0 The Downside & UPSIDE of WordPress

All is not sunshine and fruit punch in the world of WordPress. Using a blogging
platform that is engineered like this one has a couple of drawbacks:

• Appeal to bad guys. Popularity and an open code base are generally a good combination, but a few people out there are always looking to ruin everyone’s fun. Because WordPress runs so many high-profi le sites, some nefarious types are on the lookout for fl aws that can be exploited.

Luckily, the WordPress developers are very quick to patch vulnerabilities, but you have to stay on top of the releases.

• Dynamic page generation. WordPress dynamically generates most of the pages that you see. Each time you load a post, a bunch of things are happening in the background: Database queries are fi red off, PHP code is executed, and then the page is displayed. 

Usually, this system isn’t a problem; it ensures that the content of your blog is as up to date as
possible. 

But this approach is a little more resource-intensive than a  static approach and can translate to your blog’s being unavailable under heavy load.

Movable Type, the other blogging heavyweight, takes the opposite approach. Movable Type (MT for short) stores posts, comments, and the like in a database just like WordPress does, but it creates static HTML pages from that data. 

note This arrangement makes MT a little leaner when serving up content, but publishing a post can take more time because each index page needs to be rebuilt. MT has added an option to use a dynamic system, but by default, it publishes static pages.

THE UPSIDE OF WORDPRESS 

Remember when you were a kid, and you asked your mom if you could do something all the other kids were doing? She replied, “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too?” Despite the fact that my friends weren’t known bridge-jumpers, the advice is clear: Be your own
person, and you’ll be better off in life.

That advice works well as a general life practice, but when you’re considering
a blogging platform, you want to pick the one that has the most users. Why? Because along with all those users comes some pretty neat stuff, such as an active developer community, a wide range of reference materials, and a large base of people you can turn to for help.

WordPress has all those features in spades. Many of today’s most popular blogs—including TechCrunch, ICanHasCheezburger.com, and The New York Times’ blogs—are powered by WordPress, so you can rest assured that WordPress is capable of handling the traffic generated by
your adoring audience.

Furthermore, WordPress can be extended by little bits of code called plug-ins, which I talk about in detail in Chapter 14. Created by members of the WordPress community, plug-ins are often available for free or for a small fee. These plug-ins can make WordPress do all sorts of things it isn’table to do out of the box.

The active plug-in developer community owes its existence in large part to
the fact that WordPress is distributed under the GNU General PublicLicense. This license means two things:

• WordPress is free.
• You’re allowed to alter the code to suit your needs and share your modified code with anyone, so long as you distribute it under the same license (for free and in such a way that others can change your code and share it as well).