internet connections, often with mobile devices on restricted plans. A 300K image on dial-up Internet may take as much as a minute to download and view on a web page. The same image might take 15 seconds on broadband. Consider the agony of waiting for an image to load before the content does on a phone, a large image pouring through a narrow funnel. It pays to keep your image file sizes small.

How small?

As computer technology has improved, image dimensions and file sizes have increased. Yet with the boom in mobile technology, if the majority of your audience is mobile, consider shrinking these down.

My personal rule of thumb, as mentioned, is no image wider than 1024. If the image is a glorious and colorful photograph, I will permit up to 500 kilobytes, rarely larger. For tutorial images, I save them as PNG files and keep them between 50-100K for the fastest loading time and least wait time.

How do you change an image from your digital camera to meet such original image size recommendations?

How to use a graphic or photo editor program is beyond the scope of this article. Look for Resize features to reduce the size of the image. Many programs offer an Export wizard to help you export the image to be web ready, changing the original format to JPG or PNG, optimizing the resolution and size of the image for the web.

Preparing Your Images for Uploading

On the subject of preparing images for uploading to your site, here are some last minute tips.

• Name the image: An image file name of DCN3978502348.jpg isn’t helpful to anyone, let alone yourself. Rename the image file to a name you will recognize and understand such as sunset-on-beach-at-manzanita-oregon-2012.jpg. Most computer systems will recognize spaces in file names, but hyphens or underlines are also acceptable.
• Title Your Image: Once uploaded, give your image a title in WordPress. Consider this the name of the artwork such as Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci. I highly recommend you include your name if you are the creator of the image.
• Describe Your Image: In the United States and most countries, you are required by web accessibility and equal access laws to provide an alternative description (ALT) for each image on your site that adds to the understanding of the content, if your site is commercial, non-profit, or open to the public (such as a government agency). Alternative descriptions also help with SEO. An alternative description is a description of the image written in a proper sentence such as “Painting by Leonardo Da Vinci of a young age woman sitting in a chair not smiling at the painter.” It must describe the picture or offer enough information that someone visually impaired can understand what the image is and how it relates to the content.

Image Positions and Sizes in Content

Once an image has been uploaded, it’s time to add it to your site’s content on posts or Pages.

Here is a list of the decisions you need to make as you embed an image into your WordPress content.

1. Will the image float to the right or left of the content, or should it be centered between paragraphs?
2. Will the image have no link, link to its Media File, another site, or its Attachment Page for a larger view and comments?
   • If you wish to have the reader click on the image to view it within your WordPress Theme design, choose Attachment Page in the settings.
   • If you wish to have the reader click the image and go right to the full-width view of the image, choose Media File.
   • If the full-size of the image is on the page, choose None to remove any links around the image as they are not necessary.
3. What size will the published image be within the content?
4. Will you be adding a caption?

A centered image is usually the width or a little less of the content column, if that image is the main subject of interest or important to the article. Set the alignment to center and the image width to full-size or an appropriate width.

If you wish the image to float to the right or left within the content column, choose the alignment direction and an image width typically 3/4 or less the width of the content column. If the content column width is 600 pixels, 400 pixels or less is an appropriate width. An image aligned to the right will sit against the right margin with the text wrapping around on the left side of the image.

Is there an absolute perfect size for an image floating to the right or the left in the post content? While these numbers are typical, some images easily work as thumbnail sizes, about the size of a postage stamp. Other images need to be larger in order to make their point clearly. These are recommendations not absolutes. Choose the sizes and alignment options that work best for the story you are telling and the style in which you present your material on your site.

WordPress offers four styles (CSS) for positioning images within the post content. The alignment is set in the Media Library when adding images to the post. It may be changed at any time by clicking the image.

The alignleft positions the image to the left with the text flowing around to the right of the image.

The alignright positions the image to the right and allows the text to wrap around to the left of the image. The alignright is the CSS style designation found in the WordPress Theme which controls the placement of the image.

The aligncenter position places the image in the center with no text wrapping around the image. When using the center alignment, place the image on its own line. I also recommend making center positioned images the full width or large enough to fill in the space.

The alignnone CSS style adds no alignment to the image. The image sits where you put it. If used in the middle of a paragraph, like the example of the box in this paragraph, it will force the line that is it on to the height of the image, making it difficult to read easily.

If an image’s width exceeds the column width of the content area, modern WordPress Themes feature a style that reduces the width of the image to fit within the column so it doesn’t break the design.

Editing and Troubleshooting Images in Your Blog

Once you have added the images, preview the post or Page.

If the images crowd each other, pushing the content or each other around, you may fix it by editing the images through the Visual editor, or use the shortcut method with the Text (HTML) Editor.

Viewing the HTML of the post, find the image Anchor HTML tag. Select the entire Anchor HTML tag to cut and paste it into a more appropriate location. Save the post as a Draft and preview the post again to check the positioning.

The HTML tag features the alignment as a class such as class="alignright". If you wish the image to float on the left, change alignright to alignleft.

If the image appears too small or too large in the post, you may quickly “resize” it by removing the height and changing the width. For example, if the image is width="500" height="800" you can delete the height and change the width to width="300" and the image will automatically adjust the height accordingly.

Tips for Including Images in Content

The following is a list of tips and things to consider when adding images to your content.

• With multiple images in a single article, alternate images to the left and right to avoid overlapping and pushing the other images around.
• Images on the right or left should be one half or less the width of the content column. Wider than that and it starts to break the word lines into unreadable positions.
• If the image is relevant to the article, specifically instructional, place it in the center and set the width to full so the image will appear as large as possible on the page for viewing.
• Images on English and right-to-left language sites tend to work better more on the right than the left. Images on the left margin tend to cause the eye to jump over text at those points. Right alignment of the images allows for the words to be read on the left in keeping with the left to right reading pattern, and the images do not interrupt the flow of the eye down the page. If you wish to interrupt the flow, float the image to the left using the left alignment.
• Images on the left within or overlapping bullet and number lists often interfere and overlap and block the bullets and numbers unless the web designer took that usage into account and provided adequate padding or margins.
• If the image is irrelevant to the article, consider not using one. Not every post requires an image. That’s a myth. No picture ever improved your SEO unless you are a professional artist or photographer or it is a picture of a naked celebrity. If your article has the answer, people don’t care if it has a picture or not, unless the picture answers their question. While we all like a little eye candy, use irrelevant images judiciously.

For more information on WordPress image handling, the WordPress Media Uploader, and web images, see:

• Adding an image gallery (WordPress.com support document)
• Check Out the New Media Manager in WordPress « Lorelle on WordPress
• The 10 HTML Tags You Must Know to Blog | Learning from Lorelle
• Testing Video Floats and Alignments | Learning from Lorelle
• The Basic Structure of a Blog Post | Learning from Lorelle
• Public Domain, Free Photography and Images for Your Blog | Learning from Lorelle
• Plagiarism, Copyright, and Fair Use
• Links and the Anchor HTML Tag
• JPEG 101: A Crash Course Guide on JPEG
• Styling Images in Posts and Pages « WordPress Codex
• Styling Images in Posts and Pages « WordPress Codex
• Image publishing guidelines – Webmaster Tools Help
• Types of Web Images: GIF, JPG, PNG – When to Use Each Type
• Should you Choose JPEG or PNG for Better Image Quality?
• Image Optimization Part 1: The Importance of Images – YUI Blog
• Reduce Digital Noise in Digital Images « Lorelle on WordPress
• WordPress Plugins for Images, Photographs, and Graphics « Lorelle on WordPress
• Save Images As High Quality With Version Numbers « Lorelle on WordPress

Links tie the web together, linking one site to another, one web page to another. They are critical to helping us find information and understand what is being written.

