Gary Eckstein

WordPress originated as Blogging software. Since those early days, WordPress has developed into the leading Content Management System (CMS) used by large to small organizations as well as individuals. The key strengths of WordPress is its ease of use and robustness that makes it simple enough for occasional bloggers as well as powerful enough for large corporations such as the New York Times, Yahoo and Ford. One of the primary reasons for the success of WordPress is its underlying high-level architecture which is describes as three parts below.

First however, let’s eliminate the confusion between the two ‘versions’ of WordPress …

WordPress.org is the organization that develops and distributes the WordPress software. If you want to run WordPress on your own Web Host then this is where to get the software. WordPress.org also has a wealth of WordPress information and hosts most of the free Plugins (over 11,000) and Themes (over 1,200) available for download and implementation.

WordPress.com is a ‘freemium’ service that offers hosted WordPress software for free. There are various upgrades that, should they be required, cost a once-off or annual fee (an example of a paid upgrade is using your domain name on your WordPress.com site). WordPress.com hosts 11.5 million Blogs and these Blogs get over 2.5 billion Pages views per month

Here are the three core architecture elements of WordPress i.e. how it ‘fits together’.

It has already been noted that WordPress is software (i.e. an application). It is developed using HTML, PHP and JavaScript which are the most common scripts (sometimes called ‘languages’) used on the Web.

WordPress connects to a Database that stores the data such as Page content and various settings. The use of the database makes WordPress a Content Management System (CMS). WordPress connects by default to the Open Source MySQL Database Management System (DBMS). MySQL is used by many of the leading companies and Websites (e.g. Linkedin, Youtube, Wikipedia and Walmart).

WordPress is capable of very many functions and is hugely extendible. WordPress software however ‘ships’ with the core most frequently used functionality. People are encouraged to make available extensions and these are called Plugins. Plugins are very simple to install into core WordPress and there are all sorts of capabilities available via the thousands of free Plugins e.g. ecommerce functionality, advanced SEO capabilities and form builders.

The ‘look and feel’ of WordPress is managed via Themes. A Theme defines the colours, fonts, layout and many other aesthetics. There are many free as well as paid-for and custom themes available and changing the Theme in WordPress is very simple. By separating the ‘look and feel’ of WordPress from the content and functionality, it becomes very easy to create using an entirely fresh looking Site without having to touch the content.

So above is the core architecture that makes WordPress the most popular used CMS. WordPress is suitable for all size organizations, free to extend, simple to use and very effective as a CMS!

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The use of Web fonts (Web typography) is increasing massively due to improving support by Internet Browsers, widening ease of use within Websites and increased standardisation such as the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and the introduction of HTML5 and CSS3. The use of Web fonts extends the number of fonts that may be used on websites as well as the ease with which additional fonts may be included. In most Websites a standard set of fonts are used as all major brands of computers and Browser support this core (but small) set of font families such as Arial and Times New Roman. With Web fonts (using the @font-face CSS rule) the font to be used is referenced and, if it isn’t already in the installed set on the visitor’s computer/Browser, the font is downloaded from the reference (link).

It seems logical that if a font needs to be downloaded before it is used, then that will slow Page load speeds. Unfortunately this is a downside of using Web fonts! Not only will extra data (i.e. the font) need to be downloaded by the browser, but there will also be additional http requests which may negatively impact Page load speeds. As the use of Web fonts increases so will the chance that the Web font used on a Page has been downloaded in the past by the Browser and so needn’t be downloaded again.

There are also steps being taken by both Web font distributors and Browser developers to improve the visitor experience when downloading Web fonts is necessary. For example most of the Web font distributors are compressing the fonts for faster download and Mozilla Firefox uses ‘Flash of unstyled text’ where the text is displayed in a default font until the Web font has been downloaded at which time the font changes to the Web font (Google Chrome and Apple Safari display a blank space until the font has been downloaded whereas with Internet Explorer the action taken depends on where the stylesheet <link> tag is placed in the head section).

Jul 30, 2010 hreview by Gary Eckstein

WordPress Website/Blog/CMS is easily achieved. I have recently been playing with the ‘WP Google Fonts’ WordPress Plugin which makes using the free Web fonts from the Google Font Directory (using the Google Font API) with WordPress very simple (well done to Adrian Hanft, the Plugin author). The Google Font Directory offers a fairly limited selection of fonts to use but the number offered is sure to grow substantially as the use of web fonts increases. The great thing about the WP Google Fonts Plugin is that it allows the use of additional CSS controls for use with the Web font family used (e.g. drop-shadows) so the ‘look and feel’ of the Web fonts can be easily amended. Although the WordPress plugin page notes that the Plugin is compatible up to WordPress v2.9, I have tested it with WordPress 3 and with Artisteer templates and haven’t encountered any errors. This is a great way to use Web fonts in WordPress and I recommend using this Plugin.

