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Open Sources

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

policy essays by the free software movement pioneers

O’Reilly publications have decided to throw their weight behind the Open Source movement. This timely compilation of essays written by its leaders reveal why it came into being, how it works, why they think it will succeed, and where it is going – particularly in its fight against Microsoft. Open Source is a form of collaborative software development in which programmers give their time and expertise freely.

Open Sources They create programs which are written and de-bugged without any concern for commercial gain. Then they give away the code for anyone to use. As you can guess, this is just about the complete antithesis of Microsoft and its business strategy, which has recently been judged as a near-monopoly unfairly exploiting its power. The competing Open Source-Microsoft philosophies are now locked in a battle for the future.

All this is all quite recent. In April 1998 O’Reilly invited software developers to the first Freeware Summit, where participants agreed to work together to increase acceptance and use of open-source software. Since then, the influence of this movement has grown steadily – especially with the increasing popularity of Linux, a very stable and efficient operating system which threatens the dominance of Windows.

One of the things I liked most about this collection is the variety of approaches the auithors adopt to their proselytizing, plus the fact that new concepts are made accessible to the non-specialist reader. Eric S. Raymond, one of the founding fathers (whose collected essays, The Cathedral and the Bazaar have just appeared) explains the origins of the movement in his ‘Brief History of Hackerdom’.

Richard Stallman writes on the history of free software and its supporters. Robert Young, the CEO of RedHat, explains how they are able to successfully market Linux, the free software [it’s because they offer a good backup service]. Bruce Perens offers a definition of Open Sources – which is more complex than you might think. The collection ends with a transcript of the 1992 Tannenbaum-Torvalds debate in which Linus Torvald defends his new Linux operating system and his concept of free software in the COMP.OS.MINIX newsgroup. It is refreshing to encounter the modesty of this pioneer and be reminded of the limits under which he was working:

‘Linux has very much been a hobby (but a serious one: the best type) for me: I get no money for it, and it’s not even part of my studies in the university. I’ve done it all on my own time, and on my own machine [a 386PC].’

So these are rather like the crusading documents of a new movement. They might sometimes read as rather idealistic, but they also contain hard-headed facts from the worlds of big business, software engineering, and even jurispudence. They see these issuess as a matter of moral, philosophical choice, even though the medium is technological. As Chris DiBona argues in his scene-setting introduction:

Industry has produced some marvellous innovations: Ethernet, the mouse, and the Graohical User Interface (GUI) all came out of Xerox PARC. But there is an ominous side to the computer industry as well. No one outside of Redmond [Microsoft headquarters] really thinks that it is a good idea for Microsoft to dictate, to the extent that they do, what a computer desktop should look like or have on it.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Chris DiBona et al, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Sebastapol, CA: O’Reilly, pp.272, ISBN: 15659258237


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Open Sources 2.0

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays and reports from the free software movement

When we reviewed Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution six years ago, the movement for free software was only just gathering momentum – and O’Reilly were publishing a collection of essays which were essentially explaining its key concepts. Now this second collection is symbolically twice as big, and reporting on a worldwide uptake.

Open Sources 2.0The first part of the book deals with the technical and business aspects of open sources. There’s a report on the development of Mozilla.org, which produced the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email program, and an account of working on Samba, which acts as a ‘glue’ between the separate worlds of Unix and Windows. All of these Open Source programs are available at SourceForge.net – 100.000 projects and one million registered developers.

The amazing thing is that some people are able to develop business models using open source software. They do this by offering services which provide consultancy and support to users of open source. Michael Olson even describes a dual license system whereby the software is provided free to one set of users, and is sold at a charge to another. This essay also includes a very useful explanation of copyright law and warrantees.

The first half of the book deals with these conundrums and apparent contradictions introduced into the world of software and IT. What happens when people decide to make their software freely available to download at no charge to the end user?

There’s a very enjoyable chapter by Russ Nelson on developing his own small business enterprise dealing with open source. This will be music to the ears of anyone who would like to make a living writing and selling software and their related services.