In “What You Must Know About Writing on the Web,” I describe a link dump:

Ugly is as ugly does. Don’t clutter up your site with ugly link dumps.

A link dump is when the blogger is lazy and just pastes the link into their post such as http://lorelleteaches.com/2012/10/14/what-you-must-know-about-writing-on-the-web/ instead of the properly formed What You Must Know About Writing on the Web.

Which is easier to read?

A properly formed link makes it not just easier to read the post, it is clean and presents professional looking content. It invites the reader to click.

How to Create a Properly Formed HTML Link

To create a properly formed link, you may use the Visual Editor toolbar button called link or Hypertext Link.

Type the words or phrases you wish to use as the link anchor text.

1. Select them.
2. Click the link button.
3. Paste in the address.
4. Type in the link description (title) which is required by web accessibility laws in most countries for commercial or public websites – it’s a good habit to learn.
5. Click OK to complete the steps.

The text should appear in a link.

In the HTML or Text Editor, you may use the same link button, or type it in manually.

The HTML link tag is called the Anchor and begins with an A.

<a href="http://lorelle.wordpress.com/" title="Lorelle on WordPress site covering WordPress and blogging.">Lorelle on WordPress</a> 

The “href” is the hypertext reference link followed by the link in quote marks.

The “title” is the title of the site. It may be the same as the anchor text or it might be different, as shown in the above example. If the anchor text is “great article on how to blog,” the title might be “How to Write Well on a Blog by Lorelle on WordPress.” It should be in a proper sentence format, starting with a capital letter and ending with a period, though that is not always required.

The anchor text in the above example is “Lorelle on WordPress” followed by the closing anchor HTML tag.

Types of Links

There are many types of links.

A traditional link is any link that connects the reader to an external site. This is also often called an external link or outgoing link.

A link to another web page on your site is called an internal link or intrasite link.

An incoming link is any link from another site to yours, however it is most commonly referred to as a link to the root domain address, the dot com, for example, often called the “front page” of the site.

A link to an external site directly to an article on that site will generate a trackback link and comment if both sites have trackbacks enabled. The link on your site is an external site, but the link in the comments of the referenced site is a trackback link. These are also known as referrer links as you are referring someone to another site.

An image link is a link wrapped around an image. Embed the image into your post or Page and wrap a link around it. Affiliate links are often used this way to turn an image into an advertisement.

An affiliate link is a link to an ad or a paid link. Many bloggers earn extra money by providing affiliate links to sponsors and advertisers.

A link list is a list of links. The list maybe set as a bullet or numbered list, or feature the content in a list format with explanations, reviews, and recommendations with the links, helping to educate the reader about the linked content. Some link lists feature the links wrapped around images such as the articles commonly found on Smashing Magazine. Many people create their top 10 list of links on a subject or their recently bookmarked or discovered web pages and resources.

A blogroll or link list is a list of links to external sites or resources. These were popular in the beginning of the web in blogrolls, sidebar lists of links. They are now out of fashion and not appreciated by search engines in SEO as they have been long abused. It is highly recommended that you create a resource list of links on a Page on your site, or write about each reference or resource individually on posts.

There are also many types of links specific to your site, using their description to designate the type of link rather than a unique form of link. These including author links, tag links, category links, title links, archive links, permalinks, comment links, etc.

Link Format Guidelines

Now that you are familiar with what a properly formed HTML link is, it’s time to go over some linking guidelines.

1. Do Not Click Here: The old days on the web, everything had to be explained. “Click here” was developed as an instruction to teach people where to click to access more information. It is no longer necessary, and when encountered, tends to appear condescending to the reader. Incorporate the links naturally into the text. If you must guide them, use “visit this site for more information” or “you may find more information about this here.”
2. Link to one or more words: It is highly recommended that you link to more than one word to give the reader more area to click through to the article. While it might be interesting to link to many articles with every word, it’s old fashioned, cumbersome for the blogger as well as the reader, so use it rarely and judiciously.
3. Links are Recommendations – Tell Readers Why: When you link to a site, you are recommending your readers leave your site to go elsewhere. This used to scare people, but the web is a strange business. In a regular store, if someone tells you to go away, you may leave and never come back. On the web, you tell people to go away and they not only go away happy, the often come back and bring their friends. Don’t just link without reason. Tell your readers why you recommend they leave your site for this new site, and they will trust you and come back for more.
4. Tell Them Where You Are Sending Them: Use words within the context of the article and in the Anchor Text of the link to let the reader know where you are sending them. If the link is to an external site, make sure they understand that clearly or add a reference such as with this example (external site). If the link is to a PDF or other type of file or downloadable file, add (PDF) or (text file), or some other text that indicates what the destination is for the link.
5. NEVER Force a Link to Open in a New Window: There was a myth going around that no one would come back to your site if you sent them away with a link. Or that people should click an external site link and force it to open in a new window or tab so the reader could keep reading. This has not only proven to not be true, it violates web standards for accessibility and many federal laws for doing so without warning. People now know how to use the back button and how to open links in tabs. Let them control their experience. If you must use this feature, warn the reader with (opens in new window) in the link.
6. Punctuation INSIDE the link: Quote marks are always outside of the punctuation and the link, as explained in “What You Must Know About Writing on the Web,” on Lorelle Teaches. Put periods at the end of sentences outside of the link.
7. Learn How to Cite Properly: Giving credit where credit is deserved is not just right, it’s proper manners. In “Copyright: How to Quote and Cite Sources” I go into details about how to use blockquotes and how to properly cite (link) to sources. Learn how to give credit to the brilliance of others, and you will be rewarded by the generation of a trackback, an invite for the referenced person to check out what you have to say.
8. Design Links for Readability: Links are to be designed to stand out from the text, be underlined, and not to interfere with the readability of the text. The underline is so strongly associated with links, if you underline text within an article, people will often click it. Designing for links does not mean you must underline the link in your design, but consider adding underline when the mouse hovers over the link to reinforce the concept of a link. Choose colors carefully so the link is visible but also easy to read.

Links change lives, I know by experience. The simple act of linking to someone’s site, specifically something they’ve published, sends your readers there to visit with your letter of recommendation. Link wisely and carefully. Honor the power of the link to connect the web as well as people together.

Here is a link list of resources and articles to help you learn more about how linking works, and how to link better.

• Linkability – Link Popularity
• The Power of the Link « Lorelle on WordPress
• The 10 HTML Tags You Must Know to Blog | Learning from Lorelle
• Copyright: How to Quote and Cite Sources
• Changing a Life With a Link – - Blog Herald
• When Your Comment Inspires Posts – Blog Herald
• Site Optimization: Checking Loose Links
• Tracing Your Blog Links
• Dear Blog Emperors: A Link Relevancy Test
• Feeds Change How You Write Links
• The Magic and Fun of Incoming Links
• The Agony of Link Hunting
• Why A Link Post Should Be Like Mingling at a Party
• Why You Want To Link To Other Blogs
• Why Writing a Link Post Should Be Like Planning a Party
• How Do You Find Relevant Blog Posts To Link Too?
• Why Writing a Link Post May Be Less Like Partying and More Like Work
• WordPress Tip: Writing Customized Post Headlines, Title Tags, And Permalinks
• The Dos and Don’ts of Blogging
• Caring About the Little Links on Your Blog
• WordPress Tips: Exploring the WordPress Text Widget (See sectons on adding links to sidebars)
• 7 Blogging Steps Even Veteran Bloggers Forget

Check Out the New Media Manager in WordPress is an extensive article and review I’ve published on Lorelle on WordPress. It features a step-by-step tutorial on using the new Media Manager for uploading and managing your images, video, and audio on WordPress, as well as a few of the unusual quirks in the new feature.

