It is useless to talk about WordPress unless the reader has some idea on content management systems (CMS); in short, a CMS is software that allows controlling the way your site will use content, including changes and updates.

WordPress is one such CMS with remarkable admin section simplicity. Add to it the plug-ins (a large number of them exist) and the possibilities with WordPress are further extended. This way, WordPress can be used to build several different kinds of websites, including online E-commerce stores, social networking websites and business directories. Creating news sites, job boards and forums also become a breeze with WordPress; this is the reason why top brands like the Time Magazine, or the Wall Street Journal or even the CNN Blogs and the NASA Ames Research Center have opted for it.

However, the versatility and solidity of WordPress is a bit conditional; despite being a stellar choice (from the performance standpoint), changing the WP platform too much creates the troubles. The best option here is maintaining the original features and integrity as much as possible; should you like to introduce extensive changes, professional help is advised. Putting in too many active plugins from third-party developers or incorporating similar changes haphazardly, otherwise, modifies the original WP code.

Also, a certain amount of difficulty arises when certain elements (user-driven content, membership setups, online payment processing or databases exceeding 10,000 entries) are migrated from a different platform to WP. This is where only a professional can help.

Statistics show that WordPress runs 17.4% of all the websites globally, which means, the content management system holds a market share of 54.5% and that is enough to rate it as the most popular choice; however, knowing the other reasons behind shall take a little more time and effort. For that, you will require knowing about its certain technical aspects beyond its blogging roots, though they (categories, tags, threaded commenting, moderation controls and anti-spam solutions) still rule strong. Additionally, its ability to render the pages in HTML and CSS makes WordPress compatible with iPhone, Blackberry and Android viewing. That means: You work on the go! Supported by a large community of developers bettering the core code and building extendable plug-ins every day, WordPress allows keeping a site up-to-date without any major hassle.

Where WordPress Beats Others: At a Glance

1. First and foremost, the source code of WordPress is completely free and being open source it allows easy editing and managing. That means, you don’t need to hire personnel to get the job done.
2. A user-friendly admin section allows working from the browser window by someone even without any solid technical skill.
3. WordPress has a structure and code that includes SEO tools (permalinks, pinging, blogrolling etc.) and make it highly compatible with search engines. With additional plug-ins, SEO functions of a website can be further enhanced.
4. WordPress is flexible, scalable and allows even large-scale customizations; all that is due to the plug-ins which allow create anything from shopping carts and photo galleries to social media integration and newsletter subscriptions.
5. A 5-Minute Install: Unless migrating content (from an existing CMS) or creating a customized WP theme, WordPress takes just that much of time for a fresh installation.
6. A Simple Interface: WordPress beats others when it comes to the interface; it’s as simple as it can get. Logging in shall make a user land up at the dashboard, from where you can change/edit (images, pages, posts and other content) or do other stuff even if you are absolutely zero with coding.
7. Max User-Friendliness: No other CMS comes to comparison with WordPress on this particular aspect; while others may present an endless array of features, they do so at the cost of complications. WP needs no additional support; just clicking on update shall put all new, customized and edited content live on the site.
8. A Wide Range of Design Options: WordPress themes are – well – endless. There are millions available and thousands get developed on a daily, worldwide basis. Now, developing these themes is tad difficult but using them is a no-brainer. Of course, the difficulty level depends on the options a theme has within and the paid (or, the premium) themes have better ones, along with built-in functions.
9. Enhanced Functionality: Coming to added functionalities, WordPress can accommodate as much as you can give it. These are plug-ins – or, WP Plugins – and there are proficient coders who develop them. Plugins serve a multitude of functions (specific uses) and there’s a large number of free plug-ins that are available.
10. Friendly to the Search Engines: WordPress handles posts, pages, categories and tags with equal ease and accuracy but without the user racking his brains. Getting websites indexed on search engines takes minimal effort from the users, which is typically improving Google page-rank.