There are fully detailed surveys of the development of open source software in Europe, India, and even China. In Europe there is a growing pattern of local and regional government adopting OSS for both political and financial reasons. In India takeup of OSS is slower because of rampant piracy of proprietary software. Piracy exists in China too, but the potential for growth in country which actually manufactures a lot of the world’s digital hardware is so great that OSS support companies are moving in to be part of the booming economy.

The second part of the book looks ‘beyond’ open sources as a technology to the philosophy of what’s at its base – collaborative forms of working. These chapters examine new business models, such as Amazon for instance which operates using open source software, but also invites collaborative input from its customers and even its competitors. Other examples include open source legal researching and even biology.

There’s a very interesting contribution from Larry Sanger on the history of the Wikipedia project – the open source encyclopedia of which he was a co-founder. Some of the problems raised in keeping Wikipedia free of vandals is answered in a similar account of the rise and rise of Slashdot.org (“News for nerds. Stuff that matters”) the socio-technological news site which permits submissions and comments in an open source sort of way. It has developed a form of hands-off self-monitoring system which welds people together into a community.

This book is as important and impressive as its predecessor. It offers updates on practical examples of the social and technological innovations of the late twentieth century and gives us a glimpse of what might become working models for what lies ahead in the twenty-first.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Chris DiBona et al, Open Sources 2.0, Sebastopol: CA, O’Reilly, 2005, pp.445, ISBN: 0596008023


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OpenOffice Writer

July 23, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The free alternative word-processor to Microsoft Word

OpenOffice is one of the big success stories of the Open Source Software movement – along with programs such as Linux and Apache. Open Source seeks to design software by voluntary collaboration, then makes it freely available for anyone to use . Writer is the word-processing package part of OpenOffice and, not to put too fine a point on the matter, it’s a free alternative to the costly and ponderous Microsoft Word.

OpenOffice WriterBecause the software comes free of charge however, there is no printed manual, so the ever-enterprising publishers O’Reilly have produced one as part of their Community Press series. The book comes complete with a CD-ROM containing the whole of the OpenOffice.org suite which you can freely install on as many machines as you wish. The full suite of programs includes packages for spreadsheets (Calc) presentations (Impress) and drawings (Draw) as well as file conversion facilities.

Jean Hollis Weber’s guide starts by showing you how to set up the interface to suit your style of working and your own personal preferences. This includes features such as page appearance, font options, multiple undo, spellchecking, custom dictionaries, and auto-correction.

Basically, Writer works in a very similar manner to Word, but it is more customisable, less intrusive, and less bossy. You don’t get the impression that it’s trying to take over the world, as you do with Word. And even if in the end you decide you don’t like it, you haven’t lost a penny, because it’s free.

She covers working with templates and shows you how to apply styles. For people working on long documents there are tutorials on tables of contents, indexes, bibliographies, footnotes and endnotes, and cross referencing.

Writer and other Open Source software offers an ideal solution for people who cannot afford Microsoft prices, but who wish to undertake professional quality work. This is why it is being taken up so rapidly in poorer countries and even some hard-pressed local governments in the West. (As a result of this incidentally, Microsoft have started to do secret cut-price deals with some big customers in order to keep their share of the market.)

Since most of her potential readers are likely to be migrating from Word, she ends her tour through the program with a useful series of comparison tables. These explain the small differences in how common commands and actions are performed in Word and Writer respectively.

If you need the reassurance of a manual, plus the convenience of a whole suite of programs on one ready-to-hand CD, this is a bargain. It’s sort of a version of O’Reilly’s ‘Missing Manual’ series.

© Roy Johnson 2004

artie shaw Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Jean Hollis Weber, OpenOffice.org Writer, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2004, pp.213, ISBN: 0596008260


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Remix: The Copyright Wars

December 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid  Economy

Lawrence Lessig is a lecturer in law at Harvard University and a leading authority on copyright and intellectual property rights in the digital age. He helped to found the Creative Commons movement, and he’s a former member of the Electronic Freedom Foundation. His works are a passionate defence of the rights of the individual to the creativity of the past, and a crusade against those forces which try to limit the free exchange of information. Remix: The Copyright Wars is his manifesto on the topic.

Copyright warsThis is the latest in a long line of books he has written in support of such causes – explaining in non-legal language the way in which human rights have been eroded by the vested interests of big business. Whilst upholding the right of all content originators to make a living from what they create, he believes that the current copyright laws restrict the free exchange of information. He also argues that all creativity builds on the creativity of the past, and it is modern technology which has democratised and speeded up the process.

