What is wordpress? How does it work? Why would I need it for my site? What's the reason for having it? What does it look like on my site? I know nothing about wordpress and would like to get some answers. thanks.

Wordpress

Thanks for the link. But I'm still don't have a clear picture of what wordpress does or looks like.

It's a "blogging" tool or it's a content management system and it can look like however you want it to look.

What does it look like on my site?

"It" doesn't look like anything on your site. It is a collection of functions, files, etc. that allow you to create a website/blog whatever, with all the admin stuff built in.

You need to make the site still or get a free template and screw around with it.

Originally Posted by racer x

"It" doesn't look like anything on your site. It is a collection of functions, files, etc. that allow you to create a website/blog whatever, with all the admin stuff built in.

You need to make the site still or get a free template and screw around with it.

It can't be blended into a page of my site? Viewed from a page on my site?

It depends what you mean by blended into your site. Technically it can be, but you really have to know what you're doing. You can link to a WordPress page or post from any page on your site.

What I think racer x was saying is that you need to choose a theme to use with WordPress (one that comes with WordPress will be used by default) and if you want it to look a certain way you need to edit the theme files to make it look that way. It won't look like the rest of your site by default.

It's not something that just shows up on an existing page of your site. That can be done, but you really have to know html, css, and php pretty well to make that happen and it's really not the best way to integrate WordPress into your site.

thanks. does anybody have a site using wordpress that I can look at? Another question is will wordpress allow me to crate a community where people can post pictures and post blogs of there own?

thanks. does anybody have a site using wordpress that I can look at?

http://net.tutsplus.com/

Not all Wordpress sites will look like the above example. That is just a typical blog layout. It really matters "how" you want to use your site. I rarely use Wordpress for blogs even though that is what it is designed for.

Another question is will wordpress allow me to crate a community where people can post pictures and post blogs of there own?

It can be done. But that gets more tricky. Yes, it can be done with a regular install of wordpress via you assigning roles for members to create posts, etc. However, I am suspecting you want random individuals from the web to start posting images, you'll want a different path perhaps. That can be risky and the LAST thing you want to do is start letting strangers start poking around your back-end.(I mean that in a hacker way, ha).

Wordpress does have membership plugins and, if you are so inclined, might want to even try buddypress. (Plugins are additional files written by the wp community that others can use like a calendar or contact form, etc.)

I would seriously start by just downloading wordpress in a sub-folder somewhere and messing around. After you play for a while you'll have a better understanding. If you have a host with fantastico, you can be using worpress in minutes.

creating a fully functional theme on the other hand, like vangogh said, you really need a good deal of html, css and preferably php background. That is why wordpress designers like me get hundreds of dollars an hour. (ha, ha ,ha)

Good luck!

Nathan Lowell of inbound.org explained WordPress.org versus WordPress.com:

"Wordpress.org distributes the Wordpress blogging engine for you to install on your own server. They maintain the codex of functionality as well as a huge library of themes for the look of your blog.

Wordpress.com is a free Wordpress hosting site where you can set up a wordpress blog if you don't have a host of your own."

He also suggested a business site should have a wordpress.org blog, not .com, if they want to be taken seriously.

Here is an example of a wordpress.org blog (www.thereliefplace.com/blog/) and here is a wordpress.com blog (thereliefshopblog.wordpress.com/). Neither one was hard to set up. There is a word link (the blogs name) on each of the main sites to its blog.

kyh

does anybody have a site using wordpress that I can look at?

You can look at the site in my signature below. It's all WordPress. I designed a custom theme for it.

If you want to see a lot of different sites running WordPress you can check out the WordPress Showcase on the WordPress.org site.

In addition to the other responses, I'll try to answer your questions as closely as I can, Art. Although some of the answers might depend on how fluent you are with your coding knowledge.

Originally Posted by Dirt Hammer

What is wordpress?

Wordpress is what is known as a content management system which is commonly used as a blog publishing application.

Originally Posted by Dirt Hammer

How does it work?

One of the key features to point out is that Wordpress is Database Driven. What this means is that all the posts you write, settings you apply, members that register with your blog, etc. are all stored within a database (in WP's case, MySQL). And what WP does with all this data is that it retrieves the data dynamically and generates web pages through the PHP files stored on the server.

These are pretty much the basics of any CMS.

Originally Posted by Dirt Hammer

Why would I need it for my site? What's the reason for having it?

You don't NEED to use a CMS such as WP, you could manually write all the pages in individual HTML files and upload each one manually to the server, but once you start to create hundreds, even thousands of web pages, this task can begin to get quite tedious.

Originally Posted by Dirt Hammer

What does it look like on my site?

As others have mentioned, it doesn't exactly "look like anything" on your site. To create the front-end "design" of the blog, WP uses a feature that are referred to as "Themes". Each "theme" is basically a collection of XHTML and CSS files that are sliced up into various PHP sections (so you can get the header, footer, post template, etc. to create the look).

Originally Posted by Dirt Hammer

It can't be blended into a page of my site?

Yes it can. If I'm understanding correctly, you can develop your own WP theme and just model it to look like your main site. You could probably even get away with using the same stylesheet.

Originally Posted by Dirt Hammer

thanks. does anybody have a site using wordpress that I can look at? Another question is will wordpress allow me to crate a community where people can post pictures and post blogs of there own?

I also use WP to run most of my sites. However the best way to learn about it is download it from wordpress.org, install it on your server, play around with the admin section, and learn how the files are organized and structured that way.

Originally Posted by Dirt Hammer

What is wordpress? How does it work? Why would I need it for my site? What's the reason for having it? What does it look like on my site? I know nothing about wordpress and would like to get some answers. thanks.

Don't you know how to search? Wordpress is not a very complicated internet term for you not to understand it.

I think you can know about WP in wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress

Context from Wiki, as i guess the user is unable to find info about Wordpress,

WordPress can be deployed using various methods on a hosting environment. Users have the option to download the current version of WordPress from wordpress.org. From there, they can upload the source code and its dependencies to their hosting environment. Previously seen as a difficult method to install WordPress, extensive documentation as well as a user friendly installer have proved different.

WP is blog platform and they are best ever platform used by many webmasters to build their website or blogs.

In a nutshell, wordpress is the most versatile blogging engine and what it does is that it enables you to create a blog or website and manage its content and development in an intuitive form without having to code every single page.

Both of the websites you see in my signature below are WP sites.