This is a kind of on-line (tran)script of a free WordPress workshop that takes place in autumn of 2019 in Novi Sad, held by mister Davor Altman, from the Automattic company. It is held in Novi Sad Startit centre, a place for support of IT community in Serbia (if you wish to hold a free course in Serbia, feel free to contact them for the classrooms and support).
Course is planned to consist of seven two-hour workshops. This first script sublimes the introductory part. Main purpose of this is my personal reminder-reference, and help to anyone else taking the course, or interested in the topic. Sharing is caring. 🙂
Table Of Contents (T.O.C.):
- Plan – themes that will be worked through
- What is WordPress?
- Brief introduction – WordPress history
- WordPress.COM vs WordPress.ORG
Links to all the finished sessions of this workshop:
- [01] WordPress workshop – Introduction
- [02] WordPress workshop – WordPress.com
- [03] WordPress workshop – advanced WordPress.COM tutorial
- [04] WordPress Local by Flywheel installation tutorial
- [05] HTML and CSS explained
1. Plan – themes that will be worked through
NOTE: This series of articles is my own understanding and re-telling of the course, mr Davor Altman should not be held accountable, nor responsible for any misinterpretations – and as far as I’m concerned, you are taking any advice at your own risk. The information on my website is given: “to the best of my knowledge” – nothing more, nothing less.
Themes that are planned for the series of workshops:
- What is WordPress?
- WordPress.com and WordPress.org
- Making a WordPress.com website and exploring the options
- Gutenberg and Classic Editor (I/O Gremlin post about Gutenberg and WordPress 5)
- Installing a WordPress.org website in a local environment and live
- FTP and databases
- HTML/CSS
- WordPress themes, installation and file hierarchy
- Child themes (I/O Gremlin post about WordPress child themes)
- WordPress plugins (I/O Gremlin on WordPress plugins)
- Making a web-shop
- Making a membership website
- SEO (I/O Gremlin on SEO)
- Image optimization (I/O Gremlin on website image optimization)
- Backup (I/O Gremlin on website backup)
- WordPress hooks – actions and filters
- Errors and debugging
- Migration (I/O Gremlin on website migration)
- WP CLI
- WordPress support
- Volunteering
- How to make a living from WordPress?
Themes that I would add for a separate workshop, or just by linking to posts are the following:
2. What is WordPress?
WordPress is a CMS (Content Management System). In plain English: it’s a tool for creating and updating (managing) a website. It is fairly simple to use, widely used and popular.
That’s basically all that needs to be said for now, the rest will be explained in the following chapters of this and in the following workshops, systematically and in greater detail.
3. Brief introduction – WordPress history
In 2001 b2 cafelog was launched, as a blogging platform. From what I’ve gathered, that didn’t work out very well, so one of the platform users, Mr Matt Mullenweg decided to make something similar, only good. He asked community support for it and the most notable development partner was Mike Little, who joined on 25th January 2003.
They successfully forked b2 cafelog and on May 27th 2003 WordPress was born.
4. WordPress.COM vs WordPress.ORG
It is important to explain and understand the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. I’ll explain briefly, in my own words, the basic differences, pros and cons of each.
WordPress.com is practically managed WordPress hosting, but with some additional restrictions and benefits. It is owned by Automattic, the company of Matt Mullenweg (WordPress creator). Because of this, it is often confused with the next option:
WordPress.org is an open source platform, that gives you full freedom to do what you like… and mess things up. 🙂 It is based on community support. Almost every country has their own section for support and localization (translation). Support and development is volunteer based, with all the pros and cons of such approach.
Note:
You can easily migrate a WP.org website from one provider to another.
If that linked migration tutorial seems complicated, know that migrating from WP.com to a self-hosted WP.org version is even trickier!
Also know there are ways to automate WP.org migrations from one server to another, and that it’s a lot simpler if you are not changing your website’s domain.
Differences:
| WordPress.com | WordPress.org |
| Fully managed hosting, maintenance, backups. | If you can manage your hosting and website, you needn’t pay anyone for it (if not, you’ll still have to, even with the wp.org), but you must rent (pay for) some hosting and set up the website. Same goes for adding and updating themes and plugins, as well as backups. |
| Strict website advertising policy. | You are free to set up adverts on your site however you like – with all the pros and cons of that. |
| E-commerce and membership websites can be set up at wp.com with a bit costlier Business, or E-commerce plans. | Yes you can! 🙂 Most good solutions are also paid for, unless you’re a good programmer. |
| Supreme customer support. | It depends from hosting provider to hosting provider (I/O Gremlin about hosting provider technical support). |
Generally and briefly put: WordPress.com allows you to set up a website completely free, as long as it isn’t too big and you don’t require any special customizations.
The following workshop explains WordPress.com user interface, with practical examples. Here’s a link for the second WordPress workshop.
Update 2024: I wrote a separate article regarding this: “WordPress.com is not WordPress (.org).”
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