We announce our meetings through the WordPress Austin meetup group, so you’re encouraged to join us there to find out about upcoming events. We post notes about a lot of our meetings at our website, WPAustin.com, and we engage in regular discussions and assist users on the WordPress Austin Google Group.

As a side project, Nick Batik, Sandi Chevalier-Batik, Pat Ramsey and I also teach both beginner and advanced WordPress classes through Hands-On WordPress.
And of course, beyond all these things, I’m available for website design, training and consulting on a one-on-one basis, so just drop me a line!

Even though WordPress is relatively simple to use, I recognized that there was a bit of a learning curve to get started, and competent, but non-technical, people could probably use a bit of a boost to get started. So the first section of the site is devoted to understanding the options in the admin panel of WordPress.

Because the AIR competition is about building accessible websites, I also created a section on how to modify themes and create child themes, for those who want to customize their WordPress site.

I welcome everyone to use the site, and make comments if I haven’t explained something thoroughly. I’d also welcome suggestions on additional topics that I could cover.

So if you’re interested in learning more, go to Using WordPress and take a look!

So far we’ve had three great presentations from Bill Erickson, John Chandler and Nick Batik, with more to come from Jared Atchison, Devin Price, Stephanie Leary and Jason Cohen. We’re hearing about everything from what to do BEFORE you install WordPress to how to turn WordPress into a full-featured Content Management System.

Thanks to all the great presenters for offering up their wisdom. Also, thanks to all the great volunteers (I’m the volunteer wrangler, but not much ‘wrangling’ has been needed!)

In particular, hats off to Kimbrough Gray and Pat Ramsey for putting this event together.

For those unfortunate enough to be missing the event, I’m live blogging the event (which consists mainly of posting notes!) at the official WordCamp ATX website. After the event we’ll also be making a video of the speakers available.

You can also follow the event on Twitter at #wcatx.

The site, Using WordPress, is not meant as a step-by-step tutorial, but as a brief overview of WordPress, with the goal of demystifying some of the elements of the platform. There is also a brief introduction to the architecture of WordPress with discussion on how to develop custom themes.

Currently, the site is broken down into two sections, ‘Basics’ and ‘Beyond the Basics’. The topics so far include the following:

Basics

• Why WordPress?
• Admin Panel
• Pages & Posts
• Plugins
• Themes
• Widgets

Beyond the Basics

• WordPress Architecture
• Template Hierarchy
• WordPress Hooks
• The ‘Loop’
• Dashboard Editor
• Child Theming
• Themes for Development

There is also a brief introduction to Web Accessibility.

I’d love for people to visit the site and ask questions about any of the content there. As I hear from more people, I’ll add more information to the site.

Collision Testimonials
Allow visitors to submit testimonials through a web form.

EG Series
Organize your posts through the creation of groups/series of posts.

Dummy Content
Plugin that creates dummy pages and content to test your site design. It offers the option to auto-delete when you’re ready to launch your live site.

Lorem Ipsum
Generates Lorem Ipsum filler text for both posts and comments. You do need to delete manually when you have real content.

Access Keys for WP Nav Menus
Adds access keys to your navigation menus, making your site more accessible to people who rely on screen readers or other navigation to use your site. (If you have used this, please let me know how well it works!)

All in One SEO
Search Engine Optimizer that allows you to manage your meta tag and other information to improve search engines find and promote your site

Headspace 2
Another recommended SEO manager

Sexy Bookmarks
Sociable
Share & Follow

Three plugins that allow for the addition of social media buttons

CryptX
Encrypts email addresses

WP-PageNav
Plugin that adds additional navigation options to your posts

All in One click updater
Updates all plugins with one click

Bad Behavior
Extra protection from spam comments, on top of Askimet

BackWPup
(note: gives PHP errors until configured)
This plugin does database backups of your site content to email, FTP or other options. It also allows you to do a backup of your media and files, and you can even optimize your database (it puts your site in maintenance mode temporarily so files aren’t corrupted).

WP Touch
An alternate theme plugin to make your site mobile-friendly

Hint: use the User Agent Switcher, a Firefox extension, to switch to mobile device emulator

WPML Multilingual CMS
Allows for localization support, if you have content in multiple languages

Global Translator
Plugin that uses computer translators including Google and Babelfish to translate content into your choice of 48 different languages.

NextGEN Gallery
A powerful and very popular image gallery that will replace your standard media library. A number of plugins have been developed to further extend NextGEN’s functionality.

Also see information on the plugin and information on NextGEN templates from nextgen-gallery.com.

Highslide 4 WordPress *reloaded*
Javascript gallery effects

Members
User/role/content management plugin to add CMS functionality to WordPress
Also see the plugin developer Justin Tadlock’s website.