If you have a WordPress.com site, you will be able to test drive the new WordPress Media Manager. Those with the self-hosted version of WordPress will need to wait until December 5 when WordPress 3.5 is released or become a beta tester.

The skills mentioned include persistence, ability to keep up with trends and changes in the fast pace of technology, testing to the extreme, and the understanding that this is a new and evolving industry and be ready for the shifting terrain in and around you.

I’d like to add two big skills missing from this list, without which makes the difference between a savvy developer and programmer and a mediocre one. It is the ability to pay attention to details and not make excuses.

It is always the details that bite you back. A missed semi-colon, a misnamed variable, a loop that doesn’t close right, validation errors, little simple things that should be a part of the testing environment but slip by.

I’ve seen many programmers and designers, including myself, blaming the software, the code, everyone else except the person who screwed up and missed the detail that caused the issue. Then the excuses start coming out. Not enough sleep, too much pressure, too many interruptions, trouble at home, traffic jam driving into work, family problems…the list is long and all of these can get in the way of your work.

When we let the excuses consume us, we negative the good work we’ve done. A lot of successes happened in the code before the mistake. Yet we spend a lot of energy on the excuses for that mistake instead of recognizing it as something fixable, a lesson learned or relearned, and move on.

We all have the same excuses. We’d all like them to go away so we could have a perfect working environment. They won’t go away so our ability to handle them must improve.

The first step is to acknowledge that we all have interference in our lives, so let them not interfere.

Let the Worries of Home Stay at Home, and the Worries of Work Stay at Work

Jews have a long standing tradition of the Mezuzah. It is a decorative prayer container on the door frame of homes and offices (and even individual rooms). When you step up to a door with the mezuzah, you pay it tribute and acknowledge the symbolism, each person and religious sect in their own way.

Discussing the mezuzah with a Rabi while I was living in Israel, he explained that part of the task of the mezuzah was to not just remind the person of the blessing upon the home or office, but to remind them that each is a scared space. Before entering the home, leave all the pain and suffering and worries of work outside so you bring yourself completely into your home with your family, giving them the attention and respect they deserve. Before entering the office, do the same, leaving all the worries of family outside, focusing completely on the work at hand which helps to provide for that family.

I liked that notion and began to practice it. When I find that my home life and work life are becoming disruptive to each other, I stop, reconsider, take a deep breath, and compartmentalize the worries of each. I separate what are my work worries that I’m bring home and disrupting my personal life with. I look at the issues in my personal life and notice how they are impacting my work. Understand that they are related and yet separated, I figure out what needs the most attention, give it, fix it, and get my brain back on focus, giving the work or my family the attention and respect they deserve without the distractions of the other.

So pay close attention to detail and don’t let the excuses get in your way. Be proud of your successes as well as your failures as they are both learning experiences.

We are all born with two ends. One is used for sitting. The other is not. Success in life depends upon which one you use the most. Heads you win. Tails you lose.

This is great wisdom of the ages, applicable to everyone, especially students.

I’m reminded of the old Hillbillies television show. There was an episode with the son, Jethro, where he decided, after jumping into the cement pond and bashing his head on the bottom, that he had a light bulb idea. He wanted to go to a fancy universiteee and become a world-famous neurosurgeon. His dad took one look at his son, trying to find a reason to feel pride and stay politically correct, and said, “Ain’t hope wonderful.”

Don’t be a Jethro.

Monday, November 12, 2012
Scaling Digital Trends
For advanced WordPress users. Brandon Clark of Digital Trends will discuss how to scale WordPress for enterprise sites.

Monday, November 26, 2012
What’s Coming in WordPress 3.5
For all levels of WordPress. WordPress 3.5 is due soon and this is a chance to see what’s coming out with the next big release of WordPress.

You can get more details and information on their official site, Portland WordPress Meetup.

The PDX WordPress Meetup group meets the fourth Monday of every month for presentations and Q&A on all aspects of WordPress. The group recently added a second monthly meeting for more experienced WordPress users wishing to dive deeper under the hood.

All meetings are start at 6:30 and are held at the U.S. Bancorp Tower Conference Rooms, 111 SW 5th Avenue, Portland, Oregon. The conference rooms are on the north end of the building near the security desk.

While the meetings are free, an RSVP with Portland WordPress Meetups is required so they can provide enough seats.

I wish these were really jokes.

Clients From Hell from ClientsFromHell on Vimeo.

Hattip: Philip Dews

Click to view video on Wall Street Journal site.

In my own research on WordPress stats, 25% of all websites are published with WordPress, though this is based upon the statistic that more than half of these are on WordPress.com, where people come and go and set up test sites on a regular basis and abandon them, so Matt’s number may represent a more accurate number of active sites.

Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider were interviewed by Forbes in September talking about the impact of 60 million websites running WordPress. They also covered how WordPress makes money and why there is not WordPress “office” for their employees scattered around the world.

I discuss this in a little more detail in “WordPress Featured in Wall Street Journal” on Lorelle on WordPress.

While WordPress does what it can to make the Visual Editor emulate what your content will look like once published within your WordPress Theme, it has limits.

One of the limits is that is appears hard to publish HTML in a blog post. It isn’t. You just need to switch to the HTML or Text Editor on the Post/Page Panel.

Before you can publish code on your WordPress blog, there are some things you must know.

1. WordPress automatically fixes poorly formed code. If you mess up a link or HTML element, WordPress doesn’t recognize it as properly formed code so it will “fix” it for you by replacing < with &lt; or change other code to make it appear as text.
2. WordPress automatically strips out unwanted or broken code. If you are on WordPress.com, you are not permitted to publish JavaScript, PHP, or other code within your blog posts or elsewhere. But you can publish HTML if you have written it properly in the HTML/Text Editor.
3. The WordPress Visual Editor expects everything within it to be publishable text or a shortcode, code that displays video and other media or features.
4. The WordPress HTML/Text Editor expects everything within it to be HTML or something WordPress can use to generate HTML.
5. WordPress recently changed the name of the HTML editor to Text editor in WordPress.com. This change may be in an upcoming release of WordPress.

There are 66 HTML codes permitted in WordPress posts, Pages, and widgets, codes you can use to make lists, links, blockquotes, images, headings, whatever content you wish to add to your site.

To write in HTML in a WordPress site:

1. In the Post or Page panel, switch to the HTML/Text Editor.
2. Move your cursor to the spot where you wish to add the HTML.
3. Paste or type the HTML in. Triple check to make sure you have it written properly.
4. Save the draft, publish, or switch back to the Visual Editor to continue.

Here are more articles and information you can use on learning how to blog in HTML or use HTML in WordPress.

