WordPress

From the inception of the world wide web, every web page consists of content (what you read or see) and markup (”background” information about the structure of the content and how to display it).  Markup can also include links to other pages.  It is always possible to manually create and maintain content, markup and links uniquely for every page, perhaps with assistance from a specialized editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

This manual approach notoriously begins with a comforting simplicity and ends in a tangle of inconsistent styling, mismatched menus, broken links and webmaster busywork.  Many who have gone down that road crave for software to make their website generate markup automatically.  Such server-based software should apply page styling based on a user-defined template, automatically archive old content, and assist or automate the creation of menus and links.  After a human web designer provides creative input regarding the structure and style of pages, the website itself does the grunt work of applying these design rules.  Once the markup rules are defined, a site editor can focus on content.  WordPress is one way to make a website work that way.  It is free software with an active and growing online community of users and developers.

WordPress is self-described as “a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.” Usually, it is further categorized as a “personal” publishing platform designed for blogging. A blog (weblog) is a regularly updated online journal, typically maintained by a single author for general public consumption.

However, as WordPress has matured, its features are more and more akin to a general purpose content management system (CMS) suitable for running a general-purpose website with multiple sections and authors. Wordpress supports the addition of new features through third-party extensions called plugins, and many plugins have emerged to further push it in the CMS direction. Among those, Role Scoper is one of the most ambitious.

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