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WordPress is the most widely used website platform and content management system on the Web today, running on approximately 15% of websites. It is open source and, hence, free, released under the GNU Public License version 2, or GPL2 for short. Its permissive use and development license, combined with its ease of use from both a website user’s and developer’s perspective, has helped WordPress rapidly gain global market share for the past several years. It continues to grow each month, outpacing other content management systems at a rate of more than two to one. Indeed, in the eight years since Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little created WordPress as a branch of another open-source project, WordPress has become big business … and business is good.
Today, WordPress has become something of a hot topic making its way from the sphere of designers and programmers into the corporate world. Business owners seeking a website often look to build a WordPress site because they hear that it’s a great platform, and while some of them might be unsure why WordPress is superior, their intuition is correct: WordPress is an excellent, flexible content management system with which to build a website. And that means whether you’re a web designer or web developer (and regardless of your experience), learning to develop websites with WordPress and bend the platform to your will is a potentially lucrative proposition. Luckily, it’s quite easy to learn too, and we’re here to help you with that.
So pull up a chair, grab a beverage and a highlighter, and dig in while we show you how this powerful, flexible, extensively developed, and ever-popular content management system works!
This book is aimed at beginner to intermediate-level web developers seeking to work with WordPress on a fundamental level, so as to develop effective websites for clients in the real world. The book begins by explaining fundamental concepts, and then extends to intermediate and even advanced-level topics.
While noncoders will be able to glean some useful information from this book, you should at least have a ground-level knowledge of HTML and PHP to gain the most out of it. There’s certainly no requirement to be a coding guru, but understanding integral concepts such as if statements, loops, functions, variables, and the manner in which PHP creates HTML for screen output will go a long way in helping you comprehend how WordPress does its thing. Solid conceptual appreciation of functionality are more important than memorizing specific functions and syntax—you can always look those up easily enough. Other languages and abilities that are useful to have when broadening your WordPress knowhow include CSS, JavaScript, and web server configuration skills via interfaces such as cPanel. |
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