What is WordPress? WordPress is a strongly efficient publishing platform of high quality which covers a wide array of standard-compliant, sensible default settings and features designed for the purpose of making your experience as a publisher on the internet as comfortable, enjoyable, and interesting as possible.

WordPress offers features that enable you to obtain full control of your weblog by being able to gain access and introduce modifications to it anytime you need to. You can set time definition as an offset from the Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) to make all time-related stored elements in the database conform to Greenwich Meridian Time (GMT) values. WordPress also utilizes user-levels to regulate user-access to different features that enable you to limit the capability of individual users to create or revise your weblog content. Moreover, you can also customize the design by using themes and templates to generate pages dynamically. You can also create a weblog that is localized to your choice and delivered in a language of your preference. There is a password protection as well as other amazing features in the content creation process. In publicizing your work, you obtain optimum result through the feeds, permalinks, and inter-blog communication features.

WordPress as CMS

Since its release, WordPress has been eagerly customized by its users to cater to their needs. One such popular need currently is for content management particularly a Content Management System (CMS). With its powerful and versatile features, WordPress can be customized into a total CMS. A CMS is a web application for managing documents and other contents of the website. It is more formal and often used on bigger websites. Changing WordPress into a CMS entails customizing the Theme and probably even the Administration Panels through the use of coding and WordPress Plugins. There are a lot of elements you can add to your WordPress site to heighten the level of interactivity and to enhance the functions.

The very interesting salient aspect of WordPress is that there are few limits. A lot of people and advertising agencies are using WordPress for blogging and for managing their websites. All show exciting varied looks and distinct functions on their website. Mailing lists, e-commerce, adding ads as well as adding forums/BBS are just some of the exciting enhancement elements you can introduce.

Web 2.0 is referred to as the “participatory web” because of its attribute that facilitates interactive information sharing, reciprocal operating, user-centered designing and collaborating on the world wide web which includes web-based communities, hosted services, social-networking and video-sharing sites, and blogs among others. This development implies cumulative changes in the manner software developers and end-users explore the web.

Web 2.0 websites enable the users to interact among themselves or to change website content which greatly differs from the traditional websites which are non-interactive wherein users only passively view the web content provided to them without the privilege of modifying it for it is only the site’s owner who can introduce modifications. The Web 2.0 websites also allow the users to run software applications entirely through a browser and encourage them to add value to the application as they use it. The users can also own and control the data on a site. These sites often feature a high-degree, user-friendly interface based on Ajax and similar client-side interactivity frameworks or full client-server application frameworks in resemblance.

Among the technological features and techniques of this application are search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, and signals. With its search feature, the user finds information easily through keyword search. The links provide guides to other related and relevant information. Authoring paves the way for the creation of constantly updating content over a platform. Tags enable content categorization. Extensions give powerful algorithms that leverage the web as an application platform as well as a document server. Signals denote the use of RSS technology to quickly notify users of content changes.
Blogs, wikis, and RSS manifest the attributes of Web 2.0 in the usage of tools that allow the readers to add comments or to edit contents. This is known as the Read/Write web. The client-side/web browser technologies most often used in Web 2.0 development are Asynchronous Java Script and XML (Ajax), Adobe Flash, and Java Script/Ajax frameworks.
Besides the rich user experience that Web 2.0 has to offer along with user participation facility, forceful content, metadata, web standards and scalability, this application also denotes openness, freedom and collective intelligence generated from the participating users. Hence, this provides for a very enriching and more challenging as well as exciting web exploration experience in a broader web horizon.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an international consortium regarded as the main international standards organization for World Wide Web where member organizations maintaining full-time staff join efforts to come up with web standards. Its mission is to pave the way for the World Wide Web to optimize its full potential by formulating protocols and guidelines that guarantee long-term growth for the web. This consortium engages in education and outreach activities, develops software, and serves as an open forum for the exchanging of ideas and opinions about the web. It has published more than 100 web standards called W3C Recommendation.

The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) is a family of current and future document types and modules that are XML conforming and are designed to function in conjunction with XML-based user agents. The XHTML documents are readily viewed, edited and validated with standard XML tools. This family of document types is another step forward in the Internet development. Through it, the content developers can enter the XML environment with all of its attendant benefits while maintaining confidence in the previous and future modes of compatibility of their contents.

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language describing the appearance and formatting or the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language applicable to any kind of XML document. This primarily enables the separation of document content from document presentation including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts to improve content accessibility, to provide more flexibility and control in the particular presentation characteristics, to allow tableless web design and formatting to be shared by multiple pages. The CSS specifications are maintained by the W3C.

Tableless web design or tableless web layout is a web design and development method that does not use HTML tables for page layout control purposes. The term “tableless design” denotes the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to position HTML elements on the web page.

The development of CSS improves the separation between design (CSS) and structure (HTML) and move back towards a semantic organization of web content which considerably improves web accessibility to users operating a wide variety of devices. The created separation makes it possible to have different layouts for different devices and to have a specific style sheet for the printable version of the web page.

In the full CSS tableless layout, all information regarding the layout virtually resides in the CSS document making it centralized for changes to be made quickly and globally by default. Moreover, because the layout information is stored externally to the HTML, it is easy to make additional new web content or web page as well as to modify an existing web page.

Tableless layout produces web pages with fewer HTML tags if implemented cleverly. This reduces page download times for subsequent pages using the same resources. Tables and CSS are not mutually exclusive. A number of HTML coders utilize CSS to manipulate tables frequently.