This article introduce WordPress, and give a quick summary on installation and rapid site setup with some useful plugins. At the end there is a list of sites for themes review.
Introduction
WordPress (WP) is an Open Source Content Management System (CMS), powered by PHP and MySQL. It was Born as a Weblog (blog) publishing system, but is evolved in a complete CMS application; IMHO is the most fast and intuitive available.
Actually (jan 2011) is the most used CMS for building web sites.
Installation
Quick version of installation instructions:
- Download and install WordPress
- Create a DB for wordpress
- Rename wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php; then fill it with your database details
- Place WordPress files in desired location on your Web Server
- Run the WordPress installation script accessing wp-admin/install.php
Complete page about installing:
- install wp: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress
Plugins
WordPress community makes available a lot of plugins. Those are useful for me.
- WP Cumulus: show tag clouds, with a flash animations
- WPML : WordPress Multilingual Plugin, for multilingual site
- WP jQuery LightBox: a LightBox-like plugin, made with jQuery.
- Syntax Higlighter evolved: for source code highlighting
- Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress: good for source highlighting
Themes Review
Reviewing themes is a vaste topic, so i leave only a list of links, with most interesting themes.
- free wordpress 3.0 ready themes: list of wp3.0 themes (Gadget, Boronic)
- themelab: contains interesting themes (SilverBlog, ..)
- best free 3.0 wordpress themes: (The Morning After, Mystique, Twist of ten)
- Other themes:
- wordpress 3 themes: Indigo, Helios, NewsZine, Inner
- top 10 wordpress ready themes: Titan, Suffusion,
- wordpress 3.0 themes: Voidy, Magazine Basic, The Erudite
- 32 free wordpress 3.0 themes to enhance your blogging experience: Destyle, W3theme, Enertia