In the past, you could own the ‘source code’ to Shakespeare’s works, but only printing press owners could make copies. Now, as soon as something becomes digitised, any kid in his back bedroom can copy at will. This has given rise to a panic over copyright, which he explores in some depth.

First of all he examines the ‘war against piracy’ in the American courts by a close inspection of the terms in which it is commonly pursued:

In my view, the solution to an unwinnable war is not to wage war more vigorously. At least when the war is not about survival, the solution to an unwinnable war is to sue for peace, and then to find ways to achieve without war the ends that the war sought.

You would almost think he was talking about the Americans in Afghanistan – but no, this is the ‘copyright wars’.

He cites many examples where companies have paid out legal fees ten times greater than the lost revenue they were seeking to recoup.

He agrees with Chris Anderson and Cory Doctorow that the Nay-sayers and prophets of doom on all this are wrong. The future is not likely to be an either/or choice between prohibition and control versus unbridled anarchy. It’s much more likely to be a creative symbiosis of past and future technologies.

He then addresses the central theme of the book – how much is it possible to quote from someone else’s work in a new work for private or public consumption? The rules and general practice are quite different, depending on the medium. With printed text it is a perfectly normal, accepted practice to quote from someone else’s work. In fact academic writing specifically requires a knowledge and accurate quotation of previous works in the same subject.

But use the same approach with audio recordings and you’ll end up with a solicitor’s ‘cease and desist’ letter from Sony or Decca. And his argument is that this restriction is a brake on both creativity and freedom of information.

On mixed media he also makes the very good point that the sort of well-edited video clips with over-dubbed sound tracks shown in TV political satire (and now on blogs) are more effective than long-winded essays taking 10,000 words to make the same point.

Most people today don’t even have time to read long articles. They get their information in much shorter chunks. As he puts it, very pithily – “text is today’s Latin”. It’s an extreme view, but you can see his point.

A propos of which, he also practices what he preaches. He developed a style of presentation which uses rapid display of short, memorable phrases or pictures. Here’s an example which takes a while to load, but is well worth the wait. It’s quite old now, but it demonstrates a technique of presentation which will not date: sound and text being used together for maximum effect.

One thing about his writing I found quite inspiring is that for every bold proposition he makes, he looks at the possible objections to it. (In fact a whole section of his web site is devoted to criticisms of his work.)

He makes a profound distinction between what he calls read-only (RO) and read-write (RW) culture. Both are important, but they have the difference that RO encourages passive reception, whereas RW encourages a written, that is a creative response. This leads him to argue for the enhanced value of all ‘writing’ – by which he means not only text, but the manipulation of other media, such as the audio and video files which are the stock-in-trade of the mashup artists.

His point is that these collage-type works are definitely not examples of parasitic imitation, and that in almost all cases they reveal a skilled appreciation of the medium.

The second part of the book is an investigation of eCommerce – conducted at a level just as radical and profound. He looks Google, Amazon, and Netflix as examples of businesses that have become successful by defying the normal laws of commerce. They allow other companies to share their information, and in Amazon’s case they even allow competitors onto their site. By doing this they make more money, and they control more of the field.

For the sake of those people who didn’t catch it first time round, he explains Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Principle. He then looks at the ‘sharing economies’ to which the Internet has given birth – the Open Source projects and the Wikipedias which exist on the voluntary efforts of volunteers.

Next he passes on to what he calls the ‘hybrid economies’ – companies such as Slashdot and Last.fm who offer a community but make money by advertising revenues. The subtle distinctions between these different models have to be handled carefully – otherwise sensibilities (and revenue streams) might be affected.

He looks at the ethical and practical conflicts between Old and New economies – those based on greed and naked competition, and those based in the ‘hybrid’ sector of sharing and cooperation. Eventually this takes us back to the issue of copyright, where he has some radical proposals for reform.

The first is that basically all genuinely amateur use of copyrighted material should be exempt from prosecution. It is pointless issuing legal writs against some kid sampling and posting on YouTube. The second is a suggestion that copyright is returned to its original status – a fourteen year term which is renewable if the owner so wishes.

