At the August 09 technical meeting, Casey Danek gave an overview of our web pages based on a combination of WordPress pages and our older, static regular web pages. Here’s some more to consider regarding WordPress…

• WordPress comes in two flavors. One is the .COM version, which is free for anyone to use and runs off of their own servers. The other is a set of WordPress programs that you can install on your own web server. Once you have your own, you have a lot more flexibility in what you can do (more themes, more control over look and feel).
• There’s a pay-for version of WordPress.COM that provides a bit more power. We don’t use that.
• WordPress has a look and feel that is defined by by themes.
• WordPress web pages are pages that contain HTML text, menus, and widgents.
• The “home” page is a special WordPress page because it also contains “posts”. These are text items that are stored in a database that are displayed in a number of ways. The default is to show the latest posts in chronological order. That way, readers can catch up on what’s new. You can read older posts by looking at the archives, viewing based on categories, authors, etc. (That’s the power of a database driven content system.)
• Other pages contain static HTML content and are like any other static page except the look and feel is still defined by the theme.
• Widgets are what make themes interesting. You can add many widgets – they appear on each page – and provide navigation, FYI type stuff, etc.