• The 10 HTML Tags You Must Know to Blog | Learning from Lorelle
• Writing and Publishing Code in Your WordPress Blog Posts

The following is a list of recommended podcasts to give you a taste of what is out there, the styles and techniques that have proved successful, and those you should add to your listening habit.

Education

• Freakonomics Radio
• The Dumbasses Guide To Knowledge
• 99% Invisible
• Stuff You Should Know
• Point of Inquiry
• Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series
• Intelligence Squared
• Harvard Business Review
• New Yorker Out Loud
• TED Talk
• WNYC’s Radiolab
• Stuff You Missed in History Class
• Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for…
• How To Do Everything
• Stuff Mom Never Told You

Comedy and Entertainment

• Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!
• The Nerdist
• WTF with Marc Maron
• You Made it Weird
• Never Not Funny
• Superego
• NPR: Car Talk Podcast
• Hollywood Babble-On – SModcast.com
• Here’s The Thing
• APM: A Prairie Home Companion’s News …

Interviews

• The Jesse Keim Show
• NPR Programs: Fresh Air Podcast

News and Current Events

• Anderson Cooper 360
• NPR: Planet Money Podcast
• Global News
• NPR: Hourly News Summary Podcast
• Wall Street Journal This Morning
• 60 Minutes – Full Audio
• Wall Street Journal Tech News Briefing
• NBC Meet the Press (audio)
• Tech News Today
• PBS NewsHour Podcast | PBS

Speciality

• Pardon the Interruption (sports)
• Radio Three Sixty ACC (music)
• The Moth Podcast (Storytelling – Entertainment)
• Science Friday Audio Podcast
• On the Media
• 60-Second Health
• NPR Science
• This Week in Technology – TWiT.TV

A single post or Page pageview shows the entire content. A multiple post pageview (multi-post) may show the full content of each post or an excerpt.

Most WordPress Themes automatically display excerpts on specific pageviews such as Archives, Categories, Author, and Search, but leave the decision to show the excerpt or full post on the front page of the site up to the user.

By default, WordPress displays the first 55 words of a post as the excerpt length.

This tutorial covers how WordPress handles excerpts.

Manually Creating Excerpts with the More Feature

On the WordPress Post or page panel toolbar, you will find a More button.

On the visual editor, it is the odd button with two boxes separated by dashes. On the Text Editor it is the button with the word “more.”

To set the excerpt length manually using the more button:

1. Position your cursor at the point you wish the excerpt to end.
2. Click the More button.
3. On the Visual Editor, you will see a thin line and small box with the word “More” inside on the right side.
4. On the Text/HTML Editor, you will see a comment shortcode: <-- more -->.

To see how the except will look, publish the post and switch to the front page of the site. Refresh and the published post will be shown as an excerpt to that point with the words, “Continue reading,” “Read more,” or a similar phrase or symbol. This is set by each WordPress Theme.

To change the position of the More and length of the excerpt:

• For the Visual Editor, edit the post and click and drag the More symbol to where you wish the excerpt to end.
• For the HTML/Text Editor, edit the post and copy and paste the More comment code into the place where you wish the excerpt to end.

To Set An Explicit Excerpt

An explicit excerpt is one that you custom write yourself, introducing the post topic on multiple post pageviews.

To set an explicit or custom excerpt, go to the Post Panel and check the screen for the Excerpt form. If you do not see it below the post textarea or in the sidebar, go to the Screen Options button at the top right corner of the screen. Look for Excerpt and ensure it is checked. Close the Screen Options overlay and the Expert box will be set below the post editing area.

Inside the Excerpt form box, write your excerpt. When you publish the post, the excerpt will be shown on all multiple post pageviews including the front page of the site.

To Change the Full Post to Excerpt on the WordPress Theme

There are times when you will wish to change the entire WordPress Theme to show only excerpts on all multi-post pageviews including the front page. This requires editing of the WordPress Theme.

If you are going to edit the WordPress Theme, it is highly recommended you create a Child Themes, leaving the Parent Theme undisturbed to future-proof it for updates and upgrades. The following includes instructions on how to create a Child Theme in order to change the excerpt template tag.

Following the instructions on Child Themes in the WordPress Codex:

1. Create a new folder for your Child Theme under the wp-content/themes/ directory.
2. Copy and edit the style.css file from the Parent Theme to the Child Theme directory per the Child Theme instructions.
3. Copy the template file you wish to change from the Parent Theme to the Child Theme. In this example, we will use the Front Page template file home.php to set excerpts on the front page of the site. For more on selecting the appropriate template file, see Template Hierarchy.
4. Edit the home.php template file in a text editor or the WordPress Theme Editor.
5. Search for the_content() template tag.
6. Change the_content to the_excerpt.
7. Set any customization in the parameters if necessary. See The Excerpt in the WordPress Codex for specifics.
8. Save the file to the Child Theme Folder.

Test the Theme. If you see excerpts on the front page, you’ve done it right.

There are many ways to set up the excerpt on WordPress Themes. You may change the length of the excerpt. You may wish to change the “Continue Reading” or “Read More” to say “Keep reading, you might like it” or anything you wish.

You may wish to have the excerpts only show on searches, archives, categories, and tags, and full posts on the front or author pageviews. You can use conditional tags and statements to create other conditions in which the Theme will show full posts (with or without the “More” option) or excerpts.

Note that some WordPress Themes are not using the_content or the_excerpt but are using custom select queries and other post queries to generate and display content. Check with your WordPress Theme author for the specifics on how to change the Theme to accommodate excerpts.

Things You Need to Know About Excerpts in WordPress

By default, WordPress displays the first 55 words of a post.

Pages do not have explicit or custom excerpts, but you may set the “More” length. Pages are not traditionally not featured in multiple post pageviews, though they are included in search results with the default excerpt length unless set with the “More” option.

By default, WordPress will not display links or images when using the the_excerpt() template tag in WordPress Themes, which generate 55 words automatically.

When choosing your blog topics, realize you could be blogging about this topic for years, coming up with new ideas all the time, sometimes daily.

I recently found Band of Cats, a site by an owner of 4 cats, stuffed with funny cat pictures of their own cats plus any other cats, and cat stories, they can find on the web. The first post was July 27, 2007.

While Band of Cats doesn’t publish daily, though they did through most of 2008, they continue to update their site with cat art, cat pictures of the month, holiday cat pictures and items, cat products, and more. While they publish irregularly now, that’s still a huge commitment to the subject of cats.

Think about your own subject matter and imagine you’ve been blogging about it since July 2007 (or pick another date). What would your blog have covered during the past five years?

Usually, we have to project into the future what topics we would blog about. Why not take this backwards and imagine what you would have blogged about if you had been blogging about something for the past five years.

Today, a WordPress Theme contains files called template files that hold the architecture of the site and template tags, code that initiates actions within the site and data from the database. The design is applied through a stylesheet, holding the instructions for the colors, images, and look and feel of the entire site.

This tutorial covers the basics of the structure of a WordPress Theme and standard customization options.

The Structure of a WordPress Site

Like all websites today, a WordPress site contains a background area, header, sidebar(s), content area, and footer.

The background area is considered the canvas that the site’s structural and design elements rest. It is usually a solid color, pattern, texture, or a design that does not overwhelm the rest of the content and design elements.

The header area content is set from within the WordPress Administration Panels through the Settings > General for the site title and site tagline.

The header art image is set from within the Appearance > Custom Header Image. WordPress now permits a wide range of images and image sizes to be used as the custom header image, and permits some level of cropping and positioning.