Next comes a suggestion called ‘clear title’ – which means that the item being copyrighted needs to be clearly defined. Then comes the de-criminalisation of P2P file sharing, and the end of prosecuting sampling and mashups. As he suggests, supported by people in the pop music business, there is no evidence to prove that a sample or mashup detracts from sales of the original. All of these seem perfectly reasonable – though I suspect vested corporate interests would think otherwise.

This is a passionate and thought-provoking book on the ethics of copyright and creativity in an age of rapid technological change. It is radical, free-thinking, and a challenge to anyone participating in the digital world right now. Lawrence Lessig is a voice to take note of. But you’ll have to move fast. He seems to be in a permanent state of rapid development, and by the time you’ve read this, his latest book, he’ll have moved on elsewhere. If you go to his official site at lessig.org you’ll see what I mean.

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, London: Penguin Books, 2008, pp.327, ISBN: 0143116134


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Test Driving Linux

May 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

try out Linux without installing it on your hard disk

Linux is the completely free operating system which has been developed as part of the Open Source Software movement. It offers a powerful and safer alternative to Windows XP, which many people cannot afford, particularly where multiple installations are concerned. But switching from a well known operating system to something new can be a scary experience. Wouldn’t it be good if you could take a test drive first. That’s where the clever idea behind this book appears. It comes with a CD that lets you run Linux off the disk, without installing it onto you hard drive.

Test Driving Linux It will run more slowly off the CD, but you get to try Linux without taking any risks. David Brickner even supplies the neat wrinkle of saving your settings onto a USB flash disk so that you don’t need to reconfigure Linux each time you boot up. The CD also comes with a full copy of OpenOffice, the free alternative to Microsoft Office, as well as free browsers, graphics editing software, and hundreds of other applications for every type of daily computer task. The desktop interface which comes on the CD is called K Desktop Environment (KDE). He explains how this works and shows how a variety of applications run in it. KDE also has a number of key features of its own – such as the ability to run virtual desktops.

After guiding you through KDE (which works in a similar way to Windows XP) he offers a tour of the free Linux software applications which come on the CD – Konqueror web browser and file manager, Totem multimedia player, Kontact personal information manager, GIMP image editor, and OpenOffice.org. This is a fully featured suite of word processor, spreadsheet, and presentations programs which can open any files from Microsoft Office and save back into that format.

If you don’t like these particular applications, you can just as easily download the Firefox browser or the Thunderbird email client. Almost all these programs are more bug-free and more secure than their Windows counterparts.

The book’s subtitle is “from Windows to Linux in 60 seconds”. You might boot up from the CD in that time, but you’ll want to spend a while using all the programs and trying out the software provided.

If when you’ve finished you feel like making the switch to Linux or running it alongside Windows on a dual-boot system, then he has a very useful conclusion which explains the advantages and shortcomings of the many versions of Linux available.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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David Brickner, Test Driving Linux, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005, pp. 341, ISBN: 059600754X


Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: Linux, Open Sources, Operating Systems, Technology

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

July 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

socio-political manifesto of the free software movement

Forget the enigmatic title of The Cathedral and the Bazaar for a moment. This is essentially four long, polemical essays on the open source movement, written by one of its prime movers in the period between 1992 and summer 1999. ‘Open Source’ is a term used to describe the idealistic notion of freely sharing technological development – particularly the software code written by computer programmers. The first and earliest essay sets out the principles of the open source movement. The second inspects the attitudes and moral codes of its members (the hackers) who submit their work to peer review and what Eric Raymond claims is a ‘gift culture’. The third looks at the economic conundrum of how the open source movement sustains itself without a regular income. The last essay is an account of activism relating to the Microsoft anti-trust case.

The Cathedral and the BazaarBasically, it’s an impassioned argument in favour of a new strategy in software development which has arisen from the decision by Linus Torvalds to release the source code of his operating system Linux. He released it not only for free use, but also invited volunteers to help him develop it further. Raymond argues that this represents – dare one say it? – a paradigm shift – a democratic sharing of ideas and repeated testing rather than the development of a product in commercial secrecy.