Where WordPress Beats Others: Knee-Deep into Technicalities

1. WordPress As Open-Source Content Management Window

It’s easy to use WordPress as a full-on CMS due to jQuery.

WordPress comes with a built-in JavaScript library called jQuery. Most people are used to using jQuery by loading the file using the script tag and using the $(document).ready() function to use your jQuery code.

$(document).ready(function () {
     $(body).append('Hello World');
  });
add_filter('login_errors',create_function('$a', "return null;")

Keep Directories from Being Browsable with .htaccess.

Options All –Indexes
Use .htaccess to Protect the wp-config File
<files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
</files>

2. Blogging: Getting Easier Than Ever

You can use WordPress to easily make prototypes look like professional masterpiece.

A look at the NASA Ames Research Center website reveals what WordPress can do for sites. While WordPress is designed to be simple enough for non–coders, as there is a built-in JavaScript prototype. An object in JavaScript is any unordered collection of key-value pairs. If it’s not a primitive (undefined, null, boolean, number or string) it’s an object using ks29so_enqueue_script(). This function includes the script if it hasn’t already been included, and safely handles dependencies.

ks29so_enqueue_script( 
     $handle
    ,$src
    ,$deps
    ,$ver
    ,$in_footer );

3. WordPress Is Everywhere!

Millions of people already consume information from WordPress sites every day.

According to Internet marketing firm Quantcast, “around 200 million people visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every month, and they view over a billion pages on those blogs.” Promotional events like WordCamp and similar events across the globe campaign to unite WordPress users from all walks of life and help newcomers learn how powerful WordPress truly is. These events are evidence of a healthy, diverse, and growing community that cares about it’s users equally as much as the developers that build it. This is a phenomenon as sites are being run by affiliates whereby a party handed a site developed by someone else on one server, and have to deploy it to another. Word Press enhances site migration using a phenomenal feature of One Click Migration with script will update site information when moving WordPress sites from server to site or vice versa.

<form name="migrateform" id="migrateform" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>" method="post">
    <p id="intro"><strong>WordPress OneClick Migration</strong><br />This script will update site information on your new site.</p>
    <?php if($migrated) { ?>
    <p id="status" class="migrated"><strong>Migration complete.</strong><br /><br /><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/" title="<?php _e('Are you lost?') ?>"><?php printf(__('Back to %s &rarr;'), get_bloginfo('title', 'display')); ?></a></p>
    <?php
    if($runmeonce) {
        echo self_destruct($runmeonce);
    } ?>

RewriteEngine On
#Replace ?mysite\.com/ with your blog url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your "don't hotlink" image url
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

4. Control Your Own Domain

You can install WordPress on your own web hosting service under your own domain name for full control over your domain name, your content — and your site’s existence.

With other blogging solutions like Blogger.com and even WordPress.com, you have limited control over the look and feel of your blog. Many third-party plugins and widgets are also not supported. Just add the following to your WordPress theme’s functions.php file.

function remove_wp_version() { return ''; }
add_filter('the_generator', 'remove_wp_version');

It is also worthy to note that your blog can be taken down by Blogger.com, WordPress.com or any other commercially hosted or free blog for any reason they deem necessary — like maybe someone complained about the content of one of your posts or comments.

Whoops!

There goes all your hard work and content, and you can’t get it back! Oh, and if your provider decides to go out of business or decide to stop offering you space to host your blog, your blog is out of business, too. You may be able to rescue the data before they shut you down, but your permalink structure and search-engine keyword rankings just broke for good.

5. Theming

Themes make it easy to customize a site so it looks nothing like a WordPress blog.

WordPress supports two types of theme frameworks: “drop-in” code library that is used to facilitate development of a Theme and a stand-alone base/starter the site to be free for theme inheritance.

<?php
if ( is_category( '9' ) ) {
    get_template_part( 'single2' ); // looking for posts in category with ID of '9'
} else {
    get_template_part( 'single1' ); // put this on every other category post
}
?>

Or, using a query, it might look like this:

<?php
Example:
.postspermonth {
margin: 5px 0 10px 0;
list-style: none;
padding-left: 25px;
}

The output from this plugin is already wrapped in the needed <ul class=”postpermonth”> tags.