The sidebar(s) contain navigation, information, and design elements that complement the site’s purpose and content. In WordPress, this information is held in WordPress Widgets, modular content elements that can be moved around in the various sidebars, footers, and occasionally the header area. These are accessed and modified in Appearance > Widgets.

The footer is located at the bottom of the site. It usually features the name of the WordPress Theme and its author to give them credit, and the words “Powered By WordPress” with a link to WordPress or WordPress.com. It may also feature footer Widgets accessed through Appearance > Widgets > Footer.

The content area holds the content of the page depending upon the request of the user to view the front page, a Page, a single post, a search, categories, tags, author posts, archives, and other multiple post pageviews.

The Pageviews of WordPress

Pageviews are the different views of a web page based upon the content requested by the user.

Here is a list of the basic pageviews found on WordPress.

• Front Page: This is the front page of the site. Posts on the front page of the site are displayed in reverse chronology. It may be styled the same or differently from the rest of the site based upon the WordPress Theme’s specifications.
• Single Post Pageview: This is the view of a single post on the site. It may look the same or different from the rest of the pageviews.
• Single Page Pageview: This is the view of a single Page, the pseudo-static content of WordPress. It may look the same or different from the rest of the pageviews.
• Multi-post Pageviews: The following are known as multi-post pageviews or multiple post pageviews. The pageviews feature links to multiple posts displayed in reverse chronological order. Some WordPress Themes feature the option to add descriptive text to various multi-post pageviews. The posts may be featured by post title only, post title and excerpt of the post, or the whole post dependent upon the WordPress Theme and administrator specifications.
  • Category Pageview: This is the view of the posts within a specific category. It generally features more than one page with older and newer entries navigation at the bottom of the page. If the Theme permits it, the category pageview will display the description of the category set in the Category Panel.
  • Tag Pageview: This is the view of the posts within a specific tag, a descriptive keyword representing the index words of the site. It generally features more than one page with older and newer entries navigation at the bottom of the page.
  • Author Pageview: This is the view of the posts by a specific author. It generally features more than one page with older and newer entries navigation at the bottom of the page. If there is only one author on a site, there may not be a visible link to the author within the WordPress Theme. Some Themes are designed to show an author byline with a link to the author pageviews when a second author is added to the site. If the Theme permits it, the author pageview will display the description of the author set in the Profile Panel for that author.
  • Search Pageview: This is the view of posts generated by a search on the site. Most WordPress sites use the default search built into WordPress. Some sites integrate Google or another search engine into their site to generate search results.
  • Archive Pageview: This is the view of the posts by a specific date, typically by month though it can be displayed by day, week, month, or year.

Content in WordPress

There are four core ways WordPress manages content: posts, Pages, categories, and tags.

Pages are timeless content, and posts consist of timely content and are organized into category and tag groupings.

Pages

Pages with a capital P are the pseudo-static content web pages in WordPress. They tend to hold timeless content such as About, Contact, Events, Policies, Resources, Links, etc.

Pages are featured in key navigation menus by default on most WordPress Themes.

For more information, see WordPress Pages: Exploring the Pseudo-Static Pages of WordPress, Pages on the WordPress Codex, and Pages verses Posts on WordPress.com Support.

Posts

Posts are for the majority of your content. Posts feature timely content such as announcements, features, articles, photographs, cartoons, and general information.

Posts are grouped by categories and tags, as explained below.

Posts are featured on the front page and multi-post pageviews by default in WordPress. A post page is called a single post pageview and features a post meta data section and comments, if comments are enabled.

Excerpts

Dependent upon the WordPress Theme specifics or user control, posts featured on multiple post pageviews are displayed in full, by post title, or with the post title and an excerpt, typically the first 200 words of the blog post unless the author used the explicit excerpt feature (go to Screen Options and select the Excerpt feature to display it on the post panel).

The front pageview typically features full length posts unless the user has used an explicit excerpt or the More feature.

The More feature is a button on the post toolbar which places a shortcode comment within the post at the cursor position. This code instructs WordPress to stop the excerpt at that point.

Post Meta Data

The post meta data section of a blog post features the time and publishing date of the post, the categories and tags, and the author name in a link to their author archives.

The post meta data may be found under the post title with as little information as the author’s byline, and/or at the bottom of the post before the comments.

The post meta data section is determined by the WordPress Theme and may be different from Theme to Theme.

For more information, see Designing Your Post Meta Data Section on the WordPress Codex.

Comments

Comments are featured only on posts, below the post. By default, they are ordered descending in chronological order.

Comments generally feature the name of the commenter, their website if supplied, the date and time of the comment, and the comment itself. Most modern WordPress Theme support Gravatars which will automatically display the Gravatar of the user if they have registered that email with Gravatar.

When entering information in the comment form, users will also add their email address which is required. This information is not shown by default for the user’s privacy.

Comments may include some HTML tags. Some WordPress Themes feature a list of the allowed HTML tags.

Comments on modern WordPress Themes are displayed using threading, displaying replies to specific comments in relationship to and indented below that comment to assist with reading the chronological path and off topic discussions that may evolve on posts.

Categories

Categories are a site’s table of contents. Most sites should feature 5-12 categories at most, keeping the navigation to core content areas clean and manageable.

Categories can be set from within the Administration Panels on the Post Edit Panel or from within the Category Panel.

Category lists are features differently on each WordPress Theme. They are usually shown by default or added manually with WordPress Widgets. They may also be added to the main navigation through Custom Menus.

Categories for a specific post are always featured in the post meta data section for that post.

For more information, see Categories versus Tags – What’s the Difference and Which One?

Tags

Tags are the index words of the site. They are the keywords someone might use to search for that post or found within the post, just as index words are used in a book.

Tags are added through the WordPress Administration Panels on the Post Edit Panel or from within the Tags Panel.

Tags are featured in the post meta data section for that post, and in WordPress Widgets such as the Tag Cloud Widget.

For more information, see Tags and Tagging in WordPress.

WordPress Widgets and Design Elements

WordPress Widgets are modular design and navigation elements added to the sidebar, footer, and header areas of a WordPress Theme. The number of Widgets and their placement within a Theme is based upon the specifications of that WordPress Theme. Some allow Widgets only in the sidebar. Others allow them in the other areas or restrict the number in each area.

Each Widget features a title area and options to customize that Widget if applicable. The title area is set by default if you do not supply a title for the Widget.

Usually you can use a Widget more than once in the sidebar, footer, or elsewhere, though some WordPress Themes may restrict that.

WordPress Support lists the Widgets available in Widgets & Sidebars. The following is a general description of the most frequently used WordPress Widgets.