This is where the title comes in. The ‘cathedral’ is a metaphor for work ‘carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time’. The bazaar represents an open free-for-all approach ‘differing agendas and approaches…out of which a coherent and stable system [can] seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles’.

He inspects the arguments which have been made in criticism of the open source movement, and whilst I wouldn’t say that he demolishes them exactly, he does come up with some interesting points about a system which he is presenting as a revolutionary alternative to the common commercial model. ‘It is often cheaper and more efficient to recruit self-selected volunteers from the Internet than it is to manage buildings full of people who would rather be doing something else’. If the principles of the open source movement really do work in the long term, this will stand a lot of MBA wisdom on its head.

However, his arguments for the advantages of releasing open source on Netscape (in autumn 1998) seem to evade the issue that NS was under intense pressure from Microsoft. He’s making an argument from technological altruism, when deep down the motive might have been economic. But he does explain how a company such as Red Hat can sell open source code (Linux) for a profit, when it’s free for anyone who wants it. They sell – ‘a brand/service/support relationship with people who are freely willing to pay for that’ – and other companies are free to do the same thing if they wish.

As the book reaches its breathy conclusion, the fourth essay becomes a rather personal and excited account of how the open source movement was established in 1998/9 – largely to support Netscape in its fight against Microsoft. No doubt there will be updates to this statement issued at the appropriate web site [www.opensource.org] following each stage of the fight in court.

Some of the anthropological parallels and excursions into political economy seem slightly fanciful, and at times his polemic becomes a sociological study of hackers’ motives – a trap which in literary studies is known as the ‘intentional fallacy’. That is, we shouldn’t judge outcomes on the strength of what we perceive to be the author’s intent. It’s also very idealistic – though the latest edition of WIRED carries an article about open source warriors selling their services on the open market, and Raymond argues that there is no necessary contradiction in this.

It’s the first book on high-tech developments I’ve come across which provided the slightly bizarre experience of a text printed with double line spacing and one-sentence paragraphs. This I imagine reflects the influence of the email originals written for reading on screen. Another interesting feature is that the majority of the bibliographical references are to articles on the Net, not to printed books – though I still think he should have tried to produce an index and bibliography.

He claims that even this book is in a state of evolution via updates following peer review – and that’s exactly as it should be for such a subject. It’s written in a concise, deeply compacted style, with few concessions to an average reader’s technical knowledge, and he’s occasionally cryptic to the point of obscurity: ‘Before taxonomising open-source business models, we should deal with exclusion payoffs in general’.

This is a crusading text, and anyone concerned with the sharp end of software development and the battles of operating systems will be fascinated by his arguments. This revised and expanded paperback edition includes new material on recent technological developments which has made it one of the essential texts on Open Sources

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 1999, pp.268, ISBN: 0596001088


Filed Under: Open Sources Tagged With: Linux, Open Sources, Technology, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Theory

We the Media

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

open sources – writing and new web technology

O’Reilly publish computer books and software guidance manuals, but they also support the open source movement. This seeks to make the code of software available to be developed and used free of charge. This book is one of their contributions to the polemic. We the Media is a study of committed writing which argues the case for what author Dan Gillmor calls open source journalism. He takes the idea of sharing code into the realms of information exchange. To this is coupled his enthusiasm for blogging as the greatest form of New Journalism. He also discusses the other forms in which information can easily be transmitted – such as peer-to-peer file sharing, Wikis, the mobile connected camera, text messaging, and RSS feeds.

Open Source JournalismHis basic argument is that journalists, news broadcasters, public relations people, political activists, and anybody else who wants their message to be taken seriously should make full use of these latest communication tools. He gives plenty of examples of IT-activism – people mounting public information on web sites when the authorities removed it from public view; others raising political campaign funds from adverts on blogs.

He seems a little over-optimistic about their effectiveness for political activism, but on firmer ground when it comes to more neutral journalistic uses.

For anybody who is short of ideas, his chapters are packed with practical examples of successful enterprises which have been launched on the strength of a new blog. These range from one-person campaigns or news services, to blogs which generate income or sponsorship. One intrepid soul asked people for the money to send him to report the war in Iraq – and he got it.