User access manager
Another user management plugin

Theme my login
Theme my profile
Two plugins to style admin sections of WordPress to better match your custom theme.

Search Engine Optimization & Metrics

If you have a website, you want to make sure people are finding it. While effective SEO is more complicated than simply installing a couple of plugins, a good first step in the process is ensuring Google and other search engines index your site properly.

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is pretty much a universal recommendation from everyone who uses WordPress. It offers a lot of settings that will help you milk more SEO out of your site. Using the basic settings, such as setting keywords, is simple; some of the other settings will take a bit more research and tweaking.

Google XML Sitemaps

There are two kinds of sitemaps. One is a human-readable index of your site that offers an alternative for navigation. Unlike that kind of sitemap, the Google XML sitemap plugin generates an XML sitemap, invisible to your visitors, but which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com index your blog.

Google Analyticator

This is a great plugin. It automatically adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics. It also gives you a quick snapshot of your site’s traffic over 30 days in a window in the WordPress Dashboard. Note that you will need to set up a (free) Google Analytics account (which can be tied to your current gmail acount), and after enabling this plugin you will need to go into the plugin’s settings page to connect your site to your account to enable logging.

Site Management

Askimet

Akismet is automatically included with WordPress and is maintained by Automattic, the company that is responsible for WordPress itself. If you enable comments on your site, it’s an invaluable addition, as it runs a spam filter to check comments against the Akismet web service. You need an API key to use it, but this is free for many users and easy to set up.

WordPress Database Backup

Every site needs regular backups; a blog, or other sites with regularly-changing content, doubly so. This plugin sends you automatic backups to your email (I set mine for weekly). If your site goes down or gets hacked, you’ll be glad you have a backup ready to deploy.

Social Plugins

FD Feedburner Plugin

WordPress automatically creates a feed for your blog posts, but it doesn’t really let you do much with it, and in my experience that feed isn’t always reliable on other services like Facebook. At any rate, I’ve had better luck with Feedburner. This plugin allows you to redirect your feed to your feedburner account.

Share and Follow

This plugin allows you to add your choice of share buttons to the bottom of your posts/pages, including all the major social media sites as well as email and print buttons. It also gives you buttons for people who might want to follow your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or other accounts.

Sociable

Another, and very popular, plugin that allows you to add links as well as an RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.

Contact Form 7

There are a number of contact form plugins out there. I like this one because, while a little clunky, it does the job. You can decide on which fields you need, whether you want check boxes or other input fields, and can tailor the messages. Once you set it all up, the form will send an email to the address you designate. You can also have multiple forms on one site. It creates a shortcode. a block of text in [] brackets, that you insert wherever you want the form to appear.

How to find plugins

While I’ve linked to the plugin sites, all of these should be available through searching for them by name in the plugin directory within the WordPress dashboard. They should all be compatible through at least WordPress 3.0.1.

There are hundreds of plugins for WordPress, so clearly this is just the tip of the iceberg. Finding the right one can be difficult, so word of mouth can help narrow down the options. With that in mind, if you know of other indispensible plugins, please let me know.

First is Blogathon, which will be Saturday, August 28th from 9am-9pm. It looks like a great day of blogging and hanging out. I’ll be volunteering in the tech room, for people who want to set up a WordPress blog or need help tweaking one they already have. And since I’m there, I might also be doing a little blogging myself.

While tickets are sold out for Blogathon proper, you can attend the Blogathon happy hour from 6-9pm. Performing live at happy hour will be my friend Gina Chavez, who is a phenomenal singer/songwriter from right here in Austin.

Then in September I’ll be teaching a couple of WordPress classes for AIR Austin along with Bryan Robison of Pneumatic.

AIR is a contest where web development teams are matched to non-profit organizations with the goal of making an accessible website for the non-profit. As part of the contest, the organization Knowbility provides accessibility training for team members.

As part of the training, Bryan and I will do a basic “how to” class with WordPress, followed by a second class on WordPress development and accessibility. All participants in AIR will be able to attend these classes as part of the program.

For more information on AIR:
General Information about AIR and Knowbility
Register a Team
Register as an Individual

When using WordPress, it’s relatively easy to learn how to use and get a professional website up and running. Yet at the same time, its structure also allows experienced users to build onto it, developing complex sites with high functionality.

Recently on a forum I frequent, someone was asked to do a simple website for a business, and wondered what he would need to know to do this. Someone responded that he would need to master HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and graphic design. Then he threw out search engine optimization, marketing, copywriting, accessibility, and cross-browser compatibility, among other things. A whole laundry list of things that one would need to develop and market a website from scratch. Then, apparently feeling confident that he had overwhelmed the person asking the question, he ended his response by suggesting the person pay a couple thousand dollars to have someone do the website for him.