• Pages Widget: The Pages Widget lists links to all the Pages on your site. It can be a simple navigation list or a drop down menu. The drop down menu is not recommended as it makes the visitor work harder to find key navigation and information on your site.
• Search Widget: The Search Widget adds a search form where you wish it to appear. Some WordPress Themes feature a search form in a fixed place within the Theme such as in the header. This Widget allows you to add another one elsewhere, such as in the footer or near the bottom of your sidebar to help users search easily from anywhere on your site.
• Categories Widget: This Widget features a link list of the categories on the site. The user may choose from a simple list or a drop down menu. The drop down menu is strongly discouraged as it makes for extra work for the user to click it to see your categories. It also hides the list, masking key information and navigation points for your site’s content.
• Text Widget: The Text Widget is one of the most popular and flexible of the Widgets. You may enter text, Basic HTML, images, and many other things within it. For more details, see WordPress Tips: Exploring the WordPress Text Widget.
• Calendar Widget: The Calendar Widget displays a calendar featuring dates linked to the posts you’ve written on that date. It is not an event or appointment calendar. Few people use this any more as most visitors rarely read a site chronologically. It also serves as a reminder of how often you post, or not.
• Recent Posts Widget: This Widget displays your most recent published posts.
• Top Posts & Pages Widget: This Widget features links to your most popular posts and Pages.
• Recent Comments Widget: This Widget displays the most recent comments on your site. If you have a highly interactive site, this is recommended. If you don’t, use the real estate for something else.
• Tag Cloud Widget: The Tag Cloud Widget displays your tag keywords in a tag cloud or heat map. Tags with the most posts are featured in a larger font size and smaller ones have the least posts. By default, WordPress.com’s tag cloud shows up to 45 of your most popular tags.
• Twitter Widget: This Widget requires a link to a Twitter account. It will display the latest tweets.
• Archives Widget: This Widget is usually enabled by default. It features the months and years that you have been publishing. Each link takes you to the Archive Pageview for that date to see all the posts published that month. This is ideal for personal blogs that are chronologically focused, but serves little purpose for most sites as people don’t know nor care when something was published, they will search by keyword.
• Feed Widgets: There are two feed Widgets, RSS Widget and RSS Links Widget. The RSS Widget displays posts from any feed source. The RSS Links Widget displays the feed options on your site as images and/or text. These Widgets are called RSS, a type of feed. Any feed type will work with these.
• Follow Blog Widget: The Follow Blog Widget adds a subscription option to your site to allow visitors to subscribe to your site for email notifications. They will receive new posts by email.
• Milestone Widget: This Widget allows you to set a goal and provides an automatic count down to the deadline date.
• Image Widget: This image allows you to easily add an image or photograph to your site’s sidebar or footer.
• Meta Widget: The Meta Widget features a list of links to key WordPress sites and a login/log out link. This is an excellent feature to add if your site features multiple contributors. See How to Log Into WordPress.

Custom Menus

The menu navigation area on a WordPress site features links to key areas and information for your site.

By default, it features a link list of Pages.

If the WordPress Theme permits, it can be customized to feature links to anything and anywhere.

To create a custom menu in WordPress:

1. Go to Appearance > Menus.
2. In the form titled Menu Name, type in a unique name for your menu.
3. Click Create Menu.
4. On the left side of the panel, choose which Pages, Categories, Tags, Post Formats, and navigation options.
   • Note: If you do not see all of these options listed, go to Screen Options in the upper right corner of the panel and select these features in Show on screen.
   • If you wish to add a specific link to an internal or external web page or site, use the Custom Links option.
   • As you add each menu option, they will appear in the right side form.
     • You may click and draft these to different positions. Drag an item to the left or right to create sub-menu items.
     • You may also rename the labels.
     • You also remove the menu item.
5. When you have completed the menu, click Save.
6. In the Theme Locations section of the panel, choose the placement of the menu. Some Themes only permit one menu called the Primary Menu.
7. Click Save to complete the process.
8. Go to the front page view of your site to view the results.

If your Theme features a custom menu option in the Widgets, create another Custom Menu with a different name.

1. Go to Appearance > Widgets.
2. Select the Custom Menu Widget and drag it to a place in the sidebar or footer.
3. Go to the front page view of your site to view the results.

How to Log In and Edit Your WordPress Site

The video and tutorial, How to Log Into WordPress, explains the specifics of how to log into your WordPress site from various entry points.

All WordPress Themes also offer an Edit link visible only to logged in users such as administrators, editors, or authors.

Click this link on any post or Page to quickly access it for editing.

Permalinks: The Addresses for Your WordPress Site

A permalink is a “permanent” link to a web page.

In the early days of web publishing and blogging, there was confusion over how to link to a specific post. People would link to the page upon which they found the post, but it wasn’t the actual post but a multiple post pageview featuring many posts. The link would be to page 4 of the list of posts. As the blogger would add more posts, that post would shift to page 5, 6, and so on, and the link would no longer work as the post wasn’t there.

Permalinks were featured on multiple post pageviews near the post title or bottom of the post as a reminder that “this is the link to the post you want.”

Links used to be very ugly: example.com/category/dishes/8094/post-title-21234.html or worse.

Today, WordPress uses Pretty Permalinks to make the addresses easier to read and use.

A typical pretty permalink in WordPress is:

http://lorelleteaches.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/how-to-log-into-wordpress/

It features the domain name of the site, the year, month, date, and the post title.

Permalinks on self-hosted versions of WordPress may be set up to display the year, month, and post title, or any combination there of. It can also be set to display keywords and numbers, if the user prefers.

Permalinks on WordPress.com sites cannot be modified.

The WordPress Loop – The Engine That Makes This All Work

A WordPress Theme is made up of template files holding template tags and conditional tags and queries. It is extended through the use of WordPress Plugins.

Customization to a WordPress Theme is made through the use of a Child Theme, a Theme that overwrites the styles of its “parent” Theme to allow easy updating and upgrading of the main Theme while preserving the user’s customization.

The site design and customization is handled by the stylesheet within the WordPress Theme.

All of this is driven by the WordPress Loop, the engine that makes all of the bits and pieces of WordPress work.

The WordPress Loop, in its most simple form, looks like this with a WordPress Theme’s template files:

<?php if (have_posts()) : 
   while (have_posts()) : 
       the_post(); 
       the_content(); 
   endwhile; endif; ?>

The WordPress Loop works in conjunction with WordPress Template tags to request data from the database and the Theme based upon the user requests. Think of these as if/then conditional statements.

Examples of these if/then statements include:

• If this is the front page, show the front page of the site featuring the most recently published posts in reverse chronological order.
• If this is the single post pageview, show the post.
• If this is a category pageview, show the title as “Archive for the XYZ Category” and display the posts within that category in reverse chronological order.
• If this is the author pageview, show the title as the name of the author, display their profile biography, and display their posts in reverse chronological order.
• If the page sought is not found, show the 404 Page Not Found Error.

The WordPress Loop looks like this in a simple form, generating any pageview on the site.

<header>
<?php get_header(); ?>
</header>
<body><div id=“content”>
<?php if (have_posts()) : 
   while (have_posts()) : 
       the_post(); 
       the_content(); 
   endwhile; endif; ?>
</div>
<div id=“sidebar”>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
</div>
<div id=“footer”>
<?php get_footer(); ?>
</div>
</body> 

The get_header, get_sidebar, and get_footer parts of the code are template tags. They are bits of WordPress programming code that instructs the Theme to get the header, sidebar, and footer template files and include them in the generation of the page.

The most basic WordPress Theme may feature a template file called index.php featuring the code above to generate every page on the site. A modern WordPress Theme features the index.php template file as well as the header, footer, and sidebar template files. A sophisticated WordPress Theme would include even more template files to generate the pageviews per the conditions set.

By default, WordPress automatically creates (generates) a pageview based upon the user’s request according to its Template Hierarchy programming.

According to this template file hierarchy, if a template file is requested and not found, WordPress automatically falls back to recognized defaults:

1. If category with an ID number of 42 is requested, WordPress looks for category-42.php.
2. If not found, it go to the category.php template file.
3. If not found, it goes to archive.php.
4. If not found, it goes to index.php to generate the page.