Gillmor also gives a cautious glimpse into the future by looking at the latest trends in web technology. This includes news aggregators, RSS feeds, and Web Services. All of these enable information to be gathered automatically and customised by the user.

In the latter part of the book he looks at some of the legal implications of the latest technologies – cases where people have claimed to be libeled, copyright cases, cybersquatting, even cases where people have sought to prevent others deep-linking into their sites. He deals with all these issues in a way which supports freedom of speech, whilst recognising that it might sometimes be put to negative purposes.

Strangely enough, he does have some reservations about the current state of copyright, which he sees as increasingly restrictive to the point of abuse:

What were once 14-year terms have now been extended to the life of the author plus 75 years, or 95 years when a copyright is held by a corporation. By amazing coincidence, copyright terms seem to get extended every time Mickey Mouse comes close to entering the public domain

This is a committed and wide-ranging polemic which explores the very latest developments in online communications – both from a technological and a content point of view.

In keeping with the high standards he advocates throughout, he acknowledges and references all his sources, there is a huge webliography listing all the homepages, sites, and blogs mentioned; and the book has its own web site where you can follow up on his arguments, find software, and even download a copy of the book free of charge.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Dan Gillmor, We the Media: grassroots journalism by the people, for the people, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2006, pp.336, ISBN: 0596102275


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Filed Under: Journalism, Open Sources, Publishing Tagged With: Communication, Journalism, Open Sources, Publishing, We the Media

WordPress 2.7 Complete

December 28, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Create your own web site from scratch with WordPress

WordPress 2.7 Complete. WordPress started out as blogging software, but it has grown rapidly into a fully featured content management system (CMS). That’s partly because it was well designed in the first place, but mainly because it is open source software (OSS), which means that designers and programmers all over the world have contributed to its development and improvement. This effort comes mainly in the form of extra modules for the basic program. These are plugins which increase the range of features and enhance what WordPress can do.

WordPressBut like many other OSS programs WordPress comes without an instruction manual, which means that it’s hard for beginners or new users to get to grips with what’s under the bonnet. There are user forums and FAQs, but most people will feel more confident with an instruction manual, which is why this guide from April Hodge Silver is welcome. She starts out by explaining some basic concepts and parts of WordPress as software. This might appear a little simplistic, but in my experience it’s quite important to grasp some of the fundamentals of a content management system. For instance it’s not immediately apparent that all the parts of what will eventually appear on screen as a unified page are kept separate. That is, the title, sub-title, text, pictures, captions, tags, and meta-data are all stored in different parts of the database – for good reasons. And of course the appearance of this information on screen is controlled separately too – from a style sheet.

She then describes how to make a WordPress installation of your own, and how to set up all the basic configuration of the system. You can get WordPress.com to do all of this for you, by hosting your installation. But they do not give you permission to install the extras with which you can customise your site (and make money from it).

Posting a blog entry is very, very easy, and WordPress also makes it as easy as possible to control and format what you write. But she explains all the options clearly, including the way in which you can add graphics to make your pages more visually interesting.

All of this means getting to know the control panel and its multiple menus, and her explanations are very helpful, because it isn’t always possible to tell what function some item performs simply from its title. What’s the difference between a page and a post for instance? The name alone tells you nothing.

One of the really good things about WordPress is that most of the content of any site is organised using what are called management tables. These are lists of all the basic information known about any item, and because the data is tabulated, it’s much easier to understand and control.

The next part of the book deals with two features which really bring WordPress to life – themes (which is WP jargon for templates) and widgets, which are ‘sidebar accessories’ that allow you to personalise what shows up your sidebars – without having to learn any PHP or HTML code.

In fact the urge to have an individualised site is so universal that she wisely includes instructions for designing your own theme. It’s at this point you’ll need HTML design skills and a knowledge of cascading style sheets (CSS) – but she provides some basic coding to get you started.

And for those readers with a creative bent who have coding skills she also demonstrates how to create your own plugins and widgets. (A widget is just a plugin with extra functions.) But you’ll also have to be prepared to roll up your sleeves and dive into the database at this point.

There’s an interesting chapter on using WordPress as a content management system. This explains in some detail the difference between static pages and normal posts, and it presents a different type of theme which is geared to the construction of a commercial site with product pages. Although they are not covered here, there are now excellent plugins offering fully-featured eCommerce systems.