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WordPress.com is hugely popular as a Blog host. Simply put, WordPress.com gives free hosting for Blogs using the latest release of the massively popular WordPress GPL software. For those wanting a Blog with a limited set of options then WordPress.com is an excellent choice. People or organizations requiring their own domain name, integration with other software and a huge amount of configuration and extensibility options then a self-hosted solution using software free to download, install and use from WordPress.org is the answer (WordPress.com does provide some upgrade options for various fees).

To most people and organizations, the software or solution used doesn’t matter much as most are concerned with total cost of ownership, reliability (and quality) and meeting requirements. This is precisely the reason that WordPress has done so well; it is simple to use, is equally reliable and feature packed for individuals’ right to the largest organizations and is very cost effective. To illustrate just how popular WordPress is, some statistics are provided below for WordPress.com (WordPress.org stats are not included in the information below):

New WordPress.com Posts per day: 350,000

Total number of WordPress.com Posts: 200,000,000

New Blog comments per day (excluding Spam comments): 400,000

Blogs on WordPress.com: +- 11,500,000 (there are +- 13,800,000 active installations of the WordPress.org software with over 100,000,000 Plugin downloads)

Number of people who visit at least one WordPress.com hosted Blog per month: 260,000,000

Number of WordPress.com hosted Pages viewed per month: 2,000,000,000

Most popular WordPress.com Blog languages: 66% are in English, 8.7% in Spanish, 6.5% in Portuguese and 3.5% in Indonesian.

WordPress.com changes to themes per day: 35,000

Number of Flickr images embedded into a WordPress.com Blog per day: 40,000.

Number of YouTube images embedded into a WordPress.com Blog per day: 50,000.

Number of Photobucket images embedded into a WordPress.com Blog per day: 30,000.

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I have installed WordPress hundreds of times. Besides the very occasional minor non-WordPress issue, the installs have always worked fine. Until yesterday …

I had a domain name that forwarded to another but I decided I wanted to create a WordPress powered Site for the domain. I cancelled the forward on Godaddy Domain manager and set the DNS nameservers as the Godaddy recommended servers. I then installed WordPress at the required Godaddy shared hosting folder (this method has always worked fine in the past).

I noticed that when viewing the homepage or the dashboard of the new WordPress install (i.e. http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/wp-admin) the styling was as if no CSS was evident (the layout, fonts, colours etc. didn’t look ‘right’). I changed the theme but that didn’t help, I reinstalled WordPress and that didn’t help, I changed the DNS nameservers and I spent hours on the Web trying to find a solution. Also the CSS/display problem wasn’t unique to a computer or Browser; the same problem was there with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome and on multiple computers.

This is not the first time that this error has been experienced when installing WordPress and it is, as mentioned, not specific to specific computers or Internet Browsers (or Webhost i.e. not just Godaddy shared hosting). During my Web search for a solution I arrived at many forums where this problem is discussed with various potential solutions however none resolved the issue for me. I eventually discovered a solution after noticing a few forum responses recommending certain .htaccess hacks which may work. Although none of the solutions provided in the forums worked for my WordPress problem, I managed to find a solution through trying a few .htaccess hacks which, in desperation, I hoped may work.

The solution for this WordPress display problem is as follows in the two steps below:

1. With a text editor create a file named .htaccess in the root of your WordPress install (if an .htaccess file already exists then ignore this step and continue with step 2).

2. Save the following in the .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

</IfModule>

These .htaccess lines above basically send browsers and searchbots to index.php of your WordPress install. AskApache has a good explanation for those interested in further .htaccess information.

Good luck and please let me know if this resolves your WordPress CSS problem.

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Google has announced that it has acquired Metaweb (and Freebase). Metaweb TopicBlocks is a WordPress Plugin which has been available for a number of months that helps to included data from Metaweb into Blog posts.

The Plugin may be Setup to either automatically include Metaweb data when certain words or terms are included in a post or Metaweb data may be manually included in the post. Unfortunately the data included by the Metaweb TopicBlocks Plugin doesn’t display very well in posts.

Below is an example of the data that is included when a Metaweb TopicBlock with the term Freebase is included: Freebase

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