Conditional Tags in WordPress add even more conditions to how a page is displayed.

• If this is the front page, show the custom sidebar for the front page.
• If this is the category page, in the sidebar show a list of posts only found within that category.
• If this is the author page, in the sidebar show a list of posts by only that author.
• If this is a post in the Automobile category, display ads related to cars in the sidebar.

The customization of WordPress with conditional tags is infinite. It is up to you as designer and developer to customize WordPress any way you want.

To see the possible, look for the section on “Study the Twenty-Eleven Theme in WordPress” in What You Most Need to Know About WordPress. The default WordPress Themes that come with the basic installation of WordPress serve as examples of the possible, and are the basis upon which many WordPress Theme designers base their Themes.

For more information on the WordPress Loop and functions, see:

• Template tags
• WordPress Loop
• The WordPress Loop in Action
• Stepping Into Templates
• Stepping Into Template Tags
• Conditional Tags
• Finding Your CSS Styles in WordPress

More on WordPress Bits and Pieces

For more information on the parts and pieces of WordPress, check out:

• What You Most Need to Know About WordPress « Lorelle on WordPress
• What I needed to learn about WordPress
• WordPress Tips
• WordPress Cheat Sheets, Checklists, and Infographics
• WordPress Theme Resources
• WordPress Under the Hood

My blogging software hasn’t been updated for months, and the main developer has disappeared, and I can only hope that he’s okay.

What to do? Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree with. Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name. What should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?

Mike Little in England responded to the 18 year old in Houston, Texas:

Matt,
If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing. I’m sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too. Perhaps a post to the B2 forum, suggesting a fork would be a good starting point.

By May 30, 2003, the world of web publishing was changed forever.

It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened fast.

As explained in the About WordPress on the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users:

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee and a number of other important freedoms.

WordPress is unique because it is an open source project created by the users, its own community. All these years later, little has changed. In August of 2005, with the creation of WordPress.com, the free hosted version of WordPress, Automattic was created, a commercial company dedicated to all things WordPress and supporting the WordPress Community.

A few years later, the WordPress Foundation was finally brought into existence to support the non-commercial, non-profit mission of WordPress. It is focused on education and support for WordPress as a whole. It is the driving force behind WordCamp Central, the annual regional WordPress conference events, and WordPress Meetups, local, regularly scheduled meetings of WordPress fans around the world.

WordPress Timeline

According to the Historical Timeline of WordPress, WordPress was born out of b2 cafelog created by Michel Valdrighi. With a vision to improve upon it and make blogging not only easier but accessible by the masses, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little took b2 and created WordPress (called “forking”).

The first official announcement, thus the official “birthday” of WordPress was made on May 27, 2003 in a humble summary post called “WordPress Now Available.”

I am very happy to announce that the first release of WordPress is now available for download. A full change log is available, but here is a brief overview of the new features.

By the end of 2003, WordPress documentation was being build in a wiki, which eventually was migrated over to become the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users, build upon MediaWiki, the same open source wiki software that supports Wikipedia.

In 2004, the Hello Dolly WordPress Plugin was created by Matt Mullenweg to serve as an example of how to extend WordPress features beyond touching the core coding. It featured random selections in the top right corner of the Administration Panels from the lyrics of “Hello, Dolly” from the musical of the same name (originally known as The Matchmaker based upon Thorton Wilder’s The Merchant of Yonkers) made famous by Louis Armstrong, Carol Channing, and Barbra Streisand.

In the same year, bbPress was created, a forum to complement WordPress blogs. bbPress continues to be developed and is currently running the popular WordPress Support Forums and WordPress.com Forums with millions of visitors and comments a year.

The growing WordPress fan club and community development team from around the world hanging out together on an IRC chat realized that the traditional method of changing the core development code was painful for managing updates and upgrades, and WordPress was determined to grow and evolve – fast.

2005 was one of the busiest years in WordPress history.

WordPress Themes were introduced for WordPress 1.5, extracting the design elements from the core programming, allowing users to customize their own site designs without touching the core programming. Integrated with WordPress Plugins, users were able to add modular design elements and functionality at will.

Plagued by comment spam, with the help of some top developers and security experts in the WordPress community, they created Akismet, a crowd-sourced comment spam Plugin that works on WordPress and multiple other publishing platforms.

The first official employee for WordPress was Donncha O’Caoimh. His work on WordPressMU, which eventually became WordPress Multisite (MS), brought WordPress to the attention of corporate companies eager to launch multiple sites from a single administration control point.

Social events began to happen as Matt put out word of open-to-the-public events in San Francisco to announce major WordPress events and activities. People began to gather around the world to talk about WordPress, how to use it, and to learn from each other. That same year, the first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California, igniting highly social “unconference” style events, which inspired the first WordCamp the next year.

Since 2004, Matt had encouraged WordPress developers and fans to be the source of the “next big” announcement coming out of the WordPress Community. By 2005, sites specializing in WordPress were popping up everywhere featuring news, podcasts, and WordPress tips and techniques. Web designers and developers began to jump on the WordPress band wagon becoming exclusive WordPress experts. By 2010, official WordPress news was restrained to official sites such as WordPress News and WordPress.com News. Within the past year of 2012, Make WordPress was developed to group together all of the volunteer and community efforts around WordPress.

WordPress.com was launched in 2005 over a flurry of private invites to the service. Today, while the numbers are no longer published, it is estimated that 25-50% of all websites in the world are hosted on WordPress.com.

In 2006, the first WordCamp was held in San Francisco with over 500 people in attendance. There are now hundreds of WordCamps held annually around the world.

Widgets were added in 2007 with WordPress 2.1, named for Ella Fitzgerald. This allowed users to customize their sidebar. The first blog featuring WordPress Widgets had the tagline, “Lorelle calls them Sidebar Accessories” as she complained so vocally about restricting Widgets to the sidebar. Within two years, Widget access began to be found beyond the limits of the sidebar, working their way into footers and headers, even though an entire site could be designed solely with widgets…eventually.

In 2007, Matt Mullenweg was named number 16 on the list of “The 50 Most Important People on the Web” due to his work on WordPress, angel investing, and contributing to freedom of speech.

WordPress has been awarded many honors, as has its founder. In 2007 and 2009, WordPress won the Packt Best Open Source CMS Awards. In 2010, WordPress won the Hall of Fame CMS Category award. The Critters presented WordPress with the best Open Source Web App of the Year Award in 2011.

By 2007, the official WordPress Plugin Directory supplanted all the lists and directories of WordPress Plugins offered by unofficial sources, creating a vast repository of mostly free WordPress Plugins to extend the capability of WordPress sites. Currently, these Plugins are not vetted. They rely upon crowd-sourced recommendations and complaints. Recently, all Plugins inactive for a minimum of two years are hidden from general searches as these are considered inactive and lacking continued author support, and reduces the likelihood of incompatibility issues with upgrades.

In 2008, the official WordPress Theme Directory was opened featured free WordPress Themes to the community that had passed an automatic and human vetting process.

Automatic upgrades and installation of WordPress Plugins were added to the WordPress Administration Panels in 2008 with the release of WordPress 2.7. Automatic installation of WordPress Themes came in the next version.

BuddyPress was created in 2008 by Andy Peatling when he was working on adding social networking, community features to a multiple user WordPress site. It has now grown into a main WordPress Plugin with many additional BuddyPress Plugins to increase functionality and features.