WordPress is now up to version 2.9 – but I checked all the basic concepts outlined in this book, and they still hold good. Even the copious screen shots illustrating the guidance show exactly what you’ll see when you start using the latest version. This is an excellent guidance manual which I could have done with a year ago when I first started learning how to use WordPress. It would have saved me lots of time and speeded up the process enormously.

© Roy Johnson 2010


April Hodge Silver, WordPress 2.7 Complete, Birmingham: Pakt Publishing, 2009, pp.277, ISBN 184719656X


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Filed Under: CMS, Open Sources, Web design Tagged With: Blogging, CMS, Open Sources, Web design, WordPress, WordPress 2.7 Complete

WordPress 3.0 Complete

April 4, 2011 by Roy Johnson

a blog, web site, and content management system

WordPress 3.0 (WP) started out as a blogging software program in 2003, but it has grown rapidly into a fully featured content management system (CMS). That’s partly because it was well designed in the first place, but mainly because it’s open source software (OSS), which means that designers and programmers all over the world have contributed to its development and improvement. This effort comes mainly in the form of extra plugins which increase the range of features and enhance what WordPress can do. But like many other OSS programs WP comes without an instruction manual, which means that it’s hard for beginners or new users to get to grips with what’s under the bonnet. There are user forums and FAQs, but most people will feel more confident with an instruction manual, which is why this guide is welcome.

WordPress 3.0April Hodge Silver establishes from the start that WP is now a fully developed publishing platform and can be used for running a blog, a commercial web site, or even used as a CMS. You can run WP on your own computer using it as a server (that’s the better option for advanced users) or you can let WordPress.com do it all for you, which means you have less control but is probably the better option for beginners or those who simply want their own blog. The ‘completeness’ of this guidance manual is that it covers all that’s required for both options.

The advantages and disadvantages of each choice are explained clearly. But in either case you will need the features and the configuration settings fully explained. They can be learned through trial and error, but the benefit of a guidance manual is that it will shorten the time involved and flatten the learning curve.

My advice in brief is this: if all you need is a blog, choose WordPress.com, but if you want to customise your site, have advertising, and take advantage of plugins and widgets – go for your own installation.

Once you reach the user-friendly WP control panel, the principles are the same for both users. Silver explains how to create a post (WP jargon for a page that you see on screen) and how to add graphics which will make it look more attractive.

The huge advantage of a program such as WP is that everything you upload is stored in a database, but you can control how it is summoned into your pages. A single graphic for instance can be presented at thumbnail, medium, or large size.

WP offers two editors in which you generate your content – one a ‘visual’ editor which requires very few skills or technical knowledge, and an HTML editor for those who know a little about coding. As soon as you start posting you’ll also start getting comment spam, but WP comes with a powerful tool called Akismet that deals with it automatically.

The control panel in WP makes all your work as easy as possible, but if you are not used to a CMS it can be difficult to conceptualise the relation between what you put in to the system and how it will appear on screen as the finished article. This guide does a good job at overcoming this problem by generous use of full scale screen shots, so you will know exactly what you should be looking at.

WP 3.0 now includes automatic menu creation. This can be used in conjunction with ‘categories’ to create the structure and the navigational system for your content. Silver then moves on to show how (free) widgets and plugins can be deployed to enhance a site. The great thing about these is that they are enhanced regularly, and can be updated with a single mouse click. And if you are really feeling ambitious you can even download a plugin to render your site ready for iPhone and iPod touch.

The central part of the book deals with the most important element of a WP site – the ‘theme’, which you lift off the shelf or develop yourself. This provides the basic structure of what your site will look like, it’s style, features, and behaviour.

Then comes the issue of developing your own plugins and widgets. As you can probably tell from this description, these issues are becoming more technically demanding, but you don’t need to know these techniques in order to create a successful site.

Silver finishes in the same technical vein – giving explanations for setting up an eCommerce site, then giving instructions for upgrading a WP installation. If you have opted for hosting on your own server, this will be invaluable, because WP is updated quite frequently, with new features and functions at every new version.

