this started out as a test to make a wordpress page… i’m moving it to a post instead.

WordPress is a blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database, which is distributed under the GNU General Public License (gpl). [ wikipedia/wordpress ]

reasons to use wordpress
there really are too many reasons to use wordpress. it has a good license, really good documentation, and you can customize it in probably every way imaginable. i migrated from a homegrown publishing system to wordpress back in 2005 because i was tired of trying to re-invent the wheel and i felt that i could hack wordpress into something that i could not only use but also enjoy. i really stopped playing with it after setting up my theme and importing my old data. bad flipp… fast forward a little bit…

when i upgraded from an older wordpress (v1.5) installation to the latest wordpress (v2.2). it wasn’t very difficult. all it took was to untar the latest.tar.gz tarball over my existing wordpress directory and running the upgrade.php script in my web browser.

creating a wordpress theme
next i should probably port my theme because as it is right now wordpress works fine with it, but honestly, though i’ve wanted to rewrite my theme for the longest time and learn more about how to extend wordpress.

my original goal was to create a wordpress 2.3 theme based on the last homegrown bonq.net. i couldn’t use any of widgets for wordpress which became available in wordpress v2.2 .

08/22/2007
blah blah blah… original wordpress theme, not very much going on. it does have category listings, but no nav menu. the main css is also still not optimized for wordpress, a lot of the divs are cobbled together

11/22/2007
3 months later… and it’s still not done! too much time playing with tags and wordpress plugins… theme is widgetized though, even have 2 dynamic sidebars.

wordpress links

• to build your own theme
  start here ( http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes )next read this ( http://codex.wordpress.org/Stepping_Into_Templates )
• need some cheatsheets?
  kahi.cz : wordpress cheatsheets [ from : wpbits ]
• want to make a wordpress plugin?
  michaeldaw : writing secure wordpress plugins
• still lost?
  search the wordpress codex
  try searching google… wordpress+cheatsheet
• misc links
  404 header fix for wordpress google sitemaps, wordpress design sandbox, wordpress plugin: blogroll page, how to protect your wordpress site, wp design sandbox, one simple way to protect your wordpress plugins, hardening wordpress, almost perfect .htaccess file for wordpress blogs, , hardening wordPress with .htaccess, & things i do to optimize and secure every wordpress site and blog

notes for wordpress mu, a completely different beast based on wordpress.

wordpress mu

http://mu.wordpress.org/faq/
Does it scale? (Also: The way you do your databases and tables doesn’t scale!)
WordPress MU creates tables for each blog, which is the system we found worked best for plugin compatibility and scaling after lots of testing and trial and error. This takes advantage of existing OS-level and MySQL query caches and also makes it infinitely easier to segment user data, which is what all services that grow beyond a single box eventually have to do. We’re practical folks, so we’ll use whatever works best, and for the 400k and counting on WordPress.com, MU has been a champ.

Can I use Akismet spam protection?
Of course. The latest version of Akismet allows you to hardcode a key into the plugin file and you can put that into your mu-plugins directory to auto-enable it for all your users. However we highly recommend you get at least a Pro-blogger API key for your install and consider the enterprise licenses.

Do plugins work?
Plugins work just like in regular WordPress, they can be activated and deactivated on a per-blog level. We have something extra called “mu-plugins” which auto-executes any PHP file in that directory, like plugins that are enabled by default. Most plugins work, but some that modify core tables or create tables of their own in the DB might have difficulties, depending on how they’re coded. Best way to find out is to test!

http://mu.wordpress.org/about/
Development on MU is spearheaded by Automattic, since they use MU to power WordPress.com a great deal of the companies resources are poured into improving the code, and it all goes back into the open source world via MU.