In 2009, there was a furry over what was called Logogate by WordPress fans over a new year’s resolution to get WordPress fans to use the proper WordPress logo with the “tall and graceful W not the fat and squat W.” At the same time, Matt Mullenweg added a script to WordPress.com which forced a capital P in the word “WordPress” fixing all the uses of the lowercase P in the trademark name.

In September 2010, Microsoft announced it would shut down its Windows Live Spaces blogs and partner instead with WordPress.com, sending millions of bloggers to the popular self-hosted service.

Also in 2010, with the release of WordPress 3.0, WordPressMU, the multiple user version of WordPress that runs WordPress.com, was merged into the core of WordPress to feature one click options for installing the multiple site version or the single site version. This made it easier for people to set up multiple blogs within a single installation. The new version was renamed WordPress MS for multi-sites.

WordPress 3.1 brought the Admin Bar, a shortcut navigation bar at the top of WordPress sites when the administrator is logged in, allowing for faster interaction with the Administration Panels or back end of WordPress.

WordPress 3.1 also introduced Post Formats, a feature that allows the user to post specific types of posts such as links, quotes, video, podcasts, and images which are featured distinctively from standard blog posts on WordPress Themes featuring post formats. This made WordPress resemble micro-blogs such as Tumblr.

Many companies supporting WordPress, some owned by Automattic, continue to be crucial to the success and development of WordPress.

GlotPress was created as an entire division of Automattic to focus on the localization and internationalization of WordPress.

Code Poet became a directory and resource for WordPress professionals, helping to connect WordPress customers with WordPress experts and resources.

WordPress Stats

In “WordPress Stats and Numbers: Breaking Their Own Records,” I summarized WordPress stats as of 2011. Estimates at the time is that 25% of all websites worldwide were published on WordPress. As of March 2012, WordPress is on 72.4 million sites and WordPress.com hosts about half of them.

As of October 124, 2012, WordPress 3.4 has been downloaded over 21.5 million times, and WordPress 3.5 is due at any time.

WordPress is responsible for almost 15% of the top one million sites in the world representing many corporate companies.

According to Google Trends, WordPress is the fasting growing web publishing platform worldwide. It is available in more than 120 different languages, with new ones being added all the time.

In April 2012, Pingdom announced that WordPress now is in use by 49% of the top 100 blogs in the world, up 32% from only three years ago.

In May 2012, All Things D reported that WordPress now powers 70 million sites, fast moving into the majority of all site publishing platforms worldwide.

As of summer 2012, WordPress has found that access and content generated by mobile devices is up by 500%, leading to improvements in the WordPress mobile Plugins including WP for iOS, WP for Android, WP for BlackBerry, WP for Windows Phone, WP for WebOS, and WP for Nokia.

How Does WordPress Make Money?

In 2012, Forbes Magazine wrote about how WordPress rules the web with over 60 million websites – so where is the money?

The issue of how WordPress makes its money has long been one of the most asked questions.

Today WordPress powers one of every 6 websites on the Internet, nearly 60 million in all, with 100,000 more popping up each day. Those run through its cloud-hosted service, which lets anybody create a free website online, attract 330 million visitors who view 3.4 billion pages every month.

Automattic’s enterprise option, WordPress VIP, is now the default digital publishing tool for major media companies (including Forbes.com). For many of these organizations, it’s the promised land–a standard, easy-to-use, multimedia-friendly platform–after a decade of lurching through clunky, expensive, jerry-rigged content-management systems.

Given the ubiquity of WordPress, why isn’t Mullenweg, now 28, a billionaire?

It’s difficult to explain how a company can make money while not having office space, and have employees spread across the globe, and much of the labor generated by volunteer community members. Matt Mullenweg described it as:

How do we do it? Automattic offers a benefit above and beyond what they ever could: We give people the perk and the luxury of being part of an internet-changing company from anywhere in the world. This mirrors the meritocracy that makes Open Source great and treats people on the quality of their ideas and their work whether they’re in San Francisco or Argentina. (Or if they started in San Francisco and moved to Argentina.)

Even when big companies try to adopt this (sometimes under the lovely moniker “telecommute,” which reminds me of “horseless carriage”) people still face cultural resistance from their managers and teams, or find themselves as a second-tier citizen versus those in headquarters. The same often happens in “remote offices.” For it to really work it has to be part of the DNA of the company from day one. You have to be really committed to keep the creative center and soul of the organization on the internet, and not in an office.

The funding for WordPress began with investors. Corporate companies with a strong future vision saw their future with the web based in GPL licensed, community-driven publishing platforms. WordPress shone from among the clutter and constraints of TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, Live Journal, etc. Placing their bets, and company time, on WordPress, they generously put their money where their sites were to keep the community funded and going. The New York Times and Om Malik were among the first to help the young man with his web publishing vision.

In 2006, the first funding investor partners arrived bringing in the millions WordPress needed to keep the company independent and self-sufficient. More funding arrived in 2008, keeping the company going with its 18 employees at the time, as WordPress.com and Automattic’s roles in the organization were stabilized and income from those projects began to cover the bills.

WordPress had the WordPress.org domain name, yet there was a lot of confusion over the WordPress.com site. With WordPress becoming a trademark name, the owner of the WordPress.com site eventually gave in and gave the domain over to Matt Mullenweg. He mulled over the possibilities and in 2005 the hosted version of WordPress, WordPress.com, was born, a long time dream of Mullenweg to provide a global publishing platform free of web hosting fees and complications, built with WordPressMU/MS, giving everyone a chance to have their say in the world.

Mullenweg didn’t stop with his commercial sites. He saw how WordPress needed to have a variety of companies and projects supporting its users. Ping-O-Matic was created early on to handle all the pings from WordPress blogs (and others) to notify search engines of updates, inviting them to crawl the sites and index them. He bought Gravatar to help users create global avatars across all WordPress sites. He bought PollDaddy to help users easily set up polls and surveys.

In “Automattic Grows Up: The Company Behind WordPress.com Shares Revenue Numbers and Hires Execs” on All Things D, it was announced that Automattic is now profitable, expecting to bring in $45 million in 2012.

The majority of Automattic revenue comes from premium subscription services, and that’s supplemented by a “VIP” enterprise publisher business — in total, there are half a million paying customers — as well as a recently launched advertising revenue-sharing network.

Called a commercial Robin Hood and the Blog Prince of Blogging, Matt Mullenweg (Wikipedia Page) has been the recipient of much outside investment, and he has done his fair share of giving back, too. He was named as one of the Most Influential Angel Investors by Forbes in 2012.

WordPress and Jazz Legends

Want to start a conversation with Matt Mullenweg, get him to talk about Jazz and the great legends of the art form. His passion for this uniquely American art is found in the naming of major WordPress releases.

Blogging Pro author, Franky Branckaute put together an infographic of the Jazz Legends of WordPress to show the history of the version names and their namesakes.

For a full listing of the Jazz legends and the version of WordPress they are named for, see WordPress Versions in the WordPress Codex.

More on the History of WordPress

For more information on the history and development of WordPress, check out the following.

• The Biography Of WordPress – With Matt Mullenweg Mixergy
• WordPress Versions « WordPress Codex
• Andrew Ryno: A Brief History of Plugins | WordPress.tv
• The History of WordPress | SEO Alien
• WordPress – Wikipedia article