I spent a long time learning much of this the hard way – before WP manuals became available. And I certainly wish I’d had something like WordPress 3.0 Complete to hand at the time. It would have made my life a lot easier, and I would have known to get hold of the best online backup to save all my files whilst I was learning WordPress.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011


April Hodge Silver, WordPress 3.0 Complete, Birmingham: Pakt, 2011, pp.322, ISBN: 1849514100


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Filed Under: CMS, Open Sources, Web design Tagged With: CMS, Open Sources, Publishing, Technology, WordPress

WordPress for Dummies

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

from blogging platform to content management system

WordPress was first launched in 2003 as open source software designed for blogging – and it is still used as such. But as its popularity has suddenly grown exponentially, enormous numbers of add-ons and plug-ins have been developed to provide extra features. Because it’s built on a solid base of MySQL and PHP, these extra features have transformed it from an individualist tool into a major communication platform. So much so that it’s now become a content management system (CMS) which offers an alternative to Joomla and Drupal. Releases of the software are named after jazz musicians. WordPress for Dummies is a guidance manual on how to use it.

WordPress for DummiesIf you want to see the sorts of web sites which use this combination of WP + templates – look here, here, and here. This is the best of the current guides to using WordPress. The strongest point in its favour – apart from the very direct ‘for Dummies’ approach – is that it gives instructions for would-be bloggers , but also explains the more sophisticated uses of WP for those who want to build a web site using a content management system. The beauty of WordPress is that it can do both.

In fact WordPress is pretty thoughtful software – which is what’s made it so popular. All blog posts can be drafted, auto-saved, spell-checked, and stored prior to publication. The options for interacting with site visitors are endless – which is presumably why WP has overtaken Blogger. It really does have the heavy-duty functionalities of a full-scale content management system combined with the ease of use of a simple blogging platform.

Basically, this guide covers the three main options for WordPress users – the hosted service where you have a blog at WordPress.com; the free software which you download from WordPress.org; and the multi-user version. And the author, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, now makes her living designing WordPress templates – so she knows what she’s talking about.

I set up a test blog at WordPress recently [here] and can confirm that it took me less than five minutes from start to finish – and that includes uploading a picture and editing my profile.

WordPress successfully combines ease of use with a range of powerful features, so if you’re thinking of starting your own blog, WP seems to be the way to go. So the first option, of using WP for blogging, couldn’t be simpler.

Just in case you’re worried, WordPress has got nothing to do with Microsoft Word. It’s an Open Source program, and therefor free. You access the program without payment, and updates are available to you at any time without charge.

The second option of hosting the software on your own machine gives you scope to make use of lots of extra features. Many of these are free plug-ins which add extra functionality to the system. But even more important than the trimmings, this guide explains in detail the crucial installation and configuration of WordPress. This is the part most people are likely to find find difficult.

Ambitious bloggers and web designers will know that everybody wants to have an individualised theme – that’s the style and layout of what appears on screen. How to do that is explained here as well – including some rudiments of style sheets and PHP coding.

The third option is to use the most advanced, multi-user version of WordPress. This is for people who want a community of users and contributors. I came across one recently – a football enthusiasts’ site where fans email their reviews of matches directly from the game. Post-match reports are available even before they’re on the national news channels. There are three whole chapters on how to set up and administer this version of the software.

Lisa Wilson finishes with recommendations for free WordPress themes and plug-ins. All of these allow you to customise your site or blog, and add functionalities that only a professional designer could have dreamed about only a couple of years ago.

It’s almost impossible for these printed guides to keep up with the pace of software development. New features are being added whilst the book is with the printer. Just get the latest edition, and recognise that there may be differences in what appears on screen. Of course, you can always read the complete documentation at codex.wordpress.org – but if like me you prefer a proper book to consult, rather than reading off screen, then it’s all here. This book not only showed me how to use WordPress: it helped me to understand some of the fundamental structures of content management systems.

© Roy Johnson 2010

 Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


Lisa Sabin-Wilson, WordPress for Dummies, New York: Wiley, 3rd edition 2010, pp.408, ISBN: 0470592745


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Filed Under: CMS, Open Sources, Web design Tagged With: Blogging for Dummies, Blogs, CMS, Open Sources, Publishing, Technology, WordPress, WordPress for Dummies

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