According to Wikipedia, WordPress is defined as:

an open source blog publishing application. WordPress is the official successor of b2\cafelog, developed by Michel Valdrighi. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg.

This content management system is much more than your run of the mill framework. I can honestly say that out of all the open source projects I have encountered, WordPress is the most useful framework for web development. Now, I’m not downplaying jQuery, MooTools, or RubyOnRails in the slightest. These are all very useful, well documented projects that have all served very well in my arsenal of tools. However the one that has saved me the most time, with the smallest learning curve sticks out in my mind.

One thing I’d like to focus on in this post is the template system. If you’re a Joomla, Drupal or Freeway guy, you’ll be glad to find a similar template system incorporated into WP. In addition to breaking your template into sepperate, dynamically included PHP files, you can further tailor your post query via “The Loop“.

An Example of The Loop

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

<?php endwhile; else: ?>

<p><?php _e(’Sorry, you have found nothing!’); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>

If you’re familiar with PHP, you’ll notice a simple if/while/endif loop. This is the beauty of the template system. With this you can pull content from specific dates, categories, tags (and more) and render the content from a number of degrees. You can ask WP for every post from every third Monday, about The Boston Red Sox, with more than 200 words; and display them in reverse chronological order, only showing the first 20 words of each article, with a green themed CSS style for every post covering a game that they won. Its truly amazing.

The amount of code that is saved by the WordPress Codex template system is truly astounding. Without it, you might still be reading an “Under Construction” sign, or Jimi-Hendrix forbid, the old website.

On a side note, I’d like to thank Kayvan, Cesare, Marah, Brian, Denise, Mark, Michael, Gary, Paula, Eric, Julianna and Hillorie for all of their help in making this site what is is today. Alexa top 100,000 … here we come.

- Ben

Tags: php, template, wordpress

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Blogs, Developer's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.