$post = $ks29so_query->post;
if ( in_category( '9' ) ) {
    get_template_part( 'single2' );
} else {
    get_template_part( 'single1' );
}
?>

In either case, this example code will cause different templates to be used depending on the category of the particular post being displayed. Query conditions are not limited to categories, however, using Conditional Tags can improve the state of article.

6. Installing a WordPress Blog/Website Is Very, Very Easy

Modern day webhosts are super slow compared to WordPress which take [count them] – SIX mouse clicks and a few characters of typing after you log into your web host to have a functional WordPress site up and running.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (\<|%3C).*script.*(\>|%3E) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2})
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [F,L]

7. Easy to Personalize

WordPress is easy to personalize. There are many themes and templates to choose from. You probably want a number of standard template elements on your custom page template. Here’s a good framework to start you template with:

<?php
/* Template Name: About Us*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
	<?php the_content();?>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

The loop on your page template will by default grab the content your write for your page in the admin interface.

8. Easy to Use

WordPress is really easy to use.

How easy? Well, you’d have to take it for a test-drive to get the feel of it, but I can tell you this: it’s used by way more than 15 million publishers,** many hundreds of thousands (millions?) of whom run sites that are way more than just a blog. If they can do it, you can, too.

9. Search Engines Love WordPress

WordPress is SEO-friendly, especially if you use the right plugins — or even just the right theme to start with.

We all are learning how important search engine optimization is, right? Well, the aforementioned Thesis and Atahualpa themes are just about maxed out on SEO-friendly features. Even if you don’t use either of those themes, all it takes are a few of the right plugins to maximize your SEO efforts. Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine. Without going into huge detail (that’s another post for another time), I’ll just say that, in order to correctly perform about 80 percent of your on-page SEO with each post, the plugins you need to have include All-in-one SEO pack, Google XML Sitemaps, Akismet spam filtering and Sociable. And to top it all off, they’re all free, and they’re all found by doing a search within the WordPress admin interface (under the “plugins” menu, the “Add New” item). Website In A Weekend has a plethora of valuable info on this site to help you out with SEO as well.

10. WordPress Is Free

It’s free, and it’s got a strong open-source development community behind it.

Continued, regular development, with the size of its installed base makes WordPress the rock of the ages. Any plug-in developer should start with the Codex’s own WordPress Coding Standards using node.js that gets updated for every instance to increase longevity of WordPress. It uses ks29so_enqueue_script to load your scripts. JavaScript loaded directly into HTML documents (template files) should be CDATA encoded to prevent errors in older browsers.

<script type="text/javascript">
/* <![CDATA[ */
// content of your Javascript goes here
/* ]]> */
</script>

Other Points to Consider

WordPress doesn’t take down your search rankings if best practices are followed. Establish proper 301 redirects and create for the new site a similar site structure.

A properly set-up WordPress CMS with necessary plugins installed is a powerful tool for search engine indexing. SEO needs unique meta data and WP gives the users the ability to do that.

And Perhaps the Biggest Cause Is…

WP doesn’t keep responsive design bound to the portfolio of developers and designers; CSS media queries now allow varying website layouts fit to different screen sizes. So, if you want to fit your WP site to the mobile devices, then including the right viewport is the first step to it. This is because a mobile browser treats the pages as the scaled-down, larger versions of the websites. So include the following meta-tag between tags.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, target-densitydpi=device-dpi">

If that still poses a problem with scaling, follow an Apple device’s standard and do the necessary adjustments:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, target-densitydpi=160">

Next, it is about adding support since most browsers don’t support CSS3 media queries and HTML5, the must-haves for a responsive design. For IE8, it should be:

<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="http://css3-mediaqueries-js.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/css3-mediaqueries.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

Image Credits – Clever cupcakes