To be honest, this is a completely accurate answer. But it’s also unfair. While a custom designed website can (and should, if done well) cost several thousand dollars, that price is completely out of the reach of most artists, musicians, small business owners, and individuals. And the “do it yourself” suggestion presents a lengthy and steep learning curve for most people.

This is why I love WordPress, because with just a little effort you can put together a website that looks sharp without spending the big bucks. Or you can pay someone to build a custom theme in WordPress with the features you need.

The point is, WordPress allows for both, and the choice is yours.

In a future post I’ll be discussing places to find nice WordPress themes for under $100. I’ve also been asked for plug-in recommendations, so stay tuned!

If you’ve downloaded the new 3.0 Thelonius version of WordPress, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the images included with the new default Twenty Ten theme.

Did you know where they came from? Did you, like me, wonder why they picked those images to feature?

Wonder no more.

I just stumbled across the blog post Matt Mullenweg made back in June that explains their origins.

What I found remarkable was that the now already ubiquitous default image of a sole figure walking down a tree-lined road was taken in Ireland, specifically the road to Blarney Castle. While I liked the photo before, knowing that it was taken in Ireland just makes the whole theme that much cooler. (Other locations include Munich, Osaka, and Agra.)

So while many of you may use the default theme with your own image, or create a child theme to tweak it further, or just go with an entirely different look, it’s worth stopping for just a moment to review the photos and the stories behind them.

WordPress first came on the scene in 2003, when it was released by Matt Mullenweg. According to Wikipedia, it’s “an open source CMS, often used as a blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plugin architecture and a templating system.”

That’s a good place to start. To break it down further, WordPress is a platform for both blogging and full-scale web development. It allows a novice to get a website up and running in just a few minutes, while allowing the creation of advanced websites with heavy customization, multiple users and millions of visitors. Some noteworthy sites that run WordPress include the New York Times and CNN. See featured WordPress sites at WordPress.org.

Why is it so popular?

First of all, it’s a Content Management System. In simple terms, this means that when someone creates a website using WordPress, they don’t need to develop all the code themselves, but instead rely on a pre-built system consisting of a number of PHP files and a MySQL database that together dynamically generate webpages based on content residing in a database. All an end user needs to do is choose a “theme”, or skin, that defines how the site looks, and then enter content (both text and media files) into “pages” or “posts” on a user-friendly “dashboard” (or control panel) without needing to understand much or any HTML code. It’s possible to add additional functionality using plugins, which are often as easy to install as a few button clicks.

Because it’s a CMS, that makes it easy to add new content (either a blog post or an entirely new page in the navigation) without having to hack the code; it’s also extremely quick to make global changes to the header, font colors, etc. Some of these changes can be done literally in seconds.

Second, it’s open source, meaning that the code that runs WordPress is open to everyone to view, embellish, or change. Furthermore, because it’s so easy to get under the hood, anyone with minimal programming skills can modify themes or create new ones, and others have built new plugins and other features unimaginable by the original creators of WordPress (some of which have been incorporated into core functions over time). Even better, many people have shared their themes and plugins for free, allowing quite a bit of customization without any expense.

Third, it’s just easy to use. Most people can pick up the basic features of WordPress and the Dashboard and create a website or blog in just an hour or two.

Isn’t WordPress for blogging?

While it is often used for this purpose, using WordPress it’s very easy to create a regular business website without a blog feature. In fact, more and more websites are migrating away from static HTML (in which, to make changes, a webmaster had to manipulate the code manually, making for more time-consuming and costly changes) to WordPress.

So why should I use WordPress?

Choose WordPress if you want:

• direct control over your content
• to be able to easily make changes to the look & feel and organization of your site over time
• to start/migrate a blog
• to post photos, events, calendars, or anything that will require regular updates
• a large and vibrant community and detailed documentation in the WordPress Codex
• a website with minimal upkeep and little to no ongoing expenses
• easy access to Google Analytics
• the ability to link to Facebook, Flickr or other social media
• the ability to choose whether to have free hosting on WordPress.com or on your own server/hosting company

Great! How do I get started?

You can sign up and create a free WordPress website now at WordPress.com or download a free copy of WordPress to install on your own server by going toWordPress.org . Easiest of all – if you already have a web provider, it’s possible that you can install WordPress through your Control Panel/CPanel using something like Fantastico that automates the process for you.

And if you need further assistance, or just want to see if WordPress is right for you, we at Getting Dirty Designs would love to help you out!